William Morris on The Gig Economy?

The Endless Fight for Meaningful Labour (with references to Ruskin's Road) 

WM would be fuming as we put arguments on meaningful labour and yet we are here with an AI-generated image. Peak irony! 

John Ruskin was known famously for his critical view on the division of labour that argued that mechanisation stripped workers of creative agency. Morris too envisioned a world where work was not just a means of survival but an intrinsic part of life's beauty. In News from Nowhere, he described a society that was replaced by cooperative workshops where people took joy in their crafts and mass production was reduced and rejected. 

Today's gig economy is epitomised by companies like Uber who have become the frontier of dehumanised labour. Workers are no longer factory cogs, but are app-driven contractors who are stripped of stability and creative fulfilment. 

Morris would have viewed today's gig economy as yet another manifestation of dehumanizing forces that he rallied against. Creative labour was central to human fulfilment and today's gig economy stands in complete contrast where the industry stands fragmented. 

Uber, Zomato, Swiggy have become the new age mills where its about profit trumping the dignity of labour. The 'cooperative workshops' that Morris envisioned and artisans took pride in have now been replaced by apps that are faceless and allocate rides for delivery of products without knowing the person using the app. Morris would have been extremely disheartened to see how platforms increasingly gamify productivity by using metrics and ratings to incentivise overwork. He would have viewed this as grim mechanisation of human spirit where workers have no tangible connection to the products of their labour nor satisfaction of a well-made object. 

Morris believed that the chief duty of civilised world is to seek to turn the toil of all men into work that they could care about doing and the gig economy however preaches the opposite with the main focus being on "toil for all" 

On the other hand, if John Ruskin were to witness today’s gig economy, Ruskin would see alarming parallels. Gig work, much like factory labour in the Victorian era, prioritizes efficiency and profit over human dignity. Platform workers whether delivering food, are fragmented into data points, assigned tasks by algorithms, and rated by customers, with little room for individual expression or creative agency.

Ruskin believed that true art and craftsmanship required the worker’s “heart and soul” to be invested in their labour. Yet, the gig economy creates a model where workers, despite being called ‘independent contractors,’ are in reality disempowered and alienated from their labour.