Alex Kurth has never worked a typical 9-to-5 job, and he says he’s mostly OK with the fact that he never will. The 36-year-old Toronto resident cobbles together a living made up of four different gigs: he bartends at a craft brewery, is a sound technician, delivers takeout for Foodora, and he’s a representative for his fellow bicycle couriers who are unionizing.
Between his four jobs, he usually works between 30 and 40 hours a week, which makes him about $30,000 CAD a year. Kurth said his hustles don’t give him much when it comes to job security and benefits like health, dental, paid vacation or sick days. “Companies have realized that they don’t need to have dedicated, salaried, 9-to-5 with benefits employees and just treat People like Kurth reflect a shift in the way millennials and Gen Z work—nearly 60 percent of 18-24 year-olds are part of the gig economy, according to a “You can only get parental leave if you’re an employee and that doesn’t sync with the reality that we have. If you’re an independent yoga teacher, and you have a child, you get nothing covered, even though you’re paying into various things. That doesn’t seem right to me; that’s something that needs to be fixed,” she said. When it comes to retirement savings, which used to be built into full-time salaried jobs, gig workers are out of luck. Kurth says he just started putting some money aside for retirement this year. “Before that, I hadn’t saved a cent. I side hustles
<p>Thanks to technology and a pool of cheaper, on-demand workers available for specific projects as they arise, employers haven’t felt the need to raise wages for gig workers or their staff alike. According to the Bank of Canada, roughly 1 in 3 people do informal, or gig, work—which mirrors the Work Is Not a Place: Our Lives and Our Organizations in the Post-Jobs Economy and she says there’s a gap in social policy to reflect the lack of benefits and security for gig workers.
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