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Researchers studying on-demand nursing platforms found a pattern that's unsurprising: a home health patient gets a different visiting nurse almost every shift, depending on who the app has available. One nurse learns his blood pressure medication doesn't mix well with the ibuprofen he takes for his knees. The next nurse never finds that out, because nothing follows the patient from shift to shift, only the task.
Eventually, one of them is in the room when it goes horribly wrong.
Nursing makes the gigification of work visible and high-stakes, but every job that depends on knowing specific people and specific problems over time is undermined by the same loss of continuity.
That’s most jobs, by the way.
What changes from industry to industry is how long it takes for the gap to show up, and how expensive or risky it is once it does.
Diana Reddy, an assistant professor of law at UC Berkeley who studies unions and labor law, argues in Coworkers, Not Contractors that employment was never just a vehicle for a paycheck and benefits. Its real value is the standing relationship: the fact that the same people keep showing up around you, producing what she calls relational transaction benefits, the kind of benefits gig and contract work can't replicate no matter how good the app dispatching people gets.
That’s why we need a new vision for employment, not an abandonment of the concept in favor of efficiency and cost savings.
The Risks of a Gigified Workforce
Arguments in favor of the traditional employment relationship treat it as an employee wellness or political point. Something about workers feeling connected and cared for. Something about being the right thing to do. Something about it being the best way to deliver benefits and pay taxes.
Those are all part of it.
But those arguments also undersell the advantages of employment for both organizations and coworkers.
Continuity is mainly about what people end up knowing and can deliver on a regular basis, not just how they feel.
It’s a nurse who sees the same patients and learns things that aren’t charted. A sales rep who keeps the same accounts learns which client's "we'll circle back next quarter" means yes and which means no. A line manager who's run the same shift for two years who knows which machine throws an error every August, and why nobody's ever fixed it. None of that gets written down, because it doesn't need to be, until the person who knows it leaves.
The gig economy's own research shows how thin the replacement is. A systematic review of platform work found that 74% of gig workers rarely or never talk to a coworker face to face. The lack of connection becomes a lack of continuity.
Organizations rarely account for that risk.
There's no structure in the gig model for building shared context, because the platform is designed to make each worker interchangeable with the next one. That's the gig business model working exactly as intended.
How Companies Undervalue the Judgment They're Cutting
Companies wouldn't sell off a patent or a customer list without putting a number on it first. The knowledge and judgment a person builds up over the years doesn't get that treatment, though. It sits off the books until the person is gone and something breaks that used to just get handled.
Contract the job out instead of keeping it in-house, and the company is liquidating an asset it might not fully understand.
Whatever it costs to rebuild that judgment — in redone work, in mistakes, or in a slower ramp for whoever's next — is the real cost of the thing that looked easy to cut. Most workforce plans don't account for that at all. They price the headcount line as a liability instead of something worth keeping.
That's the business side of it. The same fact pays out somewhere else too.
The knowledge sitting in a person's head, built from paying attention to the same patients or accounts or machines long enough to know them, is the difference between a job worth having and a job worth doing. Being the one who's known, who gets called back to, who someone actually remembers, is most of what makes work feel like something more than a shift.
End the relationship in the name of efficiency and the company loses a real asset. The person loses the only part of the job that was never interchangeable in the first place.
That's one fact doing two jobs, not two separate arguments. Split it into a poorly understood asset case and an employee wellness case, and both halves get easier to dismiss. Combine them and you get closer to the real issue.
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Everyone's Arguing About Money. Continuity Is The Real Problem.
While the move away from traditional employment has been positioned mostly as a financial issue for employers, governments and workers, that’s not the true issue.
Put the business case, the policy fight and the employee conversation about gig and contracting work side by side, and all three are describing the same thing in a different vocabulary.
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The business view runs through procurement and finance, where the comparison is a contractor's day rate against a loaded employee cost, a clean number both sides can put in a spreadsheet. Nobody in that meeting is the person who'd know to ask what the relationship itself was worth.
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The policy fight over gig work argues almost entirely about money and status: the Aspen Institute's portable-benefits push wants to attach a safety net to contract work without changing what the work is, while EPI and other reclassification advocates want to pull that work back under employee status through tests like the ABC standard.
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The employee conversation treats the whole thing as workers needing to feel more connected, turning a structural fact about how work actually functions into an engagement-survey question and a perk.
All three of these are reacting to the same thing — the judgment continuity builds — without ever calling it that. One calls it a cost. One calls it a benefit. One calls it a feeling. That siloing is why we think too narrowly about employment. We think we have one problem to solve.
Nearly 55% of gig workers say they intend to leave gig work within three months, according to Economic Policy Institute research. That’s what happens when a debate keeps missing the problem it's supposed to be solving.
Building the Next Version of the Job to Create Longevity
None of this is a case for freezing employment exactly as it exists. We should be rethinking what jobs should look like. The solution won't be one thing. While not an exhaustive list, these are some of the proposals already in the works:
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A shorter standard workweek. Reddy's own proposal drops the standard below 40 hours specifically to make room for caregiving. Nobody's built an organized campaign around it yet, which makes it more of an open idea than a live one.
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Just cause protections. Ending at-will firing addresses the security half of the same relationship, the part that makes continuity worth trusting in the first place instead of something that can vanish without explanation.
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Sectoral bargaining. Already being tested for rideshare drivers in Massachusetts, California and Illinois, it gives fragmented, gig-classified workers something closer to the collective standing that employment used to provide by default.
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Scheduling-stability laws. A handful of cities and one state already require employers to give hourly workers advance notice and predictable hours, which is the closest existing policy analog to protecting the continuity that actually generates judgment.
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Building continuity into management practice, not leaving it to chance. Train leaders to actively protect relationship continuity, guard the time it takes to build against the next reorg and check whether that protection actually reaches the same lower-wage and gig-adjacent workers who are least likely to get it by default.
When we see continuity as the asset it is, the argument for employment stops being about preserving a structure from the last century. It becomes about building a better version of the same idea: relationships that last long enough to generate judgment, on terms that fit how people actually live now.
For anyone deciding how to staff the next role, the real question is whether the business can afford to keep replacing the person who was just starting to know what they were doing, not whether contracting it out is cheaper this quarter.
Call the new work alternative flexibility if you want. Call it modern workforce management. What it guarantees is that people stick around long enough to know something. And that when someone is a contractor, they get some of the same advantages, while delivering similar benefits to the organization.
Editor's Note: Knowledge transfer is the topic du jour. More articles on the topic:
- From Knowledge Systems to Organizational Intuition: Turning Information Into Action — Companies are drowning in data but starved for action. The edge doesn't come from using more tools, it's from turning knowledge into collective intuition.
- More Tools Won't Fix Collaboration. Communities Might — Seat counts make AI rollouts look successful. Whether they actually are depends on the conversations happening around the tool.
- Don't Let Critical Knowledge Walk Out the Door — When expertise walks out the door, so does competitive advantage. It’s time to make knowledge sharing everyone’s job.