It has never been easier to find little jobs for little payments. If you are being paid through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to tag people’s photos or being hired to put up shelves via TaskRabbit, who needs a real job? For enthusiasts, these micro-jobs mean sticking two fingers up to the Man and rejecting wage-slavery in favour of freedom. For pessimists, they are precarious ways to earn a living that offer no pension or health insurance. Welcome to the “gig economy”, a phrase that evokes both the romantic ideals and the grinding poverty of life as a journeyman musician.

The app-based gig economy is still small. Perhaps one in 200 American workers rely on it for their main source of income; nobody is really sure. Yet it seems likely to grow, and, as it grows, so will a question: does the way we link social protections to jobs make sense?

Details vary but most advanced countries have a list of goodies that must be provided by employers rather than the government or the individual. In the UK a full-time worker is entitled to 28 days of paid leave. In the US the default provider of health insurance is your employer. In many countries, employees cannot be sacked without long notice periods and a decent pension is the preserve of people with a decent job. As for freelancers, they may enjoy flexibility and independence and sometimes even a good living — but as far as social protections go, they are on their own.