I have been thinking about the gig economy lately. While some people prefer casual employment (see the new movie Nomadland for just one example), gig workers can often feel like they are operating on the margins of society, outside of the usual opportunities for belonging to a group or feeling vested in their community. This, in turn, has been making me think about how similar this is to the struggle many Americans waged to gain the right to vote. The United States gradually, grudgingly expanded the franchise—the right to vote—from its founding in the late 18th century to today. At first, only white men (usually Protestant men) who owned property could vote. The logic was that only these men had a sufficient stake in society and the laws that governed it. This logic gradually evolved: some states allowed free African Americans to vote (if they owned property, or at least paid taxes); New Jersey briefly allowed property-owning women to vote (but took away the right later); Rhode Island allowed the eldest sons of property-owning men to vote, on the assumption that these future heirs would also have a vested interest in seeing the United States maintain its standards and values, many of which were less than democratic. But owning property still guided the conversation about whether people could vote if they didn’t somehow have a stake in society.
By 1860, though, as the urban population grew, immigrants increase in number, and landowners became a smaller percentage of the population, most states allowed universal white manhood suffrage. (Though not without a struggle: conflict over extension of the franchise nearly led to armed conflict in some places.) Black voting was not enshrined in the Constitution until after the Civil War, and even then, and for another hundred years, it was extremely difficult to actually cast your vote in most states if you were not white. Women would not get the vote nationally until 1920. Native Americans could not definitively vote until the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Over time it became clear to many Americans, even those who constituted the “elite,” that you could have a vested interest in the US—a sense of ownership and belonging—even without owning any land. There were other aspects of being an American citizen (which is how those who pursued the right to voted defined themselves, or wanted to) that could make you feel that you belonged: finding some measure of economic opportunity, or finding in the US a refuge from religious persecution (for many religions, anyway), or commitment to the ideals from which the country sprang—however imperfect our ability to embrace those ideals, and how slow our progress to fully living up to them. Just because you did not own land, it did not mean that you were rootless or transient. The important thing, though, was that people would see the continuing expansion of that inclusiveness. An increasing number of Americans had rights, and with time and effort, would have more. People felt this connection to the whole through civic engagement, religion, military service, and in a routine sort of way, on a regular, almost daily basis, if they were employed outside the home, their workplaces. Labor unions in particular created a sense of camaraderie and solidarity among workers, reinforcing a clear sense of what it meant to be an American—the rights, especially, and the responsibilities. Of course there was alienation among many individuals, a sense of exclusion for many groups—many were excluded, and had to fight for their right to be recognized as citizens. But they often did that through organizing with others who were like-minded, reinforcing a sense of belonging to a part of America, if not the whole.
Beginning in the mid-20th Century, though, this sense of being connected to the US through a set of ideas about what the United States could be, and claimed to be, began to shift. Sam Harnett at KQED has told this story well in a series called “The Great Risk Shift”: how employers gradually began to extricate themselves from obligations to their employees, like health benefits and pensions, and shift the cost and responsibility onto employees themselves. Reagan’s policies in the 1980s limited the federal government’s authority to protect workers. And globalization began a shift of manufacturing jobs overseas, while automation took many more of these jobs. This shift has led to the rise of the service industry and the knowledge industry, and it has also hastened in the rise of contract labor: independent, temporary, or consultant work. A 2018 Brookings Institution study showed that over 15 million Americans were primarily independent contract workers: this did not include those who had side gigs as contract or casual workers. Accompanying this is a phenomenon described by Robert Putnam is his book Bowling Alone: a post-World War II decline in social capital—the ways people create networks of social relationships—as people moved to the suburbs and gated communities and church membership declined. (Though some dispute Putnam’s conclusions.)
This has all led to a gradual de-emphasis of mutual obligation within our communities. People are more dislocated and more atomized. Gig workers, especially those who derive their work through an app, might interact with people, but only in short-term transactions, nothing likely to build sustainable relationships. They also have no stake in their employers. Nor do their employers have a stake in them. At the same time, many communities have been disappearing across small-town America: factories closed, and downtowns have shriveled up as Walmarts popped up just outside of the town centers. For many white Americans, this experience combined with the growth of immigrant communities throughout rural and urban areas and the election of a Black president to hone a sense of grievance and loss. E. J. Dionne, Jr., Norman J. Ornstein, and Thomas E. Mann noted in their book One Nation After Trump that “Trump clearly appealed to two broad, overlapping streams of discontent….One was animated by race, immigration, religion and culture. The other was inspired by economic discontent, the flight of well-paying jobs overseas and the hollowing out of many of our communities.”
In other words, many Americans feel a sense of powerlessness and disconnection. This accounts, in part, for the rise of the Tea Party after Obama’s election, as well as a growing sense of resentment and the rise of conspiracy theories like QAnon. These are the acts of bitter people who don’t feel connected to the privilege of their citizenship and whiteness as they once did. I don’t mean to suggest that the rise of gig workers—especially those who take jobs through an app, and may not ever meet another person through their work—is to blame. But it is another step away from community and it certainly doesn’t help to strengthen a sense of community and shared interest. The sense of grievance that led to the armed attack on the US Capitol in January demonstrates that fraying social capital that Putnam described.
My point is that higher ed has an important role to play in addressing this issue on several fronts. We can help people who are in the gig economy (who don’t want to be) transition to a place where they have more control over their careers and economic futures. Maybe they remain independent, but as consultants or contractors. We can help prepare people for asserting control over their economic lives in an economy that continually tries to take it away. But we can also help to address the sense of dislocation and lack of community ties by incorporating more of a focus on civic engagement and responsibility, shared values (or the quest for common ground)—making sure that our graduates are not just good employees or good workers, but also good citizens. This doesn’t mean we need to find a common set of values. We have never had that, though we might have agreed on the terms of the discussion about our values. I don’t advocate a return to the Cold War Consensus model, in which we minimize our differences and the uniqueness of our various demographic categories and subcultures.
But providing a good education is about more than just teaching skills: it means helping people see how they and their skills and strengths relate to the rest of the world. It helps people understand how they belong to it, and how they should feel about that. More to come on this.
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