Perpetuating Precarity Via Platforms

Gig work has long been a factor in the labor economy, but in the last decade, the advent of platform-based gig work has boosted its dominance and for reasons that I will outline in this paper, accelerated precarity. First, I will discuss the conditions that allow for the gig economy to exist and expand, including technological, social, and political economic factors. These factors can combine to create or deepen precarity for gig workers, as I will examine. Finally, I will present the possibility of full employment as a foil to this precarity to determine whether the gig economy could, in …

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Food Justice

Too often it seems like a conversation around food security veers away from the reality of a conversation about food justice. The episode of this series that we watched was such a thoughtful examination of the origins of one battle in the fight for food justice and really examined what is and probably should not be a radical concept: that food should not be a privilege. This was the first statement made by panelist Ericka Huggins in this video, and a thread throughout the conversation. As a member of the Black Panther party, Huggins participated in the Free Breakfast program …

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Economic Justice

The articles we read this week outline the ways in which economic justice, or rather economic injustice, can play out in a person’s life, especially in the city. In the article by Formosa, Weber and Atkins titled “Gentrification and urban children’s well-being: Tipping the scales from problems to promise”, the authors go into great detail about the process by which the economic impact of gentrification has rippling effects for children growing up in an urban environment. According to the authors, gentrification has enormous social implications that translate to economic impacts. For example, the article discusses theories of “social capital”(400) that …

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Does the Right to the City Still Apply?

David Harvey’s article about a “right to the city” is an exploration of urban environments as a sort of ecosystem that seeks to regulate itself. The article describes issues of inequality that urbanization seeks to rectify in a way and primarily presents the idea that “urbanization is central to the survival of capitalism”. There is tension, in this description, between wants and needs in the urban space and the availability of those wanted or needed things. For example, the tension between unemployment and available employment. Harvey describes these as the coercive laws of competition. He also examines the parallels in …

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The Idea of Justice

In this week’s reading, the idea of justice itself is at the fore. In an excerpt from a chapter of Amartya Sen’s book, we read about two separate lines of reasoning for trying to understand the meaning of justice. One such line of reasoning is called “transcendental institutionalism”. This idea concentrates on getting the institutions of our society to be “right” in terms of justice and focuses less on the actual societal outcomes of participating within those institutions. The second line of reasoning that Sen discusses to set up his example is a “realization-focused comparison”. This concept takes a more …

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