THE GIG ECONOMY FUTURE IS DOOR TO DOOR SALES ONLINE

As a social historian of cleaning, labour, home economy, material culture, I find predictions of the future of work of great interest. The earliest push to create a postmodern culture of self employed public workers, that is the nineties push to privatize government, pushed by liberals like Al Gore an Jean Chretien, and right wingers like Ralph Klein and Murray Rothbard at two extremes.

In 1999 the American right wing libertarian mag Reason published one of those end of the decade, end of the century, end of the millenia speculative issues of what would America of the free market look like in he 21st Century, our century.

It would be full of entrepreneurs peddling goods to each other, the ultimate service economy. While our products of consumption would be outsourced, contracted out, privatized, globalized produced in developing countries introducing taylorist mass production to create a world proletariat in the poor world to service the rich world while we serviced each other.

We in the cleaning industry know this Gig Economy because we have always had private janitor companies vs. in house cleaners such as those that work in Oxford Dev. buildings, govt buildings, hospitals, schools, institutional cleaners in other word unionized, public sector workers.

There is an irony in all this that we as canaries in the social labour coal mine saw and experienced all the worst of this neoliberal ideology throughout the eighties, nineties and until today. When services are cut to the bone it is cleaning services. If a service is to be contracted out, outsourced or privatized its easy to do because there are lots of janitor companies we can tell by the regularity of the bankruptcies that occur in our industry.

So what is this entrepreneurial (self employed/contractor not protected by labour law because taxi drivers and door to door salesmen are deemed that historically) service economy, the so called GiG Economy, really the future or just the middle class ideal

that is over 100 years old.

This is the future of the GiG Economy and us in it: we sell to each other what we buy from abroad, we service each other as door to door sales people online in the internet world

but this really is not new it is the American Ideal of 1906 when the Fuller Brush company began.

It was everything about the future of capitalism it was branding, so famous that it made the career of Red Skelton when he made the movie Fuller Brush Man in 1948. It was about the ideal of Norman Vincent Peale and his protestant exhortation to everyman to be a salesman, not a blue collar worker, but a consumer product promoter, in other words

because domestic life was centered around the nuclear family of those workers, the Fuller Brush man came to your door just like Amazon today, with all the cleaning products the

housewife, aka the household engineer, would need to fight disease. And that was how it was originally sold as a public health aids. He had his list of products, you checked off what you needed and a week later he delivered it. Multi Level marketing begins with Fuller Co. and then Watkins, and some others not as successful or well known. The companies continue until the Seventies when the expansion of large scale box stores and malls created community spaces where one could buy all ones need, and put them in the car. Door

Door culture was killed by the car and the mall. But they adapted, but without going bankrupt.

The model however remains functioning today whether it is Uber fighting laws recognizing drivers as workers entitled to those minimal protections not given the white collar self employed contractor, or Google and Amazon fighting unionization of their workers. The state recognized the Fuller Brush man in law stating that door to door salesmen were Norman Vincent Peale's self made men and not regulated by employment law. This is the case for all contract workers in the GiG Economy.

HERE IS A FORMER FULLER BRUSH MAN,

NORMAN VINCENT PEALE'S PROTESTANT

SELF MADE MAN.