Which leads us to the hospitality workers, the flipside of creative labor. These are the cleaners, cooks, and chauffeurs that some would see as the glorious vanguard of American entrepreneurialism. They are employed thanks to young, smartphone-clutching businessmen who have built a distributed-services sector that answers the genuine need for work at a time when jobs are on the decline.

This is where the distinction between work and a job really matters: In the wake of the financial crisis, the former is being persistently separated from the benefits that once came with the latter. On one hand, a service such as Uber liberates its workers from any single employer. But that liberation at the same time frees up Uber from the traditional responsibilities of being an employer. It is ingenious to make employment less predictable, and thus less costly, in the name of independence and choice.

Often, the relationship between knowledge workers and the service industry that has swelled to accommodate them is mediated by the tapping of a smartphone screen. However, the two worlds clashed recently when WeWork effectively laid off most of its office cleaners—subcontractors, of course—after they tried to unionize and seek higher wages. Forced to acknowledge the needs of service workers, they demurred, instead asserting their right to outsource crucial aspects of their business. Even the most established and powerful enterprises around the world rely on contingent labor today, not just startups.

When non-standard employment is becoming standard, our language for labor rights has to change—“on-demand economy” and “gig economy” are a start, but still insufficient. They do not fully capture the divides that define the new modes of labor: between those who design an app and those who physically provide the service it sells; between those who assemble devices and those who profit from their use; between those who offer the infrastructure for labor but no stability or benefits to accompany it.

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