If TaskRabbit Is the Future of Employment, the Employed Are Fucked

July 25th, 2014

Welcome to the IT industry of the mid 2000s.

Via: ValleyWag:

The employment of the future is here, and it’s terrific for everyone except the people doing the work. TaskRabbit, which lets you outsource the things you don’t want to do to people who need money, is at the forefront of this chore revolution, and it’s already making some lives harder.

In 1994, professors Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio published a book titled “The Jobless Future,” surveying sea changes in the way people work. It didn’t look good: “Today, the regime of world economic life consists in scratching every itch of everyday life with sci-tech,” they wrote. A big heap of trivial problems were being solved by a bigger heap of trivial jobs, marked by a trend “toward more low-paid, temporary, benefit-free blue and white collar jobs and fewer decent permanent factory and office jobs.”

Twenty years later, we’ve nearly perfected this ephemeral gig machine with TaskRabbit, a software engine that does for labor what Snapchat’s done for memories.

Research Credit: afterhours

One Response to “If TaskRabbit Is the Future of Employment, the Employed Are Fucked”

  1. erth2karin says:

    And the opening of this article is only the prelude to this clusterfuck.

    Miserable as TaskRabbit employment may seem to the full- and part-time employed, both sides were marginally happy with the arrangement, so obviously it needed to be changed. True equity only exists when both sides are being equally screwed by an algorithm.

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