Langues appliquées - Anglais : Economie, gestion, droit, AES - 4e - 60

economics

Instructions For Study
1. Turn to the definitions following the text Employment in the Sharing Economy. They refer
to the specialist terms printed in bold type in the list of Useful words and concepts.
2. Use an English language dictionary to find the meanings (in context) of the other words in
the list.
3. Do the exercises to improve your language skills.

Employment in the Sharing Economy
As we move into an economy where work is decomposed into tasks done around the world,
performed in people's spare time or through on-demand platforms, and services are provided by
freelancers working through multiple platforms or offered by generalists who may be specialists in
something else, our systems to keep track of how much employment there is in the economy start to
get seriously challenged. For most of the second half of the 20th century, most Americans worked a
single profession at a time, as a full-time job. If they lost that job, they were out of work until they found
another full-time job. In today's economy, being employed or unemployed is becoming increasingly
difficult to measure as microentrepreneurship, multiple gigs, freelance work, and fluid self-employment
muddle traditional definitions and measures.
As a growing number of individuals no longer conform to the 20th century ideal of "having a job"
and as more employees become microentrepreneurs in their spare time, the line between losing and
gaining "jobs" becomes increasingly difficult to measure.
How then do we measure employment in the sharing economy?
A natural question in the United States is whether the unemployment numbers being collected by
the Labor Department are sophisticated enough to capture these changes. Consider someone who used
to work a full-time job but is now unemployed and drives an Uber, or provides services on TaskRabbit,
or sells handcrafted goods on Etsy. If that person reports this new work for profit in a response on a
BLS survey, they would be continued to be counted as employed. However, the numbers reported by
the BLS don't capture the additional "employment" or "work" generated by underemployed people
who were already working at least one hour a week (like a software contractor who now only does Lyft
on the side). Additionally, the BLS surveys don't fully capture people who contribute to the sharing
economy while holding regular full-time jobs (an investment banker who rents out her apartment
periodically on Airbnb).
Clearly, we need to rethink the way we add up all the work that is being done in the economy. Just
as the impacts of the sharing economy have proven difficult to fully capture using existing economic
measures, such as the GDP, creation of work in the sharing economy cannot be easily understood
using established employment measures. We also need to develop metrics that take into account job
quality, income stability, and work-life balance. A full-time job that requires a long and expensive
daily commute may in fact be less desirable than two part-time jobs carried out from home. Whatever
new metrics are developed, one thing is clear - just as our economic measures need to take other
factors into account (work-life balance, sustainability, equality), so do our employment measures.
Labor Disputes
The 160,000 drivers who filed a class action against Uber maintain that the platform wants the cost
advantages of working with contractors while simultaneously maintaining the control of working with
employees. According to Shannon Liss-Riordan, a labor lawyer, the performance of Uber drivers is

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