Organizational Communication in the News
Case Studies of Organizations and Organizational Communication in the Media
The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death
Source: New Yorker
It does require a fairly dystopian strain of doublethink for a company to celebrate how hard and how constantly its employees must work to make a living, given that these companies are themselves setting the terms. And yet this type of faux-inspirational tale has been appearing more lately, both in corporate advertising and in the news… At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear.
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Organizational Communication in the News by Rahul Mitra is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
