On a radio program I heard recently, the gig economy of today was extolled as a chance for people to follow their dreams and explore more flexible work alternatives. I don’t think that’s true for most people.

I entered the gig economy in 2002, when I decided to end my 20-year engineering career. There was a high-tech slump, not the first I’d experienced, but this time it seemed I would be forced to lay off some perfectly competent staff, which I had managed to avoid up until then. So I negotiated a package for myself.

I had become disgruntled by high tech and its strange combination of verbal macho bravado and actual timid, crowd-following decisions. My own family of four was stressed, with two working parents constantly juggling responsibilities. The nation was still largely fact-oriented, but the twin evils of money-rules and branding were rising. I decided to step back and try to find work that was more flexible, more rewarding, and required less contact with corporate-think or marketing-speak.

From then until now I have lived the gig life. I have commuted a long distance to a work full-time at a large corporation as a contractor, completed project work on the web for employers I never met in person, spent significant time doing on-demand work in both public and for-profit education, owned a business for which I found gigs from both personal and job-matching websites, and worked with individuals in their homes.

While our family’s quality of life was, I hope, improved, this didn’t really work out for me either financially or in terms of being able to support myself when my husband retires. The only reason I could experiment with this, as it turns out, is my husband held a lucrative job, with family health insurance.

Many of today’s gig workers are millennials with college degrees forced to vie for zero-pay internships to work in their fields, or couples with children working second jobs to save for college, or elderly people checking groceries, or RV dwellers pulling merchandise for Amazon CamperForce. That is, they are people who have worked hard, and achieved goals, and yet find themselves with stressful jobs without sick leave, paid time off, or for those under 65, health care.

Universities and corporations are taking untoward advantage of the gig economy to cut costs or increase profits. Corporate marketing departments and capitalism cheerleaders are working overtime to get the population to accept this as the new norm. Trumpsters got the political-institutions-are-systematically-destroying-opportunities-for-the-middle-class part right. Too bad they don’t seem to realize that these institutions are bankrolled by the wealthy class to demonize the real solution, fairer distribution of income and wealth. Don’t take my word for it; check any income/wealth distribution versus household prosperity graph.

Or, get busy finding your next gig.