Hence the rise of zero-hours contracts, sub-franchisee agreements and the "gig economy", where workers must scrounge for bit-work from several sources in order to cobble together something like a liveable wage.
Those "gigs" are often on-call, and may be directly competing time wise. Tough. The "employer" knows there are a dozen other folk waiting to pick up the work should the first person fail.
Welcome to the exploitative nature of the 21st century job market, where the old model - workers supplying labour while business supplies capital - has been turned on its head.
Now, many workers are required to supply their own resources - be it an office or computer or tools of trade or vehicle or all of the above and then some.
Many "positions" - existing only as long as the worker can sustain them - require the worker to provide their own clients, and even pay an access fee for the privilege of bringing those clients into the company workspace.
Oh, and don't forget qualifications, which are increasingly expensive and often need constant updating.
So you get airline pilots - I kid you not - paying airlines to be allowed to fly their jets so as to clock up sufficient flight-hours to acquire "value" on the job market. Would you sit comfortably in your seat knowing the pilot had to pay for his seat, too?
Ostensibly an extension of the self-employed freelance model, the gig economy is being used and abused by companies to get more work done for less wages - no holiday or sick pay, super, overtime or weekend rates - with no job security.
The rise of companies like Uber is directly dependent on this "contingent worker" concept, and given it's estimated more than 40 per cent of US workers will work this way by 2020, it has become mainstream.
How can someone with limited education and resources hope to create a living in this environment? They can't. They are, and will remain, unemployable; or at best, able only to work the no-skill bottom-tier "service" positions that haven't yet been replaced by robots and self-serve machines.
The real problem is that the market has changed but our attitudes to work have not.
Back in the mid-1960s schools started teaching children about a rosy future where finding things to occupy your leisure time would be a daily conundrum.
Technology has now enabled that idyll, but we humans have not adapted and adopted it.
If we had, no one need work fulltime; we would accept some must always be unemployed; and work would be a valued choice, not a frenetic survival-driven chore.
The attitude that stops that happening is enforced from the top. The growing rich-poor gap tells you why.
*Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.
