You can’t avoid peer-to-peer marketplaces. For transportation and housing, look no further than Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. Skillshare and TaskRabbit are tackling education and task completion. Etsy and Shapeways have created handmade and fabrication marketplaces. They all facilitate integration into the economy without the need to secure employment from a large company.

Instead, the growing peer economy enables people to monetize skills and assets they already have. Vendors and providers on these platforms choose when to work, what to do and where to do it, sidestepping traditional constraints of geography and scheduling. Investors, advocacy groups and companies tout its apparent advantages, including a greater sense of solidarity through peer-to-peer commerce and reduction in carbon footprint through access to products and services instead of ownership.

Dandy! Especially in light of our anemic economic recovery. So why is the peer economy causing such a stir? Critics ask whether micropreneurs get back enough economic security in exchange for their labor. These suppliers are hamsters in a wheel, they assert; if pay comes gig by gig, how can peer economy suppliers ever do more than just keep up?

Embedded in this concern are assumptions as to what constitutes a job: that it be full-time, offer benefits, and provide a livable income. These parameters make up a framework, one that is baked into our society. But this framework—which dominated 20th century work—has been on the decline since the late 1970s. IRS clarifications changed how companies approached benefits such as paid leave and retirement plans, transferring more risk to employees. And job losses have come in two forms: globalization that led to offshoring and technological displacement. Unemployment may have crested in 2008, but its roots are in the 1980s.

Though it may seem “timeless”, the 20th century framework for work is not the first such formulation and it will not be the last. There were other mainstream understandings before it—factory work, piece-meal work, craftsmanship and apprenticeship—and undergirding them were a mix of cultural and political factors. Regulations (or lack thereof) shaped industry structures, and existential quandaries about work played out in arts and media (think Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, where the Little Tramp grapples with the dehumanization of mass production technology). And as the normative gender throughout history, these mainstream understandings of what work was followed men’s lives and patterns.

Today, safety nets are thin for everybody. People have little faith that corporate America cares about their needs or that government can address them before it is too late. Against this backdrop, the peer economy is well positioned to rival our popular understanding of work. The peer economy won’t take over where the framework of full-time employment once sat, but it does change our understanding of what “full work” could mean.

In fact, the peer economy is less new than it often appears. People have always made their own clothes, grown and preserved their own food, shared their houses and lent out their tools. At different points in different places, this was (and is) called “survival.” Trading is common, and helping out kin is natural. Peer economy platforms didn’t unearth a new type of commerce. These economic platforms further enable socio-economic activities that were always moving toward a more visible and centralized space—activities that have trickled up and are now given the market a face.

The real question is what it means and takes to achieve “full work,” the sort of work that enables one to exercise a greater range of independence. Just as many of the activities that make up the peer economy are not new, neither is this question.

Recently, nannies, cleaners, elder companions, members of a vulnerable work population known as domestic workers, testified at the Massachusetts state house to ask for a domestic workers’ bill of rights. As excluded laborers, domestic workers are the analog to peer economy workers in vulnerability: They are fragmented, with shifting workplaces and employers. They are not guaranteed minimum safety conditions in the workplace (38% of domestic workers suffered from work-related wrist, shoulder, elbow or hip pain in the past 12 months.). They aren’t protected from discrimination and cannot bargain collectively. Sound familiar?

American domestic work has a 200-year history and has always drawn its forces from the margins of society: women, minorities, immigrants, and now undocumented workers. This workforce has been denied every improvement to labor rights legislation, beginning with the 1934 Fair Labor Standards Act. There has been a string of failed organizing attempts throughout the 20th century, and domestic workers have remained invisible in society. In the 1990s, things began to change. Domestic workers came together under the lead of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. With new organizing tactics, they have collectively won domestic workers bills of rights in New York, California, Hawaii.

Peer economy providers are also vulnerable but with a crucial factor that makes all the difference: They are a visible workforce, able to make these collective interests heard.

The economy of the future will not be the economy as it is now. The challenge before us is to reimagine what full work means, not based simply on how we’re used to conceiving of it, but based on a consideration of what we deem most valuable (independence, security, connectedness, etc.). Thanks to similar movements—from unions to vulnerable workers to urban and rural cooperatives—the threads for that conversation are already there. Let’s make something of it.