About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

103 Soc. F. e1 (2024-2025)
Review of "Side Hustle Safety Net"

handle is hein.journals/josf103 and id is 417 raw text is: Social Forces, 2024, 103, e1-e2 https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaeO4l Advance access publication date 31 March 2024 Book Review Review of Side Hustle Safety Net By Alexandrea J. Ravenelle University of California Press; 2023, 344 pages. Prices (Cloth/Paper): $95.00/$29.95. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520387300/side-hustle-safety-net. Reviewer: Cansoy Mehmet, Fairfield University hat happens to the most precarious workers when a global pandemic upends the whole NA economy? Alexandrea J. Ravenelle's Side Hustle Safety Net, building on two phases of surveys and interviews with almost 200 subjects, uncovers the experiences of New York City residents who worked on gig work platforms, pursued other freelance work, or were low- wage employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ravenelle argues that although these workers faced a large spectrum of outcomes based on their social position (health, immigration status, etc.), whether they could successfully attain the officially unemployed status, which gave them access to the expanded unemployment benefits, was a key determinant of their experiences. An important subset of those who could attain this status were able to use their resources to pursue new careers, more education, and in general more stable and better paid employment. While those that couldn't found themselves facing more precarity, less stability and worse outcomes. Side Hustle Safety Net offers sorely needed insight into trends that have been plaguing the lower end of the American labor market for decades. The increasing misclassification of workers as 1099 independent contractors, the underfunding of the unemployment system and its inability to react to labor market changes, the growth of workers working multiple jobs (what Ravenelle calls polyemployment), and the resulting responsibilization of workers all come into stark contrast against the vivid details of pandemic life. Across two phases of surveys and interviews, the subjects offer up their experiences navigating the pandemic shutdowns, the real and perceived risks of leaving their homes, the chaos of rapidly changing policies, and how they had to navigate all of these experiences through their relationships with work. Ravenelle focuses the main thrust of her argument in Side Hustle Safety Net on uncovering and explaining the differences between low-wage or otherwise precarious workers who were able to secure unemployment benefits and those that were not (or chose not to). We see a stark difference between these two groups in multiple interviewees stories, interspersed with discussions of the history of unemployment benefits in the US, the details of public assistance programs during the pandemic, academic debates, and history of Universal Basic Income (UBI) schemes, and the short-term economic impacts of the pandemic unemployment policies that all offer up important context. For those who found themselves outside of the safety net, the pandemic resulted in an intensification of the preexisting trends of precarity. While the dramatic stories of delivering marijuana, selling drug-free urine, or having to engage in sex-work stand out for the reader, the much more common experience was a persistent instability, trying to secure jobs (or gigs), learning how to weed out scams, and desperately hanging on to basic necessities. Received: February 6, 2024. Accepted: February 13, 2024 © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most