Publishers Weekly
07/10/2023
While the Covid-19 lockdowns gave some laid-off workers lavish unemployment benefits that changed their lives, others scrabbled for dead-end gigs, according to this revealing study from University of North Carolina sociologist Ravenelle (Hustle and Gig). Reporting on her survey of 199 workers, most of them New Yorkers, Ravenelle focuses on people who got by without unemployment assistance, including immigrant, part-time, and gig workers who were ineligible for benefits, as well as others who passed them up. Their safety net, Ravenelle observes, was to pile on bad jobs, including ubiquitous, grinding app gigs with Uber, Door Dash, and TaskRabbit, selling their pristine urine for faked drug tests, delivering illegal pot, or doing stints of prostitution (“The worst sex of my life,” according to one respondent). These routines left people stuck in a rut, stressed out, and chronically hard up for money. In contrast, those who received the unusually generous unemployment benefits of the CARES Act, which often paid more than their jobs had, were giddy at their luck—“It was about $8,000.... I definitely cried.... In my personal bank account, I had never seen that much money”—and used the windfall to start a pet-boarding business or give up bartending to retrain as a dental hygienist, among other projects. Ravenelle makes a cogent case for more comprehensive unemployment insurance, but her survey also shines as a lively, fascinating panorama of the neo-Dickensian labor regime so many workers endure. It’s worth a look. (Oct.)
Convergence
"Side Hustle Safety Net provides rich case studies and thought-provoking analyses of precarious workers during the pandemic, guiding readers to observe the trend of poly-employment and drawing attention to the deficiencies in the social safety net."
Social Forces
"The book…is full of rich qualitative data that Ravenelle works into a cohesive narrative time and again and leaves the reader excited to hear about the results of the ongoing (as of the time of writing) third phase of the study."
Kirkus Reviews
2023-08-23
A vivid, disheartening portrait of unemployment during the pandemic.
Ravenelle, a professor of sociology and author of Hustle and Gig, begins by looking at two key categories: the “Officially Unemployed” and the “Forgotten Jobless.” This key distinction determined whether someone who found themselves out of work during the pandemic could apply for unemployment insurance or not. One chapter includes a brief history of unemployment insurance in America and the ways it has been weakened by “decades of neoliberal, antiwelfare ideology.” In addition to “causing more quarantining than polio, killing more Americans than HIV/AIDS, and resulting in more sudden unemployment than the Great Depression,” writes the author, the pandemic "divided people into essential and nonessential, demanding or on-demand, vaccinated or unvaccinated." In an eye-opening text based on an in-depth study with more than 200 workers, Ravenelle examines exactly how people made it through 2020 and 2021 and, specifically, “what happens to the most precarious workers— the gig workers and laid-off restaurant staff, the early-career creatives, and the minimum-wage employees—when the economy collapses, and how they fare in the pursuit of an economic recovery." Many ended up doing “side hustles” such as food delivery, dog walking, driving for a car service, or pickups for shopping apps. Ravenelle analyzes why those who didn’t apply for unemployment chose not to, for reasons ranging from not knowing they were eligible, to believing it was wrong to take money for not working. The author sympathetically portrays people who “faced weeks and months of living on the edge," clearly believing that America could do better by its unemployed. She closes by proposing a number of fixes to ensure how our outdated economic and employment systems could be made more efficient and effective for the overextended workers of today and tomorrow.
A startling examination of the patchy response to pandemic-era unemployment.
