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

[n2doc]

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.

TaskRabbit's premise is instantly charming: Fill as much of your idle time as you want with temporary work, from assembling IKEA furniture and scrubbing floors to making photocopies and decorating parties. It offers lackeys on demand, and like its automotive cousin Uber, has raised big venture capital bucks and cemented a role as spirit animal of the "sharing economy."

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http://valleywag.gawker.com/if-taskrabbit-is-the-future-of-employment-the-employed-1609221541/+laceydonohue

[mike_c]

1. so it's a thing now, is it?

That sort of future has long been fodder for dystopian science fiction novels in which the working poor spend their days trying to underbid one another to work for less at whatever tasks are posted and thus eat for another day.

[arcane1]

3. And the Race to the Bottom continues!

[TheNutcracker]

2. This....needs to be kicked and pushed hard, for it's exactly what HAS HAPPENED to our job market!