In the name of job flexibility, ‘Uberisation’ is spreading its tentacles across society

theguardian.com:

In the late 18th century, as the impact of the Industrial Revolution bit into the lives of the nascent working class, the high cost of fuel, one study notes, “forced inhabitants of many southern regions to abandon home cooking”. Fuel costs were much greater in the south than in the north. As a result, Frederic Morton Eden observed in The State of the Poor (1797), “the culinary preparations of the Northern peasant are so much diversified, and his table so often supplied with hot dishes”, whereas in the south, working-class families could not afford to boil or bake potatoes, so were forced to buy cheap white bread and eat dinner cold.

Because it was more expensive to cook at home than to buy shop-made bread, there were more bakeries per head of population in poor areas such as Hampshire than in richer regions such as Yorkshire. More than 200 years on and we’re back in a Britain in which many poor families are being “forced to abandon home cooking” because of the high cost of fuel. Not only has there been an explosion in the use of food banks, but many food bank users “are declining products such as potatoes and other root veg because they can’t afford to boil them”.

Much of the discussion of the cost of living crisis has rightly been about the impact of soaring prices on the lives ofmillions driven to desperation. It is not just inflated prices for basic goods that have created such desperation. It is also the precariousness of income and, in particular, the huge growth in recent years of poorly paid, insecure jobs.

A study by Dalia Gebrial and Paddy Bettington, of the thinktanks Autonomy and the Centre for Labour and Social Studies, tracks what it calls the “Uberisation” of the labour market. “Insecurity,” it observes, has