Should we resign ourselves to the continued growth of the gig economy or fight for the right to full-time labor with benefits to and protections for workers?

In Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass (2019), anthropologist Mary Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri, both of whom are senior researchers for Microsoft, examine the human labor behind artificial intelligence (AI). \(\mathrm{Al}\) is not sophisticated enough to operate without additional human labor. Services like Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) are designed to use people to assist Al in jobs such as analyzing photographs, describing injuries, or transcribing business cards. Some of the tasks may be quite complicated. For example, one MTurk task asked almost 1,500 people to evaluate different levels of compensation for participation in a medical experiment (Samuel, 2018). Because the work of these individuals is invisible to the people who use the services they provide, Gray and Suri call them "ghost workers." Ghost workers are paid by the task, and most of the time, the rates are extremely low, usually under 10 cents per task. Many pay only a penny. Amazon originally created MTurk for its own use. However, MTurk and other similar services are used by an enormous range of corporations and other entities: everyone from university-based social science researchers to Fortune 500 companies.
Amazon says MTurk has half a million registered workers. Other analysts have concluded that, at any moment, between two and five thousand workers are active on MTurk. Many workers are based in the United States, but thousands are located throughout the world, particularly in India. Work on MTurk can be profitable, but only \(4 \%\) of MTurk workers make more than \(\$ 7.25\) an hour (Gray \& Suri, 2019, p. 12). A New York Times reporter who tried his hand made \(\$ 0.97\) an hour (Newman, 2019).
So why are people willing to do such low-paid work? Gray and Suri point out that the workers they interviewed were united by their hopes. They hoped to be able to control their jobs, stay close to family, avoid hostile environments, and gain experience. However, very frequently, other better options were not available to them. Sometimes, they were constrained by responsibilities such as the need to care for young children or aging relatives. Sometimes, they lived in communities where there was little meaningful work available. As one of the workers Gray and Suri (2019, p. 12) interviewed said, the pay may not be great, but it "is a meaningful amount when your previous income was zero."
As Gray and Suri point out, in some ways, the gig economy is nothing new. Industrialized production has always relied on part-time and extra workers whose labor is often invisible and usually undervalued. Gray and Suri raise important questions about what kinds of protections such workers need and what governments can do to better the conditions of gig workers. We need to carefully consider the rights of those who are employed through platform capitalist companies, as well as the rights of those who purchase goods and services through them. Gray and Suri's prediction that gig work will account for an evergreater share of the economy suggests both that these will be critical issues in the years to come and that the gulf between the rich and poor will continue to widen.