In 1575 the Danish king gave Tycho Brahe an island and funding for an observatory in order to keep him in Denmark. This transformed the land from a Crown property to a feudal domain, of which Brahe was the lord.
Tycho took control of agricultural planning, requiring the peasants to cultivate twice as much as they had done before, and he also exacted corvée labor from the peasants for the construction of his new castle. The peasants complained about Brahe's excessive taxation and took him to court. The court established Tycho's right to levy taxes and labor, and the result was a contract detailing the mutual obligations of lord and peasants on the island. Source Wikipedia
Serfs have rights under the law. Gig workers have none. The only thing they can do in order to earn rights is to sue to be treated as an employee.
The article gets it wrong. Traditional employment is an evolution on the master-serf relationship. Gig employment is lower status, akin to wandering laborers with no land or family. Gig workers wish they could be serfs.
I do gig work. My experience of it has been positive. It has allowed me to work when I choose to and to relocate someplace cheaper so I could get back into housing. It has allowed me latitude about some things that you typically only see in very privileged groups, like the Jet Set or well off retirees.
I know this isn't true for a great many gig workers. But I wish we would focus on ways to make it a positive for most workers rather than just talking about it in damning terms as if it can't be a positive.
I could be wrong, but insofar as wage labor is an evolution of serfdom, it seems to press farther away from the care that the owning classes have to invest in "their" workforce.
That is, wage labor is a way of moving the conditions of reproducing labor onto the laborers themselves, and the gig economy is just another step in that same process.
I have only a base understanding of the history and a very inconsistent and loose mode of thinking about it, so I'd be stoked to get some better picture of the mechanisms.
As I understand it, serfs have rights, and in addition the feudal system itself (the owning class) had to value the reproduction of labor as part of the work. So, in order to extract value from serfs, you have to feed and care for them, or at least take that care into calculations as part of production.
Under the conditions of early capitalism the domestic labor that goes into reproducing labor is pushed from the system into the individual families, so once we have wage labor things like "feeding the workers" and "caring for children" is the responsibility of labor and no longer a concern of the people who are employing that labor.
Thus a "gig economy" is just the next iteration of the same process of externalizing as much of the process of doing work to the laborers. The end goal is to have the laborer take all the responsibility for production and the owners have no investment, only pure exploitive profit, and the gig economy is an advancement of a wage economy, which is an advancement of a serf economy, which is itself an advancement over slavery.
I write "advancement", but I only mean that from the point of view of the extracting/ owning class: if "slavery" means racist chattel slavery then that's truly a horror without end; if enslavement just means that you're working for a specific household which you're integrated within and you don't have a free hand in just up and moving to another household (as it seems to operate outside of capitalism) then the gig economy seems far more exploitive than slavery as practiced in pre-capitalist civilizations.
But like I say, I don't have a great understanding, and I'd be interested to hear where I'm wrong in terms of history or logic.
Feudalism was an evolution of the old "agrarian empire" concept. Technologies to easily transport large quantities of goods were still hundreds of years away. So your kingdom could only get as big as the economics of transport allowed. You could gain political control over a distant land and exact tribute, but you had to visit the area regularly with your imperial army or they'd stop.
Ruling classes were limited in just how much they could take from the surrounding areas. Localities developed cultures and social institutions like English common law, and the ruling classes universally realized that it was more useful to work within those traditions than it was to impose your own on them. Where they conflicted, religious authorities were there to mediate disputes. Out of this reality, feudalism arose and developed for hundreds of years. Local people didn't have the means or inclination to do foreign policy or state building, for the most part. Lords were the necessary evil they accepted so that they could get left alone.
Naval technology changed all that and created a new merchant class. It became economical to move large quantities of goods over water and the people that did that quickly became rich. The original merchants were royally chartered, but there soon was enough of a manufacturing base in naval tech that anyone could start speculating in commodities.
Thus began colonialism. The old land lords lost power and prestige to the new merchants and slavery, which had been gone in Europe since the Roman Empire fell, started to serve the new colonial masters, who were far away from the old systems of social control, church and state. Wealth became liquid in a way that it never had been before.
It wasn't so much the forced work that was the problem, but the transportation away from home communities and the treatment of people as commodities. Britain proper long abhored the slave trade even as British citizens participated in it. International law had to be wrapped around the seas, and the British slowly brought a stop to the slave trade, at great expense. Slavery in her former colony took a civil war to end.
Forced labor can make individuals rich and powerful, but it's free people and institutions and the deals they make and the social contract that provide for the advancement of nations. Slavery was an existing part of the social contract under the Romans, then it didn't make sense anymore, until technology made it possible to bring it under the yoke of individuals.
As a nation, we're slowly coming to terms with the need for new social contracts to provide for the common welfare. Gig work allows individuals to be economically useful that wouldn't otherwise be, but is very close to the bottom of that barrel. Americans haven't come around to acceptance of the European welfare state, and it probably never will if you ask me. Gig workers will be left to their own devices and are the beginning of a new underclass. They're not quite slaves, not quite serfs, and lack the means to improve their lot. Like serfs, though, they will create their own internal rules and morals and institutions, and the business world will adapt around them.
Another thing to remember is that serfs and slaves had large collective families of blood and coworkers. You might work oppressive hours and suffer for it, but you aren't doing it alone.
Most gig workers are going to job to job in isolation because they don't want to be homeless. They always live with other people, but its not a relatable cohabitation and they arne't working together to ease one anothers burdens. Its a rat race designed to abuse and exhaust its participants while keeping them isolated and vulnerable to the exploitation.
Beyond that the exploitation actually increases as people get more desperate. Lack of education on how to manage money etc. leads to people spending more money in these gig jobs than they could ever make back. Uber is a good example, most drivers are unprofitable.
Tycho took control of agricultural planning, requiring the peasants to cultivate twice as much as they had done before, and he also exacted corvée labor from the peasants for the construction of his new castle. The peasants complained about Brahe's excessive taxation and took him to court. The court established Tycho's right to levy taxes and labor, and the result was a contract detailing the mutual obligations of lord and peasants on the island. Source Wikipedia
Serfs have rights under the law. Gig workers have none. The only thing they can do in order to earn rights is to sue to be treated as an employee.
The article gets it wrong. Traditional employment is an evolution on the master-serf relationship. Gig employment is lower status, akin to wandering laborers with no land or family. Gig workers wish they could be serfs.