Will the gig economy prevail?
by Colin Crouch  (Author)

About the Author
Colin Crouch is Professor Emeritus of the University of Warwick and an External Scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for Social Research at Cologne.

About this book
Increasingly, employees are being falsely treated as ‘self-employed’. This phenomenon – the ‘gig economy’ – is seen as the inevitable shape of things to come.
In this book, Colin Crouch takes a step back and questions this logic. He shows how the idea of an employee – a stable status that involves a bundle of rights – has maintained a curious persistence. Examining the ways companies are attacking these rights, from proffering temporary work to involuntary part-time work to ‘gigging’, he reveals the paradoxes of the situation and argues that it should not and cannot continue. He goes on to propose reforms to reverse the perverse incentives that reward irresponsible employers and punish good ones, setting out an agenda for a realistic future of secure work.
Crouch’s penetrating analysis will be of interest to everyone interested in the future of work, the welfare state and the gig economy.

Brief contents
1 The Rise of Precarious Work
2 Ambiguities of the Employment Contract
    The historical development of standard employment
    The drivers of change
    Conclusion: the ambiguous trajectory of standard employment
3 The Rise, Fall and Persistence of Standard Employment
    The fate of employment rights
    The impact of the crisis
    Conclusions
4 The Changing Shape of Precariousness
    The different forms of precariousness
    The overall pattern of change
    A new labour market dualism?
5 A New Approach to Employment Security
    The future supply of work
    Active labour market policy and flexicurity
    Extending the scope of good employment
    Worker representation
    Conclusion: rebalancing the asymmetry of the employment relationship
References

Series: The Future of Capitalism
Pages: 140 pages
Publisher: Polity; 1 edition (April 2, 2019)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1509532439
ISBN-13: 978-1509532438