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The Covid-19 pandemic has greatly impacted the labor market and given rise to the Great Resignation. Drawing on a mixed methods panel study of 199 precarious and gig-based workers, we analyze how a changing conception of free time during the Covid-19 pandemic led low-wage service workers to seek more fulfilling careers. Whereas most workers initially perceived free time in terms of opportunity costs, they later reconceived this time as enabling an investment in personal growth, moving from "spending time" making money to "investing time" in themselves. This shift in temporal experience is expressed through the adoption of a "work passion" logic and "pandemic epiphanies" that motivated respondents to seek self-affirming and potentially more lucrative work opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has been unprecedented in many ways, but perhaps no more so than in the sudden expansion of--and increase in--unemployment assistance benefits. We ask how precarious workers, many of whom were "hustling" for money or engaged in creative fields, feel about making more on unemployment. How are they using the funds? We draw on remote interviews and online surveys with 199 gig and precarious workers in New York City during the first wave of the pandemic. We find that workers are ambivalent about unemployment assistance and concerned that a financial influx today portends a shortage tomorrow. This "specter of the unknown" affected workers' use of their benefits. As a result, even though the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act was intended to mitigate the social and economic impact of the pandemic, these programs--despite being helpful--may have also contributed to precarious workers becoming even more certain of their insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Good jobs that allow remote work have enabled white-collar professionals to stay home during COVID-19, but for precarious workers, online advertisements for work-from-home employment are often scams. In this article, based on in-depth interviews conducted between April and July 2020 with nearly 200 precarious workers, we find that precarious workers regularly encountered fraudulent job advertisements via digital media. Drawing on Swidler's concepts of the cultural tool kit and cultural logic, we find that in this time of uncertainty, workers defaulted to the focus on personal responsibility that is inherent in insecurity culture. Following the cultural logic of personal responsibility, job seekers did not place blame on job search websites for allowing the scams to be posted, but normalized the situation, deploying a scam detection repertoire in response. In addition, the discovery that advertised "good jobs" are often scams affecting workers' desire to continue job hunting and perceptions of potential future success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While social distancing measures are essential in limiting the impact of a pandemic, such measures are often less feasible for low-income groups such as precarious workers who continue to travel on public transit and are less able to practice social distancing measures. In this paper, based on in-depth remote interviews conducted from April 2020 through June 2020, with more than 130 gig and precarious workers in New York City, we find that precarious workers experience three main hurdles in regard to accessing unemployment assistance that can be broadly categorized as knowledge, sociological, and temporal/financial barriers. Drawing on worker interview responses, we have named these responses: (1) Didn't Know, (2) Didn't Want, and (3) Can't Wait. These challenges have led workers to turn to gig and precarious work, further highlighting the inequities of the pandemic. As a result, for some workers, so-called "side hustles" have become their primary social safety net. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]