Book Review: Side Hustle Safety Net

Side Hustle Safety Net: How Vulnerable Workers Survive Precarious Times, by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle (2023). Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Alexandrea Ravenelle’s Side Hustle Safety Net opens with the story of Abdul, a twenty-seven-year-old man juggling three jobs until COVID-19 drastically shifted his employment status. However, Abdul could not access state unemployment benefits and, as a result, found himself within the category that Ravenelle coins “the forgotten jobless” – those who were unable to access unemployment assistance during the pandemic (2). Through excerpts from interviews and vignettes, the book explores what happens to precarious workers such as Abdul during times of economic collapse and recovery. Specifically, Ravenelle explores workers’ negotiation of “unemployed” status by examining the experiences of gig workers and laid-off restaurant staff, creatives, and minimum-wage employees. The author examines this topic via several concepts related to work, such as “the forgotten jobless” and “polyemployment,” in order to illuminate the unique experiences of precarious workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Chapter Two, “The Side Hustle Safety Net,” Ravenelle presents a historically informed account of unemployment insurance by tracing its emergence to the Great Depression. Alongside a historical contextualization of unemployment programs, the author explores the contemporary struggles that workers face in accessing this safety-net program and how many have turned to what Ravenelle coins a “side hustle safety net,” or a piecing together of various gig jobs to ensure a semblance of security in the face of unreliable or inaccessible state unemployment support.

Chapter Three, “Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, Scam Jobs,” delves into the sociocultural context and pressures that accompany the official “unemployed” status, such as the continuous need to search for jobs. As the COVID-19 crisis deepened, workers’ priorities seemed to change in the face of public-health concerns and shifting workplace arrangements, as remote work became highly sought after. The pursuit of safer and more advantageous forms of work consequently led to the rise in what the author calls “scam jobs.” As such, Ravenelle provides detailed examples of this disturbing phenomenon, including the account of a dance instructor who was nearly scammed while pursuing what seemed to be a promising remote opportunity.

In Chapter Four, “Making More and Moving On Up,” Ravenelle uses pandemic-era unemployment assistance as a means to examine the implications of Universal Basic Income (UBI). As some unemployed workers began earning more via assistance than they were previously paid through their jobs, the question of how precarious workers experienced this UBI-like cash aid became a pressing topic. She connects her qualitative accounts from precarious workers with research on UBI and the work opportunities that emerged via cash aid during the COVID-19 crisis. As she found, pandemic-era cash aid combined with temporal flexibility led to many workers gaining training and certifications in new fields and for some, the financial cushion to start long-awaited businesses. 

Chapter Five explores the ways that workers utilize “Strategies of Survival” to cope with the often-uncertain terrain and temporality of “unemployed” status and its associated benefits. This chapter illustrates some side hustles that workers pursue to mitigate the uncertainty of the safety net, such as transporting drugs by bicycle or providing drug-free urine for customers. Ravenelle provides several examples of this “polyemployment” and discusses how its associated income volatility impacts the lives of workers and their families. In some cases, polyemployment seems to disadvantage those workers who utilize benefits due to the income-based bureaucratic calculus used to determine unemployment assistance.

In Chapter Six, “Stuck in Place,” Ravenelle turns her focus to workers who have imagined notions of success yet believe that their career paths have stagnated. By concentrating on workers with specific statuses – such as the immunocompromised, immigrants, or creatives – the author correlates her research with relevant sociological studies, emphasizing the relationship between employment, economic recessions, and crises as experienced by young university graduates or early-career workers.

In contrast to Chapter Six, the book’s seventh chapter, “It’s a Beautiful Life,” highlights the stories of unemployed workers who found opportunity and success during COVID-19 by landing full-time employment or embracing entrepreneurship. In one example, Ravenelle recounts the unconventional story of Katelynn, who shifted from bartending to work as a dental assistant – a change that brought satisfaction, stability, and a newfound quality of life to her daily routine. As Ravenelle explains, “given the time and financial security to rethink their careers, some workers experienced ‘pandemic epiphanies’ that led them to start businesses and change careers, opportunities that transformed their lives and led some to call the pandemic ‘the best year of my life’” (223).  

Ravenelle’s conclusion, “Learning from COVID-19,” focuses on bridging the qualitative findings of her research with concrete policy recommendations and applications. The chapter begins with the recommendation that most workers should be classified as W-2 employees and concomitantly given the benefits and protections associated with this status. Ravenelle argues that, if “the work can’t be done in one’s pajamas,” then workers ought to be classified as employees rather than “independent contractors.” In response to polyemployment, the author’s second policy recommendation urges that state unemployment systems recognize and account for this growing trend and that they become better able to handle sudden spikes in claims. Specifically, Ravenelle suggests that workers should not be penalized for working multiple jobs and instead be able to retain a percentage of their lost income. The author’s final policy recommendation addresses one of her earlier observations: that many workers did not apply for unemployment assistance during the pandemic due to a lack of bureaucratic knowledge, an assumption of their ineligibility, or the stigma associated with being “officially unemployed.” In response, Ravenelle advocates for publicizing the importance and availability of unemployment assistance, as well as workers’ automatic eligibility for it.

Ravenelle skillfully weaves moments of candid conversation with broader sociological commentary on the U.S. unemployment system. In doing so, readers are able to learn from pandemic-era accounts of various forms of precarious work (such as bartending, Uber, DoorDash, and recreational-drug delivery), which they can then contextualize within the broader framework of unemployment as an official status and state system. Perhaps most importantly, Ravenelle urges us to recognize the pandemic’s work-based challenges as part of a growing social and economic pattern, where gig-based and precarious workers serve as “canaries in the coalmine” (21). As the author explains towards the end of the book, “the difficulties we’ve faced during the pandemic are part of larger social and economic trends: the loss of service jobs due to automation, the rise of just-in-time scheduling, the continued under-employment of college graduates, the growth of the risk society and the increased outsourcing of risk to workers, a defunding of social services, a slashing of the social safety net, and the gigification of work. These times may be unprecedented, but the repercussions of those trends could have been easily predicted” (250).

Side Hustle Safety Net offers a unique lens with which to view the experiences of precarious workers during the economic ups and downs of the COVID-19 pandemic. In some places in the book, academic readers may hope for more engagement with social-scientific concepts and relevant scholarship, although Ravenelle’s historical and scholarly contextualization provides ample framing to illuminate her study’s findings. By delving into the topic of precarious labor, Ravenelle’s book poses insightful questions relevant to similar studies by Milkman (2020) and Standing (2011), an intervention that scholars of the anthropology of work and adjacent subfields will no doubt find useful. Finally, the author’s concept of the “side hustle safety net” is a timely and important one that illuminates the strategizing that precarious workers must undertake in the face of pervasive societal and individualized risks. 

References

Milkman, Ruth. 2020. Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat. Cambridge: Polity.

Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: A Dangerous New Class. London: Bloomsbury Press.

Author Biography

Harleen Kaur Bal is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Her scholarly and film projects focus on the anthropology of work within the context of U.S. capitalism, food systems, and the experiences of diasporic and immigrant workers. Work-life concerns, notions of wellbeing, and analyses of contemporary capitalism all feature in her research.