Will Amazon Take Over the World?

Summary

Imagine waking up each day to find out whether you won an auction to do your job. The night before, you signed in to a labor platform—a website such as TaskRabbit—and carefully requested a relatively modest wage while agreeing to a laundry list of rules imposed by bosses. Anyone from around the world can bid on the job. You’re hoping that your past performance will give you enough advantage over lower bidders to justify your continued employment. But you never know.

For established professionals, this scenario will sound nightmarish: Black Mirror meets “right to work” evangelism. But many workers already face something like it. The default presumption of “employment at will”—which allows employees to be fired “for any reason, or no reason at all,” as many courts have put it—leaves a vast number of American workers vulnerable to sudden termination. Globally, precarious employment is also all too common, especially for the 60 percent of the world’s population living on less than $5 a day.