Topic: Can a gig economy serve as an edge against inflation? (Read 242 times)

To be fair, if you would like to get a job, that has some benefits too, you wake up early and go to office work and come back home and then rest of the day is yours. When you work in gig economy, the more you work the more money you may make, isn't guaranteed but that's the premise, so you end up working a lot and that causes a lot of people to forget that we are talking about an economy that is 7/24 alive with that, and destroys your life.

Doesn't mean that it doesn't have benefits, you may make a lot more money, and you are at home mostly and you decide your own hours, so all of that makes it worthwhile but it's also very very hard to find a job as well. All those high paying jobs? Rarely to be found by people who start out, you need to build a portfolio for many years to do that.

It makes obvious sense the way you see entrepreneurship and some of its possible benefits in the economic times that we find ourselves today. There are many high-paying job opportunities available in the marketplace, which allow work at home jobs for mothers to earn an additional income or balance a full-time career. This is especially useful in an inflationary economy wherein the cost of living rises and traditional wages can lag at orderto appeal to.In fact, sign up for my free online course on become the ability to work whenever you want, wherever you want is what can make time management easier for some and improve productivity in other aspects of life as opposed to a 9 till 6 slave office job that might seem burdensome and even counterproductive sometimes.

Furthermore, the job market is changing at such a rapid pace that the traditional model of education usually fails to update itself on time and ends up teaching obsolete courses that are not useful in giving students the relevant, updated skills. Shifting more emphasis on skill acquisition and practical experience instead of rigorous coursework will make students far more prepared for the emerging work environment. Allowing students to focus on certain skills or tasks that interest them increases the ability to learn and gives a chance for entrepreneurship and innovation to occur.

In some other areas where the cost of living has risen, freelancing and gig work provide much needed economic flexibility. These options can be particularly attractive if traditional employment does not offer adequate compensation or job security. Concerns about productivity during traditional office hours are legitimate, and flexible workflows can address this by enabling individuals to work while being productive throughout the transition to an attractive economy provides highly friendly skills based education programs that address challenges such as inflation, unemployment and obsolescence, thereby supporting individual economic development.

Competition is one of the biggest challenges you can face when doing business. If you are trying to do business in a field where everyone is present, it is very difficult to cope with competition. An even more important issue is the continuity of competition. It is very difficult to maintain this competition in an environment where competition is constant. If it does not satisfy you in terms of income, you do not even enter the competition. If you need income, you have to participate in this competition and this will tire you even more.

As you said, this situation also provides the opportunity to reach more jobs. If a high-income and permanent job can be found, working remotely can be a great advantage.

It 100% can, I live in a nation with HUGE inflation, and while I am 50% poorer compared to just only 2 years ago and living is VERY hard for me these days, it's still better than many friends. Gig economy means that you are dictating your own price, depending on how good you are at the job you do and how many jobs you can find of course. I also have a friend who does music, I don't know how any of that works at all, but makes a good amount of money.

So all in all, if you do that, it will be fine, but remember there are "online products" that you can sell too, like lets say you are an author, write a book, and sell that to make money. In the end it's all about the fact that you need to be online and global, that way you can do better.

Of course there are scenarios like that. One that I can think of is those who work for the government. It is only wrong and should not be copied and if we know someone like this nearby, we must report them as soon as possible.

We shouldn't be scared because this is so unfair to those who grind full time and sometimes only being paid less. Hybrid roles in a job sounds new to me. The only one that I know is working remotely and working non-remotely but if I were to choose among them, I think I will going to try that hybrid one because I can find one working environment to be boring sometimes but if I or we are given a chance to constantly change our working environment, that should break the boringness that I or we can feel.

If we are working the whole day, I think it would be hard for us to do another job anymore but that's fine than we can bust our selves more. We must remember that the true wealth is health and not money. Some jobs can allow us to do another job but I think that is risky because what if we caught out by our bosses or managers? If not, it might still affect our performances and can be a cause for us to get laid-off from our jobs.

Many preferred to go to the office because this is the traditional way of being employed. But I've seen people who have left the corporate job and did their experiment of going on as a freelancer and tried to do a flexible working setup. They liked it and they've found more time with their families. So, nowadays it's not only about working to provide for the family but also about having a working life balance and spending more time with them.

I agree. With this kind of setup, every free time that someone has can be converted into a gig economy and converted into money. But this doesn't come too easy because the competition is becoming tough as well.

The reality is that the gig economy is just an excuse for paying you less, often unscrupulous new companies that are trying to avoid regulations that were put into place to protect workers and customers. It's often disguised behind hype and buzzwords to make it sound more glamorous, like it is cutting edge technology but it's often old stuff relabeled. You will generally struggle unless you have a full time job, however if you do have a full time job and keep track of the benefit - it might be possible to earn some extra cash by doing these sort of gig economy jobs on the side. If you have a few hours of free time each day and are looking to earn extra, then that's great, I'd avoid considering these as full time employment though as they are full of pitfalls.

The gig economy cannot hedge inflation; it might give you more time to have some short-term contract job or allow you to manage more than one freelancing job, but you definitely will get tired of handling different (lots of) jobs, and the reason is because you are not a robot or some kind of metal that can keep multitasking for a long time or year. If you are managing three or four jobs that generate income, then it will reduce the free time you are expecting to get. 

If you think you are making a lot of money from the various jobs you are managing and the money doesn't have too much value because of a lack of control over its supply, it can't hedge inflation; you are just overworking yourself to survive. 

The conclusion is that a gig economy cannot hedge inflation, and it is not possible that employees can be allowed to report to the office just when they have work on their desk, unless you are the director of the organization. 

Freelancing, to many individuals, presents itself as a desirable liberty, plus it can be added with other works which is why it appeals to a large number of people. The economy these days has seen inflation go way up and good stable jobs are hard to find; therefore, this is considered very advantageous.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could just go to the office when there's work to do instead of being bound to a 9-6 workday whether there's a task at hand or not? This would allow us more time for our side hustles, which might just supplement our income.

In an environment where the cost of living is high and time is typically unproductive, the gig and flexible economy might be welcome. In this way, we can make our free time much more useful as well as give much more to the economy.

Online jobs are a lot harder because you are not going against just the people who are capable of going to the office, normally when you are applying for a job, the only competition is people who live within the office, if it takes an hour that's still fine, sometimes some people do like two hours but that's crazy. However, if you apply for a job online, that's literally THE WHOLE WORLD and suddenly your competition is insane and not really welcomed at all.

We need to really focus on what we are doing and not going to end up with any issues at all. We are going to just apply for jobs, but remember, just because competition is big, that's not always a bad thing because it also means that the amount of jobs are a lot as well. I am working remote, I found my job many many years ago, and I love it, always loved it, and if all goes well and my job stays, I plan on retiring old age with this job, not everyone can find that.

I am sure any hardworking individual will want to do more jobs to earn a living instead of borrowing or becoming a liability. Inflation has made many people to seek various means of making more money. This is why there is an increase in content creation on social media. People now seek means of monetizing their activities on social media. X premium account is a good example of how the social media is helping creative people make extra income.

Elon Musk said it is morally wrong to work from home and I am sure that there are other employers of labor also feel the same way. Some employers feel that workers should be closely supervised for them to be productive. While other jobs like production needs physical presence in most cases.

The high rate of unemployment in many developing nations has made these remote jobs difficult to secure due to stiff competition. Securing jobs in online recruitment platforms like Upwork and Fiverr is now tough because many people are seeking part-time jobs.

It depends.

If you live in third world countries, gig economy is better than full time job since you can earn more, full time job only pays $100-$200 per month. Starting own business isn't easy too and it need a good amount of capital, so gig economy is more make sense to start a career.

However, if you live in first world countries, working on blue collar jobs is enough and it pays better than gig economy.

If it is a full time job, you are definitely going to have work to do during your working hours, nobody is going to pay you for a full time job if they didn't see the value you'll bring them, or if there was not much work to be done. Some companies also offer employees hybrid roles, were you work remotely and also in-person, but the thing is you are definitely going to be working during your stipulated working hours.

That being said, people manage to add part-time jobs to their main jobs, but they don't do it within the working hours for their main job, they can only do it after they are closed from work. It is not so easy to do and could have implications on ones health in the long run.

Obviously some companies would not want that because they wouldn’t like you working for other companies or clients. They hired you to work for them and expect you to deliver all your time and efforts into doing work for them. They might think that you wouldn’t be as efficient if you are still doing other things on the side.

That’s why if you are freelancing, you stick to freelancing and if you want to become a permanent employee then you go do that.

Such discussions have been discussed in this board for quite some time and over and over again, the gig economy is the future of work but it can't fight against inflation in any way. Its true value is not enough to beat inflation in a country and one main reason is because it is not an asset. To make things worse the government won't allow the gig economy to strive more than the traditional system, they will do anything to shut it down so that it won't strive in such a way that they cant regulate the gig system.

There are a lot of companies now that have adapted this sequence. They are required to go to office at least once or twice a month depending on the availability and need for that employee in the office so, it's a better setup for those that have been going to office and having hard time to commute. But to mind everyone, a company that has hired an employee thinks that they've bought your time whether you have something to do in their office or none.

I agree on this. That's also lessening the time that they dedicate on other subjects that they're not good. But I think there's a reason behind that and kids interest are changing from time to time. I have no question against the educational system but it varies for each country.

It is one way to defeat inflation as it will serve as a source of income. But there's no stability in freelancing, one thing freelancers do is to be wise with what they earn. Investing it to income generating assets will be the best option IMO.

Freelancing is very beneficial tho both the employer and the employee and it goes beyond being able to handle multiple jobs to have bigger renumeration. It saves mostly the employer the cost of renting an office apartment and paying taxes for it, electricity tariff, providing comfortable working environment for the employees, providing work materials and official gadgets for employees, paying feeding and transportation allowances to mention but a few.

Also it saves the employees the hassle of moving from one place to another on a daily basis and physical limitations to attend to other priorities and the flexibility of working hours.

Remote work is very impactful and should be applied to every unit of workforce, education inclusive to enable people work more comfortable and expose them the more to ICT since it's the basis of delivery and effective communication in a remote setting.

Gig economy is a shit economy. People should only do freelancing till they get a real full time job or start their own business. Freelancing is just a temporary solution and when lots of people do it, it is a sign that something ain’t working right.

People wants to do flexibility with the free lancing because they can compromise all of their hours in a valuable task, in a corporate world not all the time you will do something or have a task will do lets say there's like a dead day that you don't do anything just wait for the concerns or task will be raise up to you next, instead of that freelancers would like to seek this opportunity to use as source of their income. Is this could be good against inflation I guess yes and a no, if you are still staying with the same country and has a low rate payment still you might be affected, but if you are paying into other currencies that has a higher exchange rate I guess at least you can survive with the inflation.

First of all, which office doesn't give any work to someone but still wants them to present? I bet 8/10 people who are in 9-5 jobs has to work their ass off to get the task done and even if they done there's always something waiting for them up next.

Schools operate differently, where I live they are only has been upto noon then they get to go home or they just continue if they are being part of extra curricular activities and almost every one of them involved in it.

Now talking about freelancing it doesn't work for everyone, it's mostly suited for someone who doesn't need to rely on the income from their gigs for their source of life, let's say they don't have any rent to pay and foods served at their table. While someone who has the responsibility to provide has to do every possible money making opportunities to ensure there's food on the table for their family.

People deciding to work 9am-6pm is their priority, of course there are a lot of jobs within that timeframe that pays handsomely, so most persons don't really find the need to do an extra job, so in fighting inflation and high cost of living, what they do is that they mostly get things and pay for bills that are of utmost priority to them and cut down on unnecessary spending, In doing so they have less to spend and more to save. So there are different approaches to fight inflation, you just have to go for the one that best suits you.

Talking about school curriculum and teaching only courses that are exactly the discipline of the students. In every education curriculum, there is always extra curriculum activities where student can  easily identify areas they can be good at, it can be sports, it can be entertainment and any other thing. Hence the school has identified the area at which the students can harness their skills outside academics whether sports or entertainment, you will see the school will begin to implement programs that will help them begin to improve on it and encourage the students on that. I think this has been a long practice mostly in high schools and sometimes even in the university that have helped people to identify their potentials and earn a living from it outside the day to day academic classes and routine.

Each job has its mode of operation and regardless of wether or not an economy chooses to be flexible in the way they carry out thier official working hours, jobs that require that you stay in the office throughout the time your service is required wouldn't  agree that you only come when you have a task to perform at the office.

Let's take for instance that you're in the teaching sector and by the timetable of the institution, you're to teach at certain time of the day and not even in all the days of the week. If you've never been in the teaching sector you would think this way that you can come around whichever time you have classes with the student but that's never how it works in real life setting.  Your responsibility as a tutor goes above just mere teaching and include other leadership and manageral roles that entails that you always make yourself available in the teaching environment even when you're not teaching. If you are skilled at a thing, it's left for you to manage the rest of the time your service isn't needed at the work place and not  that you are allowed to go home whenever you don't have lectures. So the student aren't going to be in class and will  only come around when they have a lecture that suites thier interest? What happens to the other things they have to learn from school like being disciplined and having the ability to network with others which is now a vital part of what's needed for you to survive In this era. It's not just in the teaching sector but almost in all sector, works aren't pre planned but as the day starts, jobs keeps coming in and that's when you start doing your job. It's just like saying that a medical doctor should only come to the hospital whenever a call comes through to him that there is a patient that needs his attention, how will he cope when cases of emergency come in?

I agree with this. A lot of jobs that require people to be in the office all day can be done from home so I don't see a point in them going into the office every day. It doesn't have to be 100% remote, workers can come into the office maybe 2 days a week and they can choose different days that can be convenient for them.
I find it funny when people say working from home reduces productivity. that's not true at all. If the system is very well managed to make workers feel comfortable working from home and channels are created where they can discuss freely and easily with their colleagues and clients then there would be productivity.
All that's needed is a good working environment.

Working remotely, with a flexible schedule, in a hybrid regime, and being a freelancer are all very different things that sometimes overlap and sometimes do not. I'm pointing it out because of the op's question of whether it would be better to visit the office for certain tasks instead of having a 9-6 job. Visiting the office occasionally can be a part of a full-time job with a hybrid regime, for example, and not necessarily a part of the gig economy.
In any case, I don't think it has much to do with inflation, because sometimes doing gigs means being precarious and having a very unstable income (while a full-time job might be a high-paying job).

gig economies only work if the "client" you operate with is paying you enough for your time and you also have enough jobs to accumilate

for instance doing a logo for $5 only works if you are not taking 30 minutes per job and have a waiting list of clients wanting a logo.. however if you end up consulting with the client for 30minutes to get design idea's and then 30 minutes to draw it and then you dont get another request for a few hours.. its not going to be better off than minimum wage

same goes for food delivery. if you get $5 per deliver per 15min delivery timeslot. it only works if you are less than 5 minutes from door to door. because adding in the drive to the restaurant te wait for the food prep the delivery to the customer.. and then waiting for another customer.. that $5 ends up being a per hour amount

So you are suggesting that the only solution to beat inflation is just... working more?
I wonder how the people in countries with hyperinflation are currently surviving. Do they work 100 hours a week in 5 different jobs?
If you live in a country with high cost of living, the smart solution would be to move into a country, where the inflation is low and find a job there. Working more in order to cover the higher cost of living is basically running faster throughout the "rat race".
I personally hate freelancing, even though I've worked as a freelancer several years ago. As a freelancer, you have no boss and you pick your worktime, but you will have to struggle to find your customers and you are about to compete with people, who are willing to do the same task for peanuts.

wow! what's this idea that one must have been  writing with AI that has almost become a trend when individual that haven't stayed too long on the forum shares there idea in a manner that's probably apt and well detailed? Even if this was my first thread on the forum, I would still have looked at this statement as a direct insult to my ability to think through a concept and put it out in a manner that passes my idea in a way that anyone who comes across it can vividly understand it. Does it mean one can't share his idea without necessarily making use of an AI?

Well, I will rather take this as a compliment and if you care to, you can easily run a plagiarism or AI check on this or any of my previous thread to be sure if your assumption ia right or wrong.

I have never and can never write with AI. It's never been my thing.

OP registered in 2022 and thus is relatively new.  It is rare that anyone who's registered in the last 8 years (and probably more) could put together such a coherent post as this.  My proboscis is detecting a strong scent of AI, though I would never rule out my paranoia being out of control.  Just sayin'.


Have you ever held a job?  I've had quite a few, and there hasn't been a single one where I could just drop by when I have a particular task to do.  And by the way, having to drop in to your main job to do the task and then quickly scoot out the back door to your 2-3 side hustles sounds maddeningly tiresome.  Even if you're young and are trying to earn as much money as possible, what you proposed just isn't feasible.

It's not gig economy that used to cope against inflation, but it simply you're lack of money, that's why you're looking for second or third jobs.

You're talking as an employees, so you're looking to make something more.

But, if you're an employer, you will do same to the employees because you're want to maximize the profit of your business.

Many companies force the employees to work full day because they're also forced by other companies in that city, working from 9AM - 6PM make the employees need to have lunch, so it will encourage them to have lunch in restaurant near the company you work.

If the companies not force to work full day, the restaurants might go bankrupt due to lack of customers.

Not every role can function in a gig economy, there are certain roles where the business needs permanent workers and not freelance or contract staffs. We already have a gig economy thriving in almost every part of the world and helping bridge the gap between different countries as you can market your skill from any part of the world you are in as long as that skill is competitive enough.

What I will like to see a lot more of is work-from-home settings for permanent roles. Just as was realized during the 2020 lockdown, productivity does not drop when workers do their jobs remotely. Many jobs are digital and can be done from the comfort of the home allowing the gig economy to thrive even more

Freelancing jobs are preferred by many because of the freedom that comes with it and the ability to combine it with other jobs which provides you multiple streams of income in the process. As inflation gains momentum by the day  in almost all the parts of the world, and job scarcity remains an issue, an economy that is more mobile and that gives workers the leverage to do up to three or two jobs mostly part-time would help them meet up with the high cost of living.

Wouldn't it be better that you only have to go to your office when you have a task to do and not the regular 9AM - 6PM routine even when you have nothing to do at office denying you the extra time to carry out your side hustle that can add up to the small salary most workers are being paid?

If our schools can work with this and make it less engaging for students to spend all thier times in classes but to rather identify areas they aren't good at and work on those area while the rest of the time is devoted into getting all soaked into learning a single skill or creating something for themselves, wouldn't it be better? With most institutions operating an educational system that has curriculum that's mostly outdated with course that are less relevant and yet taking up times that student can use in learning skills and adding values to themselves, it obviously calls for the need to look for better economic framework that will serve us better.

Coming from a region where the cost of living has skyrocked too high and having had experience that most workers are mere time consumers and not productive with those time and you're someone that's in that kind of setting but have the intention of doing more with your spare time, operating a gig economy that's same as a flexible economy could be the surest option.