SIDE HUSTLE SAFETY NET

A vivid, disheartening portrait of unemployment during the pandemic.

Ravenelle, a professor of sociology and author of Hustle and Gig, begins by looking at two key categories: the “Officially Unemployed” and the “Forgotten Jobless.” This key distinction determined whether someone who found themselves out of work during the pandemic could apply for unemployment insurance or not. One chapter includes a brief history of unemployment insurance in America and the ways it has been weakened by “decades of neoliberal, antiwelfare ideology.” In addition to “causing more quarantining than polio, killing more Americans than HIV/AIDS, and resulting in more sudden unemployment than the Great Depression,” writes the author, the pandemic "divided people into essential and nonessential, demanding or on-demand, vaccinated or unvaccinated." In an eye-opening text based on an in-depth study with more than 200 workers, Ravenelle examines exactly how people made it through 2020 and 2021 and, specifically, “what happens to the most precarious workers— the gig workers and laid-off restaurant staff, the early-career creatives, and the minimum-wage employees—when the economy collapses, and how they fare in the pursuit of an economic recovery." Many ended up doing “side hustles” such as food delivery, dog walking, driving for a car service, or pickups for shopping apps. Ravenelle analyzes why those who didn’t apply for unemployment chose not to, for reasons ranging from not knowing they were eligible, to believing it was wrong to take money for not working. The author sympathetically portrays people who “faced weeks and months of living on the edge," clearly believing that America could do better by its unemployed. She closes by proposing a number of fixes to ensure how our outdated economic and employment systems could be made more efficient and effective for the overextended workers of today and tomorrow.

A startling examination of the patchy response to pandemic-era unemployment.