The Victorian gig economy: casualization in Henry Mayhew's Morning Chronicle letters

Abstract

The traditional account of the Industrial Revolution goes something like this: beginning in the latter half of the eighteenth century, a relentless wave of concentration, mechanization, and rationalization demolished traditional forms of manufacturing. Decentralized systems of cottage industries and village workshops were replaced by hulking factories and “dark Satanic Mills”. Artisans and journeymen were transformed into the industrial proletariat, densely packed into manufacturing districts and subject to a rigid system of time discipline. The hourly wage – the ultimate symbol of abstracted labor – came to define what it meant to make a living. Worker autonomy and subjectivity were crushed by the deadening uniformity that industrialization brought in its wake. The quintessential image here is Dickens’s Coketown, with its grotesquely homogenized workforce that could no more be divided into individuals than the sea could be separated into its component drops. Scholars of the nineteenth century know that the process of industrialization was significantly more heterogeneous and complex. But the traditional narrative of the Industrial Revolution continues to have broad cultural purchase. The contemporary discourse surrounding the emergence of what has come to be known as the gig economy has made this particularly clear. Popularized in the years after the 2008 financial crisis, the term “gig economy” defines a diverse employment model that relies on contingent workers, freelancers, and independent contractors rather than full-time employees. Proponents of the gig economy argue that the spread of “flexible” employment throughout diverse sectors of the economy signals a cultural rejection of oppressive industrial labor regimes. For example, Silicon Valley CEO David Shadpour has argued that that our society is “evolving beyond the constraints of traditional work models” and “demanding the freedom of flexible work environments” (2018). Likewise, the economist Arun Sundararajan celebrates the replacement of “monolithic, centralized systems” with decentralizing labor platforms like TaskRabbit and Lyft (2016, 4). These platforms reject the “faceless, impersonal” nature of industrial capitalism in favor of economic interactions that are “embedded in a community” and “intertwined... with social relations” (35). According to an Uber press release, the gig economy democratizes economic opportunity by offering “turnkey entrepreneurship” to low-income workers who have historically had access only to waged labor (qtd. in Kessler 58). In this