The rise of the independent worker is arguably the biggest change to hit the global labor market in decades. Well more than 30 percent of the United States workforce reportedly lack “real jobs” working full-time for a conventional company, and that figure, some say, may top 40 percent by 2020. If these trends continue, nontraditional workers will almost certainly attain unprecedented levels of financial and political clout.

Yet the cultural narrative around independent employment remains, for the most part, decidedly disempowering, concentrating as it does upon contingent workers at the mercy of peer-to-peer platforms such as Uber and TaskRabbit. In this analysis, the so-called gig economy has pushed workers into capitalist freefall, with no safety net in sight.

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