Contingent Labor
Contingent labor names the institutional arrangement under which work that was once performed by permanent employees is instead performed by short-term, freelance, adjunct, or gig workers who lack the security, benefits, and institutional standing of their predecessors. In the academy, the concept refers specifically to the adjunctification of faculty labor — the conversion of tenure-track positions into renewable contracts, piece-rate teaching assignments, and semester-to-semester appointments. Berg and Seeber's framework treats contingent labor not as incidental to the corporatized university but as constitutive of it: the extraction of professional judgment while evading the reciprocal obligations of professional community. In the AI age, the same logic operates at scale across knowledge work, with platform-mediated freelance labor playing the role in creative and technical industries that adjunctification played in the academy.
In the AI Story
The numbers in North American higher education tell the story. In 1970, approximately 78% of faculty held tenure-track positions. By 2020, that figure was approximately 27%. The majority of undergraduate teaching is now performed by contingent faculty earning wages that, when calculated by the hour worked, often fall below the legal minimum for unskilled labor. These faculty do the intellectual work the university requires — teaching, grading, often substantial unpaid service — without the protections that historically accompanied such work.
The parallel in creative and technical industries is the platform freelancer. The graphic designer, the writer, the software developer whose work is mediated through Upwork, Fiverr, Toptal, or similar platforms occupies a structurally analogous position: performing skilled professional work on terms that would once have required permanent employment, without the reciprocal obligations of employment. The platform extracts the value of professional judgment while providing none of the institutional support that produces and sustains such judgment.
The AI transition makes this arrangement more severe. When platforms deploy AI to evaluate freelance output, set per-task rates, and route work across global labor markets, the contingent worker is pressed into competition with AI-augmented competitors whose productivity sets the baseline. The worker who wants to maintain deliberate, careful, developmental engagement with her craft is structurally disadvantaged against the worker who pairs AI acceleration with piecework logic.
The framework Berg and Seeber provide illuminates both cases. Contingent labor is not merely an economic arrangement but an institutional form — one that extracts professional work while refusing the conditions under which professionalism develops. The AI transition, deployed under contingent labor conditions, becomes a mechanism for extracting more work under worse conditions. Deployed under different institutional arrangements, it could become something else. The difference is not in the tool but in the structure within which the tool operates.
Origin
The scholarship on adjunctification developed through the 1990s and 2000s, notably in Cary Nelson's work, Marc Bousquet's How the University Works (2008), and the Coalition on the Academic Workforce's survey reports. The extension to platform labor in creative industries was developed most prominently by Trebor Scholz and Sarah T. Roberts.
Key Ideas
Structural, Not Incidental. Contingent labor is not a temporary feature of the corporatized university or the platform economy — it is constitutive of how these institutions produce their outputs.
Extraction Without Reciprocity. The arrangement extracts professional work while evading the reciprocal obligations — stable employment, professional development, institutional citizenship — that professional work historically required.
The Invisibility Function. Contingent workers are often institutionally invisible — their labor appears in the outputs (the taught class, the completed project) but not in the public presentation of the institution.
AI as Intensification. AI deployment under contingent labor conditions intensifies extraction rather than improving working conditions — the productivity gains flow to the platform, not to the worker.
Political Alternative. The response to contingent labor is not technological but institutional — labor organization, regulatory intervention, the construction of alternative arrangements that make professional work sustainable again.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Marc Bousquet, How the University Works (NYU Press, 2008)
- Cary Nelson, No University Is an Island (NYU Press, 2010)
- Trebor Scholz, Uberworked and Underpaid (Polity, 2017)
- Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen (Yale University Press, 2019)
- Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI (Yale University Press, 2021)