In the years since the COVID-19 pandemic, Egypt’s side gig economy has encompassed increasingly broad strands of the workforce. More and more, this includes young, single university graduates. For decades, it has been common in Egyptian households for both wife and husband to work two or more jobs to make ends meet. Low-income workers have long been pushed into precarious work arrangements, with no social security, benefits, or even guarantee of compensation. These fraught structures of informality can often lead manual workers to take on an overwhelming amount of work. Rising inflation has translated to increasingly long hours and financial precarity for Egyptian women in particular, who are the primary breadwinners in 30 percent of households — a percentage which rises conversely to socioeconomic status. Simply put, having to take on side jobs to supplement an insufficient salary is nothing new to Egypt’s low-income citizens. Since the pandemic, however, the side gig economy has seen rapid expansion and is no longer restricted to low-income individuals nor even to those providing for a family. Today, both local and international job search engines advertise a myriad of freelance translation, editing, and copywriting…
