When is a job not a job? When is it a gig? When will all jobs be gigs?

The gig economy spreads internationally like butter on toast. Ask Foodora, Roadie, Grubhub, Saucey or Favor, all delivery services with cutesy names and very few employees. Ask Deliveroo, invented in 2013 in London by an American investment banker and now operating in 140 cities in 12 countries.

Will Shu wanted food delivered when he worked late nights at Morgan Stanley, but London couldn’t live up to New York standards. Deliveroo! Shu raised nearly US$500 million from investors, as reported by The Guardian, a newspaper that regularly and politely asks readers for donations lest it have to build a paywall that shuts out poor readers, such as Deliveroo “riders.”

People who worship the god of cheap will not buy journalism or cook food or go to a restaurant. They value speed above all. The gig economy chips away at other people’s benefits, pay, delivery charges. It works beautifully up to a point, when companies cut costs so hard that they find themselves sanding through wood.

In small ways, jobs may increasingly resemble those of Deliveroo “independent suppliers.” The Guardian published a list on Wednesday of Deliveroo managers’ vocabulary dos and don’ts. The intent is to keep cyclists and drivers as “self-employed contractors,” not employees, so it can pay a pittance.

According to Deliveroo, a courier is not a courier, but an “independent supplier.” He is not an “employee, worker, staff member or team member,” because he was not hired; he was onboarded at a “supply centre.” He works “with” Deliveroo, not for Deliveroo, as part of the “Roo community.”

He doesn’t start a shift; he logs in. He doesn’t earn wages, salary or pay; he operates on a “fee-per-delivery payment system” that “allows [him] to earn more at busy times.”

Deliveroo riders are fighting back, and may win because even Theresa May’s Conservative government sees it’s losing revenue here. Gig workers don’t earn much, don’t pay much tax and can buy very little. The government wants the self-employed to pay in, so that one day they’ll have pensions based on their employment history, which Deliveroo calls non-existent.

If a gig walks like duck and quacks like a duck, it’s doing a duck’s job.

But that will wreck Deliveroo because customers won’t pay more for food delivery.

Let’s extrapolate. A small fascinating story in the The Globe and Mail on Thursday reported that TD Bank was “requesting ad agencies to help TD avoid taxes on their fees” if they were bidding for the bank’s business. They were to redefine services in a way that would exempt the services from tax. After agencies contacted their industry association, TD backed off, saying the suggestion had been “poorly worded.”

Indeed, it’s all in the wording.

What if ad agencies were suddenly a guy on a bike and the bank was Deliveroo?

At some point TD Bank may be on the bike and who knows who their Deliveroo will be.

Morgan Stanley?

It’s a brilliant system, if a miserable one, but at what point is government so diminished that the system crashes?

We might become more like booming China, with a vast layer of poors to do the dirty gigs. I recall Peter Hessler’s story, in his 2011 book Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip, of a hastily constructed factory in an isolated city far south of Shanghai.

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It made items that go unnoticed: bra components. Bra rings hold cups to vertical straps. Most bras have four steel rings and two underwires.

In Boss Wang’s pop-up factory, the favoured hires were young uneducated country girls without job experience.

“Girls have more patience” (and are paid less), Wang told Hessler. “Men are more trouble; they start fights or cause some other problem . . . . I want someone who can eat bitterness.”

Hessler met Tao Yufeng, 15, who made underwires, a step up from rings, earning 1/20th of a U.S. penny for each set. She was so fast, she made 80 cents an hour, double the minimum wage, doing Deliveroo-style piecework.

But weirdly, she was better off than a London Deliveroo rider. There was a minimum wage, her work was highly valued and she and Wang didn’t skate around words.

Tao Yufeng was happily eating bitterness because it was better than starving in her village. She would eventually wreck her eyesight, but she was temporarily prospering.

When we buy Chinese-made goods and order food by courier because it’s cheap, we’re behaving like little Deliveroos.

But one day we — and our children — might have to become Tao Yufengs on a bike.

So might the company we work for. Canadians worship the god of cheap, always have, and this is where we landed. Cheap clothing, fast food, free journalism, it all leads to a Deliveroo economy.

We may like it, we may not. But we chose this.

hmallick@thestar.ca