The Gig Economy: An Annotated Bibliography

Companies like Uber, Lyft, Postmates, Airbnb, and others have become established within society, to the point that Uber has become a regularly used verb. While the consumer benefits of these companies has been immediate, the legal implications remain far murkier. This emerging market has demonstrated that the twentieth century laws are unable to cope with these twenty-first century businesses in regard to employee rights, employer responsibilities, consumer protections, and federal and state regulations. This bibliography presents the primary and secondary sources which are essential to understanding what has been termed the “gig economy” so that readers have a background of the legal standards currently applied, as well as the legal scholars seeking to create clarity within the existing legal framework. In compiling this bibliography, law review/journal articles were selected from 2010 onward, though most of the literature and all of the articles within this bibliography come from 2015 onward, representing the need for legal clarity after the Northern District of California cases discussed below. Every effort has been made to include all articles from the top 50 law journals as defined by the Washington and Lee Journal rankings, however articles outside of these journals have been included when particularly relevant. The articles represented here present an overview of the scholarly discussion surrounding the gig economy, and represents myriad solutions to many problems, without a clear consensus on which are the most pressing. The bibliography seeks to present the reader with articles addressing these solutions and problems in a general way, to give the reader a greater understanding of the controversies and ambiguity present in discussions of the gig economy