Thinking about the nature of gig work without beginning with the birth of the gig worker overlooks the moment of when and where when gig workers became a thing.

To Canada Revenue a”gig worker” or properly, an “independent contractor” category of worker is a legal term like “employee” or “contractor”. Independent Contractors are novel constructs in tax law created by CRA policy changes that were written to provide a new model of worker who was neither an employee nor a contractor.The policy changes were developed by peripatetic tax lawyers and economists whose employment status alternates between the private and public financial sectors. Gig workers were designed to be weak. They are denied the rights of being an employee while also being disallowed from claiming deductions from income that traditional contractors receive. Why would economists and tax lawyers want to invent this role? The tax policy changes they develop at CRA are beneficial to their past and future private sector roles in various ways. They do not go unrecognized for their creation of the gig worker category.