The point that director Shannon Walsh seems to be making with her documentary The Gig is Up is simple but potent: In a capitalistic economy where the top level of the upper class hoards the wealth, the only solution for the workers who get the scraps is to make their own way in the world. The Gig is Up makes for a good case study of the effects of the well-known and oft-uttered idiom: “Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” The phrase is generally used by the upper middle (or lower upper) class – particularly those members who follow a more conversative line of politics – at the expense of those in lower classes who have been met with financial difficulties for one reason or another. They might be toeing the poverty line or reasonably clear of it on a few technicalities, but they cannot pay bills, buy groceries or put their kids through school.
In other words, they have no bootstraps by which to pull themselves up, and when asking to be provided with those bootstraps, the answer has been stony silence. Corporations look after the bottom line, which might seem like the most obvious statement of all time, if not for the very real people caught up in that process. With her documentary, Walsh follows a handful of people who simply have not been able or allowed to participate in a “normal” economy based around capital. Instead of rolling the figurative dice with a company run via corporate structure, they have opted or been forced into a so-called “gig economy.” The concept is straightforward: Workers are paid directly and operate their own schedule.
This looser structure, based directly on merit and not on a hierarchy, has as many benefits as it does disadvantages. The benefits are obvious: job security by default (since any given person runs their own miniaturized business of sorts) and the near-certainty that one will not be phased out by bosses securing an invisible bottom line. The disadvantages also abound, such as how the corporate ladder is replaced by simply another corporate ladder when something like ride-share company Uber monopolizes the service it provides, begins to take a portion of each driver’s earnings, and is able to raise costs, sometimes without the consent of the “independent contractors” they hire out.
Admirably, Walsh focuses heavily on the human aspect of this story by giving us a handful of people to follow for a short period of time. One man takes surveys for a pittance, which, after building up for a while, goes toward his ailing mother’s lottery tickets. Another man does menial programming tasks through a site run by Amazon, gaming the system a bit so that he takes on the top-dollar tasks. A third man, who also takes on those programming tasks, simply does whatever comes to him, even when the job pays in cents of a single digit.
This is not the life they chose for themselves, really, but Walsh only labors to understand what led us here by way of the occasional interruption of these stories to consult some talking-head experts. That is the smart decision, as the story here is not a broad or nonspecific one. It’s a deeply, tangibly human one, and The Gig is Up, despite the simple follow-and-interview style of Walsh’s direction and the rather simplistic conclusion at which the director arrives, works to illuminate those human stories.
PHOTO COURTESY OF INTUITIVE PICTURES
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