The Side Hustle Safety Net: Precarious Workers and Gig Work during COVID-19

Abstract

While social distancing measures are essential in limiting the impact of a pandemic, such measures are often less feasible for low-income groups such as precarious workers who continue to travel on public transit and are less able to practice social distancing measures. In this paper, based on in-depth remote interviews conducted from April 2020 through June 2020, with more than 130 gig and precarious workers in New York City, we find that precarious workers experience three main hurdles in regard to accessing unemployment assistance that can be broadly categorized as knowledge, sociological, and temporal/financial barriers. Drawing on worker interview responses, we have named these responses: (1) Didn’t Know, (2) Didn’t Want, and (3) Can’t Wait. These challenges have led workers to turn to gig and precarious work, further highlighting the inequities of the pandemic. As a result, for some workers, so-called “side hustles” have become their primary social safety net.

“The Looming, Crazy Stalker Coronavirus”: Fear Mongering, Fake News, and the Diffusion of Distrust

“…Media distrust and skepticism may be particularly dangerous during the pandemic, wherein credible public health information is essential in mitigating risk by promoting mask wearing, social distancing, and vaccination (Malecki, Keating, and Safdar 2021). In the case of precarious and gig workers, who often lack the privilege of remote work, media distrust or avoidance may lead to missing important information such as vaccine eligibility or availability of unemployment assistance (Ravenelle, Kowalski, and Janko, 2021).…”

Who Bears the Burden of a Pandemic? COVID-19 and the Transfer of Risk to Digital Platform Workers

“…These services cannot be offered under COVID-19 health recommendations: a ride requires some degree of physical proximity and a short-term rent involves some traveling, both strictly prohibited under lockdown and still discouraged after restrictions started to be eased. There is evidence that some drivers continued working through the pandemic for fear of economic losses, and thus put both themselves and their clients at risk (Ravenelle, Kowalski, & Janko, 2021). In most cases, however, clients' demand was so low that drivers (and Airbnb hosts) were forced to inactivity.…”

Risk, Resilience and Reward: Impacts of Shifting to Digital Sex Work

“…However, the ability to stop working was a privilege. Like many sex workers, other gig workers experienced many barriers to receiving government aid and therefore had no choice but to continue working through the pandemic -in this way we can view gig work (including sex work) as a non-governmental financial safety net [106,8]. Digitally mediated in-person workers were often also ineligible for healthcare, and could not social distance (e.g., ride-share drivers) [105].…”

“…A key question regarding exclusively-digital labor is whether a completely online workplace improves working conditions, particularly for those from marginalized socio-demographic and/or labor groups. Prior work has studied the experiences of office workers in formal labor arrangements switching to remote work during the pandemic [46,29,99,20,44,39,147] and the experiences of gig workers (who are part of the informal labor sector) who conduct digitally-mediated in-person work [31,106,105,8,102]. However, to our knowledge, no prior work has studied the experiences of informal labor sector workers who switched from in-person work to completely digital work, while continuing to do the same type of work.…”