From Gig Work to Good Work: How Workforce Policy Can Support Gig Workers

Millions of people in the United States need work that fits around uncertain day-to-day fluctuations, particularly workers who care for children, elders, or others needing caregiving assistance. While governments, foundations, educators, and unions typically focus on job placements as key to improving people’s economic stability, they often overlook individuals who cannot commit to traditional employment schedules.

Gig work can provide the flexibility people need but often equates to undercompensated work with few benefits. This raises a critical question: Can “gig work” become “good work”? And, if so, what is the role of workforce development boards and agencies?

This is an evolving field of research and experimentation. I have been involved for many years, running a pioneering program for Great Britain’s government and then advising US agencies through a nonprofit. We spent a year working with a US workforce board to launch its own regional hourly labor market as an alternative to Silicon Valley’s apps. This article shares the project’s background and initial learnings.

What We Know about US Gig Workers

Many workers who cannot take on regular employment have complex lives—they are parents of children with disabilities, people living with mental or physical conditions, people caring for elders or spouses—and usually lack support from family or public programs.

These already vulnerable workers are often overlooked in workforce strategy because they are significantly undercounted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even before the pandemic, which caused a significant increase in gig workers, Gallup’s polling found that 36 percent of adults relied on gig work for at least a portion of their income. (Other surveys used tighter definitions and produced smaller percentages; there is no universally accepted number.)

Can “gig work” become “good work”? And, if so, what is the role of workforce development boards and agencies?

Nonstandard work is shaped by powerful new technologies, though we have little information about how they are applied. Uber, for instance, has been heavily scrutinized after record-setting valuations for a widely emulated business model that retains 30 percent or more of workers’ earnings, misleads its workers to create an oversupplied market, and has distorted activity to disadvantage other labor platforms.

Market pressures to drive down labor costs led to reports of pay cuts from gig workers on many platforms, including Shipt, Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, Amazon Flex, and TaskRabbit.

This landscape has constrained many app-based gig workers to mere “survival work” dictated by algorithms. And this system is particularly detrimental to marginalized workers—communities of color, women, the young, and low-income households—who are disproportionately reliant on nonstandard employment.

The Need for a Systemic Alternative

Despite the prevalence of gig work, workforce agencies’ training, support, recruitment, and data-gathering efforts remain focused on traditional, standard employment. In the United States, the public workforce system has nearly 2,300 job centers competing with for-profit staffing agencies. When job searching moved online, state workforce agencies commissioned their own all-sector job-matching platform to sit alongside commercial offerings.

However, federal funding for workforce agencies is typically driven by performance measures based on traditional job creation and retention, such as placement in permanent, full-time positions, which excludes millions of workers who rely on nonstandard employment. The result: The needs of millions of workers who are better suited to gig-type employment are largely excluded from consideration by workforce agencies.

Yet workforce boards are ideally placed to catalyze an alternative model for employment locally. For one, directly or indirectly, the government is usually the biggest employer of flexible labor in any area. But how these agencies can instigate more equitable, inclusive, informed, and supportive gig work is still emerging. Philanthropy can play a vital role by funding pilots and helping agencies develop metrics that incentivize agencies to meet the needs of workers who are reliant on nonstandard work.

The British Experience and Implications for the United States

Britain’s project to systemically elevate gig workers started in 2005, with funding from the central government, the National Health Service, and 20 city or county governments. The result is a core hour-by-hour labor market platform that generates granular data on localized activity, pay, and demand.

In recent years, the project turned to US workforce boards. Funders—including the Annie E. Casey, Kauffman, and Walmart Foundations—supported a US viability assessment by 25 state and city workforce agencies. Philanthropy also enabled an initial pilot with the workforce agency covering Long Beach, CA. Preparations for that launch won the US Conference of Mayors’ prize for best community-led job development initiative—raising awareness and expectations.

Over the first year, the system generated $12,427,891 of unsubsidized wages [for 928 people] in W-2 employment plus benefits.

In Long Beach, the initial plan was to launch in spring 2020, with an initial focus on hospitality work. That tanked with the pandemic, and the mayor pivoted the new market toward responsive at-home childcare for essential workers. At the end of the pilot, the city council committed to funding a wider rollout with a one-year contract for a local platform that started in September 2023.

First-Year Outcomes in Long Beach, CA

The launch did not go completely smoothly. Initial hopes of demand from parks, convention centers, schools, and other large public users of flexible labor seemed thwarted by a blend of procurement rules, management changes, uncertainty about employer-of-record options, and slow vetting processes.

Community organizations were engaged and enthusiastic supporters, but none had the critical mass of demand required to kickstart initial activity. For that, we had to turn to the city’s private sector. Their focus was on growing their businesses rather than building workforce outcomes data, so our outcomes data are incomplete.

But we could extract key numbers from platform reporting (also available to City Hall for auditing purposes). Over the first year, the system generated $12,427,891 of unsubsidized wages in W-2 employment plus benefits. The average worker using the platform worked 18 to 20 hours per week while active. Average pay was $27.74 per hour.

By year’s end, 928 people had completed at least one work assignment as part of an ongoing relationship across over 100 clients (who for this project are defined as whoever pays for the work, not always the employer of record). Other findings include an average travel distance from home to work of 6.7 miles and a period of notice for work assignments averaging 60 hours (2.5 days). The average worker age was 37.

Much of this employment was in care for children, seniors, or people with health issues. Without the concentration of local public agencies, bookings spread well beyond Long Beach’s city boundaries.

City Hall funding has just ended. The platform has continued in Long Beach thanks to commercial support and a decision by Sharefest, a regional community organization, to extend the use of the platform to support work placements and progression paths for disadvantaged youth.

Learning from the Initial Data

A single pilot only scratches the surface of the need for equitable hourly-labor platforms across regions and sectors. But some takeaways already seem clear:

People want regional alternatives to gig work apps. The Long Beach program was promoted through city email lists, job fairs, college employment services and community links (one nonprofit placed multi-language leaflets in food bank packages, for example). Far more people registered than could be matched with demand. In the pilot, recruitment ended when we reached 1,200 more work seekers than immediately available employment opportunities.

Quality nonstandard work is viable. Gig work companies claim truly flexible working is incompatible with employee status (versus contractor status). That has been academically debunked already. The Long Beach operation demonstrated one replicable business model for prorated W-2 employment. There will be others.

Without public agencies, a launch must be opportunistic. It’s too early to identify a sector-specific strategy for nonstandard work, and in the absence of concentrated demand from large-scale clients, entry-level work needs to be taken wherever it can be found to get a regional market started.

Nonstandard work brings new businesses into workforce services. Many business leaders had little conception of public workforce boards. But they were still receptive to the idea of empowering workers to boost recruitment, service levels, and retention.

Unusual attributes can be valuable. A continuing area of investigation is understanding how qualities beyond formal skills can be monetized for nonstandard workers. As one example, Long Beach hospitality businesses proposed an “I will work on a boat” badge for anyone with a food-handling credential who had demonstrable work reliability and was not prone to seasickness to work shifts on the region’s ferries, party vessels, and tour boats.

Next Steps

Other regions are planning pilots. Portland, OR, is currently in the lead. They are focused initially on how people experiencing houselessness can be helped incrementally into work, building on their lived experience. Encouragingly, unions and larger community organizations there are also looking at how they could catalyze this market for their region.

Many questions remain to be fully addressed, however. One is the need to refine the “digital badging,” which allows employers to connect with people on the platform with the appropriate certifications, attributes, and preferences.

Reporting metrics are another challenge. A key question here is to identify measures that should be highlighted in dashboards serving different constituencies across regions. This is necessary to ultimately effect systemwide change across the national workforce development system.

Our team also sees possibilities for new union services, as well as innovative training and apprenticeship models. This thinking must dovetail into structures that serve full-time workers. Gig work should not be seen as separate but as part of a continuum of employment.

One last challenge and opportunity is artificial intelligence. To date, it has largely been applied to cut costs and monitor workers. But used well, AI could help construct an architecture of scalable, equitable markets to build steppingstones of advancement and alignment with a local economy’s needs.