Gig Economy: Value Comparison Against Noncontingent Income and Corporate Employment Benefits

The free-market approach of work has risen for the past few years. The on-demand workforce has a preference to stay in nontraditional employment and are generally satisfied with their income and the elasticity of employment that contingent work offers. Independent workers are also less likely to grow their careers in the same manner as a traditional job ensues, and market prevalence influences their wages comparatively more. This paper analyzes the influence which gig economy has posed on the growth of the employee and examines the benefits and deficits of contingent pay and noncontingent pay. In the assessment of conventional employment, corporate compensations such as retirement plans and health insurance add significant value to organizational service. The uncertainty of payment, as well as variable timelines of compensation, disallow a contingent worker to privately retain insurances and savings plans, whereas an employer in a firm typically offers such allowances as standard. This comparison suggests that the value lost in the gig economy is, in fact, the corporate occupational benefits and not the steady noncontingent salary.

The Rules of Social Exchange: Unchanged but More Important Than Ever

Social exchange theory (SET) is one of the most prominent and well-known theories in the organizational sciences literature (Cropanzano & Mitchell, 2005). In the focal article, Chernyak-Hai and Rabenu (2018) asserted that SET needs to be adjusted to account for changes in the nature of work, workers, and workplace characteristics. Specifically, they identify that workplaces are now more volatile, complex, uncertain, and ambiguous (Bennett & Lemoine, 2014), and work itself has become more flexible, virtual, and technology dependent; accordingly, today's workers are sourced from a global talent pool and more frequently occupy nontraditional employment arrangements (e.g., freelancing). It is undisputable that the workplace landscape is vastly different from that of the workplace landscape during which early forms of SET were originally articulated (Gouldner, 1960; Homans, 1958).

Nontraditional Employment: The Careers of Temporary Workers

This chapter focuses upon the careers of temporary workers. Temporary employment for many workers presents a route to permanent employment. Other workers, however, get trapped into temporary employment or cycle between unstable jobs and spells of unemployment. Predictors of such transitions are multiple. We selected two broad categories, namely perceived employability from the area of career research and health and well-being from the area of occupational health and well-being research. The overall conclusion is that the association between temporary employment and both perceived employability and health and well-being is inconclusive. This suggests that there are boundary conditions that may make some temporary workers successful and others not. Risk factors include dynamics related to the dual labor market, including lower job quality, lower investments on the part of employers, and negative stereotyping of temporary workers as second-class citizens. On the positive side, many temporary workers have learned to manage their careers in the sense that they invest in training and in continuous job search.