“I have to work twice as much to make half of what I was making to survive” – Third of Gig Workers Cut Back on Food As Incomes Drop Due to COVID Lockdowns

A new industry survey shared with Axios shows a third of gig works have had to cut back on food purchases as their incomes drop due to the restrictive economic measures taken by many states to stop the spread of COVID-19.

The survey, conducted by Flourish Ventures, a financial technology venture capital firm backed by eBay, reveals that the economic impact of COVID-19 and state restrictions have caused two-thirds of gig workers to see a decrease in income, with three in five workers making less than $1000 a month over the summer.

The drop in income coincides with rising food prices as U.S. wholesale prices jumped .4% in September, reflecting a 1.2% rise in the cost of food.

The 0.4% September rise was bigger than economists had been expecting and reflected in part a 1.2% increase in food costs, the sharpest rise since a 5.6% spike in May, as coronavirus-related shutdowns at food processing plants triggered shortages.

– ABC News

Notably, the increases in food prices are up dramatically in beef and veal (25% year-over-year), eggs (12%), potato (13%), and tomato (8%).

The survey shared with Axios goes on to highlight that three in five gig workers said they couldn’t cover household expenses for more than a month without additional financial help if they lost their main source of income.

Those who would normally make ends meet through apps such as Uber and Lift have taken sharp hits to their income with both companies reporting a massive decline in activity in recent months.

Lyft’s number of active riders fell 60% to 8.69 million during the second quarter, according to the company’s latest earnings report. Uber’s gross bookings declined 75% overall in the second quarter, the company said in August.

Ayana Headspeth, 33, a mother-of-four from Montgomery County, Maryland, became one of Washington’s first 100 Uber drivers in 2014 and has made her living with the largest gig platforms including Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and DoorDash.

But to protect herself and her children from coronavirus, she stopped driving in late March and hasn’t driven since.

Not only were there health risks, driving for Uber became financially “pointless,” said Headspeth.

– Rueters

Opportunity to make a living through the Grocery application Instacart is also vanishing. The application took on 300,000 new “shoppers” in October, more than doubling its workforce, causing the per-hour value of working through the app to plummet for some users.

Prior to the pandemic, Franklin-Corbett said she could make up to $300 in a few hours. On a recent trip that took more than an hour and a half, she made $9.

“I have to work twice as much to make half of what I was making to survive,” she said.

The struggle gig workers must now endure comes as economists and institutions come to grips with evidence that lockdowns have caused incredible economic hardship and may have been exercised well beyond justification.

A Study lead by economists Kosali Simon at Indiana University and Bruce Weinberg at Ohio State says that state-enforced lockdown measures account for 60% of the loss of employment in the United States.

The economists concluded that the share of people over the age of 21 with a job fell 1.7 percentage points for every extra 10 days a state was under a stay-at-home order between March 12 and April 12.

After having cautioned countries about the dangers of opening their economies, the World Health Organization is now warning against lockdown measures to tackle the spread of a virus such as COVID-19.

“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” WHO envoy Dr. David Nabarro said in early October.

“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”

“Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never, ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer,” he added.

Perhaps its time to question whether or not state bureaucrats should be able to grant themselves through fiat the ability to deem certain sectors of the economy “unessential,” especially when it comes to combating a virus that has an Infection Fatality Rate looking like this:

Age Group                                           Probability of Survival

0-19:                                                    99.997%
20-49:                                                  99.98%
50-69:                                                  99.5%
70+:                                                     94.6%

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Joseph Jankowski is an Editor-at-Large for Planet Free Will. His works have been published by major news publications such as ZeroHedge.com and Infowars.com.