Is the Gig Work Model in Our Future?

A shortage of nurses to staff hospitals and other health care settings has been with us for decades, and, as with most things, the global pandemic only exacerbated the problem. Mercy, a multi-hospital system based in St. Louis, is rolling out an Uber-like app through which regular staff and gig-working nurses can sign up for open shifts. Instead of matching riders with drivers, the Mercy app will match hospitals and clinics with nurses and is similar in concept to platforms at a few other hospital systems.

What caught our eye is this line in the article linked above: “Millennials, and those even younger, are starting to look at work in a different way,” said Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer Betty Jo Rocchio. “They probably were earlier, and we missed the signs, in nursing.” Hmmm. We hear the same sort of thinking expressed by many heads of school, especially in the COVID long tail. Could the education field be next to embrace the gig work model to cover open classes?

On the surface, it would seem like gig-working teachers stand at odds with the highly relational value proposition of most private, independent schools. Will parents tolerate more teacher churn than with an occasional substitute? To be sure, it is an empirical question, and someone is bound to try the experiment. Maybe something like Uber will be transitional to the superstar teachers as free agents model.