The Gig city: Tech-based revitalization and contingent labor across classes in Chattanooga,TN

Background

Contemporary branding of Chattanooga as “The Gig City” refers to the fact that Chattanooga (with a population of approximately 180,000) was the first city in the US to offer publicly available internet at speeds of 1 gigabit via a public fiber optic network. Speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second were introduced in 2015 and 25 gbps are available community-wide as of 2022. This network, locally referred to as The Gig, and how it is used to promote “innovative” and “sustainable” development, is crucial to the way that economic revitalization is framed in local discourse. However, the making of a Gig City comes with particular types of hiring practice and changes in employment relationships, not all for the best. For some workers, these labor forms are not new, but changes have resulted in the perpetuation of contingent employment relationships and new types of socio-economic insecurities. Others, those with education or training required for tech-based production and entrepreneurship, are finding new types of social support, but still experiencing the reality of a sector which relies on contract employment and individual economic risk.

Urban features like a dedicated Innovation District (Katz and Wagner, 2014), a lauded outdoor experience economy, and a lower cost of living than other areas with fiber optic infrastructures are used to promote the city to new residents or investors. The resultant changes in the urban core as it has revitalized - and gentrified - silences not only those being displaced, but those whose work remains central, yet unvalorized in and around the city. Insecure, informal, illegal, seasonal, part-time, and service work are long-standing labor forms in Chattanooga, like most urban areas, and remain a vital, if invisible, part of the urban and regional economies (Crain et al. 2016, Fudge and Strauss, 2013, Miraftab, 2016). Yet these types of contingent labor are not credited as contributing to the revitalizing city, or considered a matter of civic pride for the Gig City.

The celebrated, educated, socially privileged workers (many of whom have migrated to the city) are entering in to a labor market that offers them contingent employment relationships as well. Still, contingent labor forms across sectors and class are rarely, if ever, considered categorically related. In the case of Chattanooga, I found the lack of both theoretical and socio-political relationships between workers are likely due to the way specific labor forms are valorized and promoted. So, I do not consider all contingent labor in terms of a class in the making (like the precariat), since contingent hiring practice takes place across classes in Chattanooga (Standing, 2011) Likewise, the extent to which Chattanoogan subjectivities are viewed as productively economic depends on context. Depending on how a Chattanoogan worker is situated, they may create identity and solidarity from and value within other cultural or socio-economic fields. As this paper argues, which fields those are vary from sector to sector, across classes, and across racial categories.

This possibility for solidarity building is why I focus on contingent labor – broadly defined-as hiring form or employment model. For this analysis, it allows me to demonstrate commonality between very differently situated residents and discuss them in their social, political, and economic contexts. The extent to which contingent workers in Chattanooga define their community membership by their labor varies greatly. During my time in Chattanooga, I saw a well-developed understanding of the racialization being affected via revitalization, its continued link to valorized labor, and the relationship between the current iteration of Chattanoogan development and its consistent history of similar city boosterism (like its turns as “the Dynamo,” “the Scenic City,” and “the Gateway to the South”) (Knapp, 2018). Still, I find it important to find possible links across sectors, especially in the context of ostensibly progressive development strategies. Contingent hiring practice creates one or more type of insecurity for employees across sectors: lack of living wage, benefits, retirement, job security or all.

Kalleberg’s (2000:341) characterization of “non-standard employment relations” encompasses all of these insecurities in a particularly helpful way. He defines ‘non-standard employment’ as a variety of forms, all of which “depart from standard work arrangements in which it was generally expected that work was done full-time, would continue indefinitely, and was performed at the employer’s place of business under the employers’ direction” (2000:341). The same concept is also described by Panikkar et al. (2015:2) as “atypical hiring practices, contracts, and structure that are largely set by the employer with little oversite of unions or national labor laws.” Pre-pandemic, the Bureau of Labor Statistics defined contingent workers as “persons who do not expect their jobs to last or who report their jobs are temporary.” 3.8% of the total US workforce was contingent, according to the following measure:

Workers who do not expect their jobs to last. Wage and salary workers are included even if they already have held the job for more than 1 year and expect to hold the job for at least an additional year. The self-employed and independent contractors are included if they expect their employment to last for an additional year or less and they had been self-employed or independent contractors for 1 year or less (BLS, 2018).

Likewise, workers in “alternative employment arrangements,” including independent contractors, on-call workers, temporary help workers, and workers provided by contract firms made up another 10.1% of the total workforce (BLS, 2018). All these forms of employment are difficult to accurately measure quantitatively, especially given the large number of workers whose temporary labor, gig labor, day labor, caring labor, etc., remain informal and invisible. Primarily, the most insecure laborers may fear responding to the type of survey utilized by the BLS, or never be found to be surveyed due to the informal nature of their work. Also, in order to standardize the responses, definitional choices limit responses. For example, for the previously cited Contingent Worker Supplement, survey “questions on alternative employment arrangements are only asked about a person's main job,” and utilizes three increasingly broad estimates of contingent work, which differs from the definition of alternative employment arrangements. As they mention, understandings of work can be subjective, which also may create a problem for quantitative measurement (BLS, 2018). A comparable release has not been made post-pandemic, but health and disability-related changes to employment relationships and forms have likely exacerbated the invisible nature of many “alternative employment arrangements,” contingent work, and gig work.

The flexibilization and casualization of labor processes associated with shifting capitalist processes (Beck, 2000, Christensen et al. 2010, Weeks, 2011) creates a set of related hiring practices across industries which require workers to commoditize their leisure time, find informal economic opportunities, take health and safety risks, or build new social relationships to create a livelihood. These processes, however, affect differently situated workers in different ways, but many in some way. I believe the framework of contingency is useful for the theoretical repositioning of work across sectors as interrelated and to create ties between economic and social processes. Racialization and gendering has made many kinds of work invisible or devalorized transnationally (Hatton, 2011, Stuesse, 2016, Vosko, 2000). In some cases of contingent work, geographical separation (Gluesing et al. 2018), differing temporalities (Rodkey, 2016), or class-based divisions of labor can hide workers and obscure their labor. Given the histories of marginalization, displacement, and racialized violence in Chattanooga, tech-based revitalization in the city has, unfortunately, served to perpetuate socio-economic and political disparities. Grounding the creation and expansion of contingent hiring practice in place highlights these processes, many of which seem global or national in nature, but can have deeply local consequences for lived experience.

Methodology

I immediately became interested Chattanooga when, driving north into the city from Mississippi, I came across a sign at the city limit reading “Welcome to Gig City,” a fascinating dismissal of the stereotypes of the region as undeveloped, both technologically and economically. However, as I drove east from Downtown into more residential neighborhoods, the construction and commerce all but ceased, giving way to very different landscape. The deep visual (and I would later learn, discursive) contrast between areas of the city persuaded me to do 14 months of fieldwork (2017–2019) in the urban core of Chattanooga. I lived, worked, and participated in community and neighborhood life in both Downtown and a neighborhood that would soon be subject to the beginnings of gentrification, as residential and business renovation and construction moved east through the surrounding neighborhoods.

My coming to Chattanooga was prompted by my interest in the discourse of the “gig economy,” and how that might be interpreted in place. Upon arrival to Chattanooga, I began work in the tourist sector as a service worker – a good option for getting some cash soon after being hired. Like many of my coworkers, I was forced out of that job as winter approached and tourism all but stopped. I was lucky to have had some flexibility while at that job to look through ads, network, and interview. I found a position Downtown as a project manager in the non-profit sector running a small US dollar loan program as a community-based solution to pay-day lending – an industry which got its start near Chattanooga. These jobs afforded me very different perspectives and types of access. I was able to have daily conversations with workers who had been employed at many locations in the area and were experiencing seasonal employment and a low wage. Quickly, I had my status reimagined by those around me because of my new job, despite my still contingent position. I gained the access needed to study-up among elite supporters of the well-established non-profit where I was employed. While engaging with local owners and community leaders, I also worked 1 day a week at a community kitchen and day center for the unhoused, and I volunteered and participated in several community and activist organizations. Some of these organizations were vocally critical of the non-profit ecosystem of which I was a part, and the gentrification of the neighborhood into which I (an educated white woman) had moved. Yet still, important contradictions and overlaps between my positions and my identities complicated and added depth to my ability to understand the context of local revitalization. Still, I found in most of these situations I was primarily perceived as a student, especially after my explanations of anthropological dissertation research and what collaboration with this process would entail. Student is a position that most of my collaborators understood me in, despite the multifaceted nature of my positionality within Chattanooga. As local worker, student-academic, member of a neighborhood association, volunteer, and activist, I conducted semi-structured and informal interviews at locations ranging from civic club meetings to job fairs. I attended and recorded (with permission) dozens of public meetings, like sessions of the city council, gatherings at union locals, HUD budget presentations, discussions of digital equity, and the regional planning commission. In this way, my view/s of contingent hiring practice led to research focused not only on the experience of work, as I intended, but also on public policy and the discursive power of The Gig in shaping urban revitalization, socio-economic disparities, and hiring practice.

Urban revitalization

Support and ancillary services like food service, delivery, maintenance, and janitorial enable the functioning of tech-based industries. These sectors may not lack in necessity, but do lack the dignity of valorization. As Zlolniski (2006) demonstrates, low-wage workers are as ubiquitous and essential to Silicon Valley as tech workers, and both are products of economic restructuring toward flexible labor. He says, “despite the notion that poverty is a mismatch between the labor needs of the new economy and the poor skills that immigrants bring to the labor market, most Mexican workers in Silicon Valley are employed in full-time jobs, often holding more than one full-time job” (Zlolniski, 2006: 174). This disparity itself and reliance on low-wage work as a permanent strategy was a key feature of the economic restructuring of Silicon Valley, the ubiquitous tech hub. The same can be said of Chattanooga, where the promotion of entrepreneurship and tech work is supported by active city-wide cooperation, sponsorship, and placemaking strategies. Chattanooga is home to one of the few dedicated Innovation Districts in the US, a quarter-mile radius that seeks to boost entrepreneurial collaboration and resource-sharing via proximity and provide an “economic epicenter” in Downtown. Still, the poverty rate in Chattanooga was 17.6% in 2022 and ranged from 12% up to 64% in 14 urban core census tracts, with a mean of 33% in 2020 (American Community Survey, 2017, 2022). The goal of creating a distinctive economy for the region preceded the development of socio-educational strategies for allowing city-wide participation in such a project.

A Chattanooga driven by a distinctive and successful tech-based economy, a future still invoked as a goal, has now been 10 years in the making. Other municipal and private telecommunications providers nationwide offer gig speed services, including several nearby towns and cities in Tennessee. As such, the ability of Chattanooga to market itself as distinctive in this way is becoming less and less feasible. Likewise, the increasing cost of living makes the city less appealing to would-be in-migrants across classes. While tech-based entrepreneurship has benefited a segment of the population and drawn millions of US dollars of residential and commercial development into the Downtown, by 2018 many newly constructed apartment complexes were no longer drawing full occupancy. The benefits of revitalization have yet to trickle down into neighborhoods, an issue commonly mentioned by my collaborators, and a critique of the lack of public commitment to differently situated Chattanoogans has grown more insistent.

Still, a sense of civic pride in Chattanooga is not unique to this era of Chattanoogan development. The city was once famously known as “the Dynamo of Dixie,” an industrial and transportation hub. Its post-industrial future was driven by a policy model of community visioning, known as “the Chattanooga Way,” resulting in the construction of the Tennessee Aquarium and revitalization of the surrounding Downtown for tourism. Regional interests in manufacturing and transportation, as well as its well-developed service sector articulate with the attempt to make Chattanooga a tech hub. Yet the city has remained divided: by race, by class, and by community confidence in both The Gig and the political-economic elite that have been ubiquitous to the city since it was the “Dynamo” to act in the best interests of all Chattanoogans (Yanerella, 2016). Understandings of contingent labor and how such positions are valorized in the Gig City are important, as many ‘gig’ and flexibilized tech positions are considered central to a desired technology-reliant economy. Discussions of technology workers and entrepreneurs, whose work patterns are often associated with the notion of the gig economy, contracts, or “side hustles,” (Eglash, 2002, Lane, 2011), discursively foreground the experiences of majority middle-class, white, and male workers due to the demographics of tech-based industries (Van Oort, 2015). According to a community organizer in (historically Black) East Chattanooga,

They are aware that Downtown is vastly different than ever here. They're very aware the way in which you go about handling life and doing, it's very different. Downtown is all about follow your passion create stuff from the bottom. Leverage your resources find the right partners and be your own, self-made. While over here still, oh you're so poor, you're so…like look at these statistics. Oh no. You can get this eleven-dollar job and continue to take a task instead of being like no. The concept of innovation is for everybody. And if you learn how to actually leverage and connect the dots you can find the right fit for everybody.

The silencing of alternative experiences and histories of the city, and consistent utilization of exceptionalist discourses of revitalization (like The Chattanooga Way and Gig City) contribute to the way different sectors are valorized (Naylor, 2003). Still, contingent hiring practice is common across sectors in Chattanooga, all of which contribute to the vision of Chattanoogan revitalization and development as innovative and sustainable.

At a 2018 panel event, an economic development specialist for the city of Chattanooga mentioned the difficulty that businesses in the service and tourist industries were having hiring and maintaining staff, and how these sectors feed into, support, and promote overall economic growth. This was meant to be taken as an indicator of economic health-that the region has more jobs than it can staff. However, the specialist didn’t mention that many people working jobs in these sectors are unable to secure full-time employment, nor that service jobs rarely pay a living wage, nor how this might relate to the lived experience of workers in these sectors. Likewise, so many tech-based, start-up, and entrepreneurial workers are, themselves, contracted or self-employed. It is this type of skilled, professional, yet contingent worker that Lane (2011) describes as a “company of one.” A view of the self as individually responsible for a career trajectory requires constant improvement of one’s position normalizes periods of unemployment. Lane demonstrates not only periods of financial hardship during periods of unemployment (Kwon and Lane, 2016), but also psychological hardship as workers seek to maintain a sense of self-worth utilizing moralized neoliberal discourses. Career trajectories across classes and occupations are no longer assumed to be vertical pathways within a single company. The lifecourse of work is no longer primarily imagined as a career ladder, but rather as a set of horizontal movements between employers.

While this is true across classes, the inability to save for periods of unemployment makes this dangerous for low-wage workers. Dickinson (2016:277) says, “the flexible and informal labor arrangements that have come to predominate the low-wage labor market have made steady work with a single employer increasingly unattainable, particularly for those without any higher education or specialized training.” As Burgess (2004:8) notes, “non-standard workers are considered a homogenous group,” and discourse surrounding new labor forms, like that of the “gig economy” or “the precariat,” certainly seems to support this notion. However, it might be more useful to suggest that valorized contingent workers are considered a homogenous group, and non-valorized contingent workers are considered a homogenous group. In Chattanooga, contingent positions across sectors share many characteristics, and are driven by the same political-economic processes, making the lack of dignity given to low wage workers all the more undeserved. Full socio-economic rights and citizenship are tied to work, or rather, work that is valorized (Dickinson, 2016). The absence of full, valorized employment not only intensifies disparities of wealth, but all the disparities faced by multiply marginalized workers.

There is a link between the prevalence of contingent work forms and the quality of jobs, yet they cannot be taken as implicitly related. Many contingent workers do not have an employment relationship, and as such have to assume their own legal responsibilities, like unemployment protections or health and safety protections, and “are caught in the penumbrae of policies developed for full-time workers” (Wegner, 2006) or those meant to encourage entrepreneurship. Some do not have a place of employment. Some have no control over how their jobs are done, or have no creative or logical input into their job processes. Some cannot request for how long or when they do their jobs. Some cannot rely on their employment to continue for any length of time. Many have to contend with two or more of these measures, or any number of other reasons a person might define a job as “bad,” undesirable, or unfulfilling. Kalleberg et al. (2000) assessed many such measures and identified low earnings, lack of health insurance, and lack of retirement benefits as the hallmarks of “bad jobs.” They measured the “badness” of a job by the number of identified “bad” characteristics, and the three primary hallmarks were found to be positively correlated. They say, “some nonstandard work arrangements should be associated with worse jobs than others: independent contractors, other self-employed, and contract-company employees are likely to have fewer bad job characteristics than are temporary employees, on-call workers, and part-time workers” (Kalleberg et al. 2000: 261). Still, what is common to all nonstandard, or contingent, work is insecurity, as well as at least one or more characteristics of a “bad” job. Some such characteristics of course, are subjective in nature, but are clearly created by the economic conditions which have propagated contingent labor forms, as well as the socio-economic characteristics of the workforce relegated to them. The following examples from the Chattanoogan experience economy service sector, manufacturing, and non-profit ecosystems all demonstrate not only the purposeful valorization (or devalorization) of contingent occupations as a part of the socio-economic and political history of the city, but also the nature of their interconnectedness in creating an equitable future-oriented vision of the city.

Contingency across sectors: Manufacturing in the Dynamo

Chattanoogan urban revitalization is undertaken in the context of the “business-friendly environment” of the US southeast, where contingency as hiring practice is only made possible by the availability of insecure, underemployed workers (Cobb and Stueck, 2005, Kingsolver, 2016, Weinbaum, 2004). While a small union sector, low cost, generous tax incentives, and wages below the national average are promoted to secure the movement of business into the region, the workers available to fill rapidly changing business needs remain unvalorzied, despite the necessity of their labor (and periodic unemployment) to the economy. When all business is viewed as good business, low-income populations and specific segments of the job market are targeted, and particular social and legal vulnerabilities are exploited (Peck and Theodore, 2012, Panikkar et al. 2015, Rodkey, 2016).

Chattanooga was once a famous industrial and manufacturing town. The continuation of a strong manufacturing sector, driven by the regional strategy for economic development, makes temporary employment one of the most prevalent and enduring forms of contingent work in the area. Since the 1960s, expansion of temporary staffing agencies has been backed by state policies and practices that limit temporary workers’ participation in the labor force and the protections available to them (Vosko, 2000:43).

Temporary staffing agencies are responsible for the hiring and firing of temporary employees, issuing paychecks, withholding payroll taxes, and making required contributions of unemployment and social security. These workers do not, however, physically work at the agencies. Temporary workers are thus not only separated from those responsible for providing them with information about their employment, but also from other similarly employed workers. The emergence of and continued prevalence of temporary employment is driven both by employers need and the entrepreneurial efforts of the temporary employment staffing industry itself (Barker and Christensen, 1998). Continued use and expansion of temporary services reflects a demand-side rather than supply-side preference, as most workers have and continue to accept temporary jobs as a matter of economic necessity (Kalleberg, 2000:347, Hyman, 2019). The use of temporary employees reduces recruitment, training, and hiring costs, as well as legal liability of the client business to those workers. Also, temporary staffing agencies regularly enter into contracts with specific firms, demonstrating that the use of temporary employees is indeed a permanent hiring strategy.

Such is the case at Volkswagen Chattanooga. One of the Chattanooga area’s largest employers, and central to a local supply chain, the VW production facility utilizes Aerotek staffing for their screening and hiring. The language on their job postings, both online and in print suggests that temp employees are hired with the intention of eventual employment by VW. This mediation between employer and employee is a significant one, as a new hire often learns workforce guidelines, safety standards, and occupational culture during training. Since they are not, during this time, employees of VW, VW itself has no legal responsibility to provide training and enculturation to Aerotek employees. According to one employee, “There’s a mentality over there that you’re an expendable. You’re not to be heard, you’re to be bossed around.” Still, despite a different pay grade, safety standards, and protections, these temporary employees have more security than their temp counterparts at other agencies in the area, many of whom have no expectations of an eventual transition into direct employment. Other area temps, even those working in the automotive supply chain, have to line up early each morning outside of agencies in hope of securing jobs for that day only. While all these positions are staffed, auto manufacturing retains its reputation as a “good job,” especially for a company which presents itself as innovative, sustainable, and forward-thinking. The LEED certified facility and the expansion of electric models fit in well to Chattanoogan notions of a tech-driven, progressive economic future.

Auto production, even as a temp, is still more sought after than other manufacturing jobs in its local supply chain or elsewhere. These do not always pay a living wage, and offer even less to those hired through temp agencies. As a local job seeker told me,

Can I go to a factory and go get a job? Yes. Sure can. But that's not who I am and that's not what I want to do with my life. There’s got to be work life balance. I understand being poor and you have to get money. But when you go set yourself into a dead-end job you're just going to die there, and you're not going to make any money, and you're never going to be able to come up, and you're always going to be working bullshit shifts and it's just going to kill you…And so that job is hard to get in Chattanooga.

Public-private partnerships the Chattanooga way: The non-profit and tech sectors

The celebrated “Chattanooga Way” of development established in the early 1990s emphasized public-private partnerships to help drive the city into a post-industrial future. Those partnerships still drive the promotion of innovation and entrepreneurialism in the urban core have created an ecosystem of interrelationship to create policy and further class indexed placemaking. So many workers within this ecosystem, however, have career strategies driven by contingent hiring practice. Contract workers fall outside a legal relationship with an employer (and thus legal protections). Contract work is also “temporary” in nature, used to cover specific projects, for periods of increased demand, meet employment needs not available within organizations, and, importantly, to reduce labor costs. Contract work is more readily associated with higher wages than employment mediated through temporary staffing agencies (Burgess, 2004). In fact, many workers who have education, skills, and training are working as contractors, and remain so for lengthy amounts of time. While contractors are supposed to be employed for a specified amount of time, such employment relationships have been used by employers to casualize employment for long periods.

One such mid-career non-profit professional told me she spent years in a previous ‘contract' positions, with no benefits, and never knowing how much longer grants would fund her position. She landed her first job with a W-2 in her late 30s, and described to me the sense of stability that such a small document provided. For years, she had been subject to the difficulty of saving from each paycheck and estimating her tax payments. She was tired of the instability and planning required by contracting, as well as the difficulty and unexpected expenses that always seemed to occur during tax time. Along with having to create their own patterns of employment, of course, independent contractors are also subject to periods of unemployment. Inconsistent unemployment can be difficult for many reasons, but independent contractors are responsible for their own health insurance and may lose contracts in the case of illness or injury. When she and her husband moved to Chattanooga, they both had contracted positions. She told me she felt lucky to have his support, knowing that if either is unemployed, at least one wage will still be coming in to the household. Contracting in the non-profit ecosystem in Chattanooga is common practice, as well as in the entrepreneurial and start-up sectors: workers with specific skills are employed for specific projects, reducing employment costs to host organizations while providing needed expertise.

“See rock city”: The tourist and service sectors

Hiring via contract is a strategy for reducing employment costs. Creating workplaces in which workers do not work a full 40 h allows for direct employment, but leaves responsibility for health insurance and protections in the hands of the worker. Many jobs that do not seem so may in fact be contingent. Contingent employment relationship are present in not just retail, but also in the large service, hospitality, and tourist sectors in Chattanooga, where many jobs are part-time. Part-time, however, does not mean a flexible 20 h a week. In fact, 30-35 h a week on a schedule that is different week to week and is released only a few days in advance is still classified as part-time.

A service worker in her late 20s, at the local tourist attraction where I was also employed, described how she found herself working too much and too inconsistently to find a second job, yet not enough to make ends meet (much less afford good health insurance or save for emergencies). Some of our co-workers were students, many of whom live at home, but she has dependents and is responsible for rent. She hoped to eventually transition to full-time within the company, yet those jobs were few and subject not only to external posting, but also the internal competition from applicants. Gelephithis and Jeannet (2018) write, “the share of part-time employees who work this way involuntarily has almost doubled since the early 2000s, reaching 10% in the USA and 28% in the EU in 2014,” which amounts to around 3% of all workers (Dunn, 2018).

Likewise, part-time workers “are paid 29.3% less in wages per hour than workers with similar demographic characteristics and education levels who work full time. And when controls for industry and occupation are added, part-time workers are paid 19.8% less than their full-time counterparts.” (Golden, 2020). In the tourist workplace, the desire to classify as a full-time employee was not just about economic necessity, but also about the consistency in scheduling. Flexibility, in this case, did not relate to the ability of workers to create their own schedules according to their needs, but the ability of the employers to build their schedules according to the shifting number of anticipated customers. As summer moved into fall and business from the busy tourist season dwindled, workers saw fewer and fewer hours. This part-time employee tried to make do, and if anyone needed a shift covered, she was willing to pick it up. Others among us secured second part-time jobs doing seasonal temporary work, corresponding with the upcoming busy Christmas retail season. Others simply had to move on. Job searching, for all types of contingent workers, happens regularly. Periods of unemployment, especially for low-wage workers who may not have much savings to depend on, can be particularly fraught. Regardless of the well-promoted experience economy these workers create, their labor remains insecure and unvalorized.

Economic revitalization and economic injustice

Economic disparities are widely present in Chattanooga, where a critical discourse toward the divisions and inequalities between different neighborhoods and demographic groups is becoming commonplace. Though the unemployment rate in Chattanooga was around 4% in 2019, five urban census tracts had unemployment rates between 22% and 25% (CoC, 2019).

Chattanooga’s history of socio-economic injustice (including prolonged segregation and white supremacist violence) is reflected in its contemporary disparities and exist as a very important counterpoint to consistent Chattanooga boosterism and policy promotion (Knapp, 2018). In 2016, the Chattanooga Times Free Press released a long-form report demonstrating that poverty was disproportionately affecting children and residents of color (McClane, 2016). The report went further, though, linking increased poverty to stagnant wages, rising rent, poor educational attainment, and lack of generational wealth.

At a block party in my neighborhood in 2018, the retired residents I was sitting between started talking about the changes in the neighborhood. They pointed out to me all the newer residents of Ridgedale, who were all white, mostly new homeowners, and appeared more affluent than some of the older residents. They deftly included me in that group, who they positioned as a student as an indicator of my privilege, but allowed me some lenience as a renter. What one of my neighbors particularly wanted me to notice, however, was that speaking to some of the newer residents was a local contractor and developer. This, the elderly neighbor told me, was an example of how folks wanting to buy property were going to take their homes, through “plans that don’t go through us.” Both she and another of our neighbors said that developers had had interest in the area for a while, and both were afraid that that interest and taxes were going to become more aggressive and threaten their homeownership. She complained of all the letters and calls she got about selling. Another neighbor told us that he thought he saw people coming around and taking photos of his home, looking for code violations. As someone marginally homed, he said he had reason to worry. Residents like him, who have long lived in homes but are not able to afford upkeep, depend on a lack of interest in homes in the neighborhood to keep their housing situations, problematic as they may be. Our other neighbor, who was widowed, now lived alone for the first time in her adult like. She just wanted her children to be able to get a good job so they could buy a house close to her, and for her grandkids to go to a good school when they did.

Financial issues, such as bankruptcy and debt (experienced across classes) are prevalent in Chattanooga, yet are experienced and understood unequally. It is, in fact, consumer debt that allows for many middle-to upper-class residents to maintain class-appropriate lifestyles-even those tech-workers living in Downtown Chattanooga. Graeber (2014) estimates average US household debt at 130% of income. Yet debt, an often-necessary component of contingent labor, has different consequences for differently situated households. In 2018, Tennessee had the second highest per capita rate of bankruptcies filed, behind only nearby Alabama. In Chattanooga, 6011 cases were filed in (Graeber, 2018, Flessner, 2019). It also has the 6^th highest percentage of student loan delinquencies among US metro areas, at 22.2% (Staff Report, 2019). Lending rates vary drastically across income levels as well. In the state of TN, interest at payday lenders can legally reach rates of over 400%, and are usually the only type of personal loans borrowers with low credit scores can qualify for. The need for credit as necessity can lead to increasingly bad financial circumstances as well: the average user of payday loans takes out eight loans a year and the average loan amount is US$375 with an average annual interest total of US$520. As a project manager for a small-dollar loan program, I spoke with so many workers who considered payments to their payday loans an understood part of their finances now and in the future. Still, all of these financial realities express the same structural issue – the insufficiency of a wage to provide a livelihood, the hallmark of contingent labor.

Anthropologists Van Ort (2015), Lane (2011), and Gershon (2017), discuss how workers internalize neoliberal ideologies of individuality, self-responsibility, self-sufficiency, self-discipline, and meritocracy. The promotion of entrepreneurship in Chattanooga, in much the same way, promotes the notion that hard work will result in success, and that some workers are more likely to succeed in socially acceptable ways. Among the issues that this ignores is the disproportionate socio-economic disadvantage and economic risk the valorization of some types of entrepreneurship and contracting places on low-wage contingent workers. The future-oriented construction of the Gig City obscures the structural conditions and failures that position and limit worker security, protections, and opportunity, especially as US hiring practices become more contingent across classes. An innovative and progressive future, however, becomes less and less likely as the years go by and the tech-hub that was promised continues to fail to emerge.

Conclusion

In Chattanooga, a discussion of contingent labor and how a business-friendly environment affects the ability to create a livelihood is necessary for effective organizing, community engagement, and the creation of political-economic imaginaries that extend beyond the moral economy of normalized late capitalist individualization. This need, however, is silenced by prevalent discourses on the “Gig City.” Many Chattanoogans are beginning to accept that this is an issue that affects most workers in some way, which is vital for the creation of more effective policy in the future. While flexibility in hiring practice has long disproportionately affected women and people of color (Hatton, 2011, Stuesse, 2016), and that is still the case, the flexibility of labor extending across sectors and classes creates new pathways for cooperation (or exploitation, depending on the local response). There is an important matrix of domination (Hill-Collins, 1990) that structures how stereotypes of “gigs” and the realities of contingent labor fit together. The same is true of Chattanoogan revitalization. It is a small Southern/Appalachian city, with a deep history of racial injustice, yet by focusing efforts on tech-based revitalization, economic inequalities are remade and expanded. As a start-up consultant told me, “because of the size [of Chattanooga], real social change is possible.” He continued, “Chattanooga has the heart, but it hasn’t changed yet.” Instead, its public-private partnerships continue to promote strategies that exacerbate contingent hiring practice and structural inequity. As Chattanooga directs its postindustrial future, the Chattanoogans who may be excluded from spaces and policies created for the revitalized city should be centered to create meaningful steps toward innovation, sustainability, and progressivism. Likewise, discourses that make the labor of differently situated workers seem less valuable must be interrogated to create meaningful change in policy and practice. Distinctly imagined groups of valorized and devalorized workers all have an important stake in economic justice in the Gig City.