Over the past few decades, workers (staff, faculty, postdocs, graduate students) in higher education face working conditions and employer relationships that are increasingly similar and exploitative. Higher education has seen the implementation, spread, and refinement of technologies of labor exploitation that have proliferated in the broader economy often termed the gig economy. In this article, we posit and articulate the features of the Gig Academy – a unique iteration of the gig economy. We first describe the shifts in employment structures that make up the Gig Academy. We then describe how this transformation of the academy has eroded community, shared governance, collective action and student experience and outcomes. Lastly we describe some ways that higher education change agents can resist this trend and help to turn the tide working within new forms of collective action. The ideas set forth here are reviewed in greater detail in our book – The Gig Academy
