If the last 18 months have taught us anything, it is what it feels like to be exposed. When the virus hit, we suddenly discovered that we could no longer bank on all the ordinary assumptions—whether about our health, our children’s education or our jobs.
For a large part of the British workforce, however, such precarity is not the product of a passing pandemic emergency, but rather a permanent condition. A gig economy in which units of labour can be traded as if they were units of electricity heightens the vulnerability to all sorts of shocks, but the problems go far deeper into our economy than that.