Author: Sheila Ireland, President & CEO, OIC Philadelphia
For millions of Americans, the gig economy provides something enormously valuable: immediate access to income. Drive for a rideshare company. Deliver food. Pick up a freelance assignment. Take a short-term contract. When the rent is due, hours have been cut, or a family needs additional income, the ability to turn available time into money can provide an important measure of stability.
We should not dismiss that value. But we also shouldn’t confuse earning income with building wealth.
There is an uncomfortable historical analogy worth considering. In the sharecropping system, people worked land they did not own within an economic system largely controlled by someone else. They provided the labor while landowners controlled the primary asset and much of the economic relationship. The gig economy is obviously not sharecropping. Sharecropping emerged from the aftermath of slavery and operated within a system of racial oppression, violence, debt, and legal discrimination that devastated generations of Black families. That history should never be minimized. But the economic structure raises a question that remains relevant today:
Who works—and who owns?
A rideshare driver may provide the labor, the automobile, the gasoline, the insurance, and the maintenance. Yet the platform controls access to customers, establishes many of the terms of the transaction, owns the technology, and captures value from thousands or millions of individual transactions. At the end of the day, the worker has earned income. The platform has built an asset. That distinction matters enormously in communities where families have historically had fewer opportunities to accumulate assets and transfer wealth from one generation to the next.
Gig work can be an excellent short-term economic strategy. Someone between jobs can generate income while searching for permanent employment. A student can supplement earnings while completing training. A parent can use flexible work to navigate a difficult period. An aspiring entrepreneur can generate cash while developing a business. In each of those circumstances, gig work is doing exactly what it can do well: creating a bridge to greater stability. The problem comes when the bridge becomes the destination.
After years of driving, delivering or completing assignments through someone else’s platform, what does the worker own that can produce income without another hour of labor? What asset has appreciated? What asset can be sold? What can be left to your children? Those questions should be part of the workforce-development conversation.
At OIC Philadelphia, our responsibility cannot end with helping people generate their next paycheck. We must help people move along an economic continuum—from instability to stability, from stability to a career, and wherever possible, from earning to owning. Through initiatives such as our Food Entrepreneurship program, we are helping people think beyond simply working in an industry. We want them to understand what it takes to build something within it—to develop a product, find customers, understand costs, establish a business, and ultimately create an asset of their own.
Not everyone needs to become an entrepreneur. Good jobs with benefits, advancement, and retirement security remain powerful pathways to economic mobility. And gig work has a legitimate place in that journey. But we should be clear about what each tool is designed to accomplish. Gig work can create income. A career can create stability. Ownership can create wealth.
For communities that have spent generations working without receiving an equitable share of the assets their labor helped create, that distinction isn’t academic.
