The Negative Parts of Working in the Gig Economy
The Negative Parts of Working in the Gig Economy
And how fairer working conditions for therapists, contract workers, and Uber drivers can positively impact how we all do relationships.
In writing about relational health, it’s also imperative that Julia and I write the occasional article about the practice and profession of relationship therapy, such as this one. This article is free, but please donate to me and Julia and subscribe to Relationship 101 so we can write more content about the relational health that the church (and so many other systems) didn’t want you to have:
A huge shoutout to Annie Waldman, Maya Miller, Duaa Eldeib, and Max Blau at ProPublica, who last week published an article “Why I Left the Network”. They start the article:
“They studied, honed their skills and opened practices, joining health insurance networks that put them within reach of people who couldn’t afford to pay for sessions out of pocket.
So did more than 500 other psychologists, psychiatrists and therapists who shared their experiences with ProPublica.
But one after another, they confronted a system set up to squeeze them out.”
At the time of publication, they had reached out to over 500 psychotherapists to interview them about the ongoing problematic relationship with insurance companies. At the bottom of the article, they left a space for psychotherapists to share their own stories about why they left the network; Julia and I both contributed our thoughts, as have (I’m sure) hundreds more.
Over the weekend, ProPublica published another article about the ways that health insurance companies have interfered with mental healthcare policy, called “What Mental Health Carte Protections Exist in Your State?”
In a profession, psychotherapy, that has struggled to unionize, largely because of antitrust violations committed by multi-billion dollar insurance companies, I’m excited to see ProPublica take the mantle of providing PR to the ongoing plight of psychotherapists. After the election, Julia and I will write a three-part Substack series about the professional challenges that psychotherapists (especially relationship therapists like us) confront.
But today, the day after Labor Day, I want to write about another ongoing issue facing the field of psychotherapy.
Unless therapists are employed by hospitals or a very large agency, we get paid by the number of clients that we see. The more clients we see, the more money we make.
We, therapists who are in private practice (and sadly, many agency workers), are part of the gig economy.
As with many gig economies, one of the most common selling points is schedule flexibility: We can set our own hours. Many therapists who are parents can schedule their clients around childcare or the school schedule. Add virtual work into the equation, and you can do creative things like living in Europe for two years and see clients three days a week. (Although in our case, the other two days were dedicated to the development of Sexvangelicals.)
There are certainly challenges to participating in the gig economy. We have to buy our own health insurance; the cost of health insurance policies without high deductibles is astronomical. We don’t get paid vacation or automatic contributions to a retirement account. Julia and I love our vacations, but the weeks before and after vacations often have 1.5-to-2 times the amount of work.
But every job has their pros and cons, right? In the 2007 article, “Rethinking the Clockwork of Work: Why Schedule Control May Pay Off at Work and at Home”, Erin Kelly, professor of work and organization studies at MIT, and Phyllis Moen, professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, describe how schedule control, the ability of the employee to dictate when, where, and how they work, can positively impact the employee’s relationship with their family, workplace morale, and workplace efficiency.
In 2021, they co-authored the book Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do About It. In their press release, the journalist writes:
“Drawing on five years of research, including hundreds of interviews with employees and managers, Kelly and Moen tell the story of a major experiment that they helped design and implement at a Fortune 500 firm. The company adopted creative and practical work redesigns that gave workers more control over how and where they worked and encouraged managers to evaluate performance in new ways.
The result? Employees’ health, well-being, and ability to manage their personal and work lives improved, while the company benefited from higher job satisfaction and lower turnover. And, as Kelly and Moen show, such changes can—and should—be made on a wide scale.”
As a note, I have not read this book. But I imagine that the suggestions that Kelly and Moen offer in Overload are much more effective than, say, the recommendations made by the Heritage Foundation about how to remake the Department of Labor in Project 2025. Check out our March article, where we reviewed the chapters of the Department of Labor (and Department of Health and Human Services):
However, as Paul Glavin, professor of sociology at McMaster University and Scott Schieman, professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, note, the gig economy itself does not inherently create the flexibility that it espouses.
A company has to take intentional steps to ensure that employees only work 40 hours per week. A company still has to invest in human resource policies that provide affordable healthcare, family friendly vacation and paid-time off policies, and financial assistance toward retirement and other savings goals.
In their 2017 article, “Ironic Flexibility: When Normative Role Blurring Undermines the Benefits of Schedule Control”, published in the spring Sociological Quarterly, they introduce two concepts and practices that can interfere with the purported benefits of schedule control:
Border creep. Employees are expected to perform work duties outside of traditional work hours.
Normative role blurring. The alteration of the values of schedule control; most commonly, the suggestion that a workers’ devotion to their job supersedes the work-life balance. These workers have the sense that they are never off the clock, a psychology that gets reinforced by the idea that you can work anywhere, anytime, on multiple formats.
Glavin and Schieman evaluate data from the 2002 (Canadian) National Study of the Changing Workforce, assessing for the presence of normative role blurring, job satisfaction, generalized anxiety, and work-to-home conflict (among other items). They found that Kelly and Moen’s assertion that schedule control improves the quality of family relationships so long as the place of employment sets intentional boundaries to protect the delineation between work and home.
However, the higher the level of normative role blurring, the higher the level of work-family conflict.
This spring, Glavin and Schieman expanded on this theory by workers who get paid via digital labor platforms, such as Uber, Lyft, and Grubhub. These employees experience high volumes of border creep and normative role blurring.
On top of that, they’re also highly surveilled by the app. Uber and their ilk collect data about the efficiency of the worker. They provide consistent app notifications that update new customer and delivery opportunities. They motivate through gamification programs, creating employee morale through inter-employee competition. Uber and their ilk also have a terrible reputation with employee transparency; often, employees don’t know the fee of their service until after they get paid, and the rate of service changes according to location, time of day, and other algorithmic decisions.
As a quick note, 16% of Americans reported receiving money from a digital labor platform at least once.
In their article “From Flexibility to Unending Availability: Platform Workers’ Experiences of Work-Family Conflict”, published in March 2024’s Journal of Marriage and Family, they explain that workers who use digital labor platforms have higher levels of conflict in their family related to work, especially those who used these platforms as their primary source of income. They write, “Ever-changing work schedules may make it challenging for workers to plan family activities or dedicate consistent time for family responsibilities” (p. 586).
While the gig economy sounds great on paper, the reality is that in a capitalist system (especially for public companies who have shareholder responsibilities, including insurance companies), the company will almost always prioritize the bottom line, which ultimately financially favors the executive leadership and diminishes the value of the employee.
Gig employees, be they Uber drivers, adjunct faculty members, entrepreneurs, the generic “contract worker”, and therapists, offer companies the opportunity to perform services without providing additional resources, such as health insurance, paid time off, and parental leave, that show care for the individual worker.
Sarah Simanson summarized the dilemma of the gig economy in an op-ed for the LA Times:
“Last year (in 2023), 64 million people (4 million more than the year before) worked freelance in the gig economy. When 38% of our workforce is in this situation — and contributing more than $1.27 trillion in annual earnings to the economy — the country has a responsibility to make that work more sustainable.
Our peer countries have done thatby widely providing workers support, such as family caregiving leave, parental leave (including guaranteed paid maternity leave), pension credits for caregivers, sick leaveand paid vacation; some are offering or considering income protections for self-employed workers.”
Effective labor policies create more time and emotional energy for familial relationships, which leads to a greater likelihood that relationships will succeed in providing connection, enjoyment, and pleasure.
If you work in the gig economy and have experienced conflict in your relationships because of border creep and normative role blurring, Julia and I would love to help. We offer online relationship coaching, and also have a nationwide network of therapists for folks who want to work with someone face to face. Email us at sexvangelicals@gmail.com for more info.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia