Comment Turking it out (Score 1) 273
In recent scifi I think this is classed as "turk" work, a unfortunate term based on the scam of the Mechanical Turk, which Amazon also adopted for one of their service offerings.
This term is used in at least the Metatropolis story anthologies by multiple authors (John Scalzi editing) and there's development on the theme in the plot of some stories (Detroit) so I don't want to give too many details.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/...
There's some parallel with "runners" from various cyberpunk scifi and gaming, too: Work for money with little formal relationship with the source of the contracts ("Mr Johnson") and a very simple professional code of ethics.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...
http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wik...
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