There’s an interesting article by Nathan Heller at the New Yorker on the gig economy. I can’t quite decide whether it’s a lament for the jobs the Millennials’ grandparents had or not:
The reason for Perez’s visit was an unusual feature of Hello Alfred’s model: although the taskers can work part time, on a schedule they determine, all are full W-2 employees. Perez considered the company to be a model—creative, well-intentioned, and kind toward its employees—and praised it between pulls on his Coke heavy. “I appreciate that you’re understanding the high road is the smart road,†he said. “This is not an act of charity! This is an act of enlightened self-interest.â€
He would have been more correct to call it self-interest tamed. Sapone told me later that it’s expensive to carry a staff of W-2 workers on a gigging schedule. The tax burden is greater for Hello Alfred than it would be on a 1099 model, the hourly rate is high, and the required human-resources infrastructure drives up the cost. Attrition is low, but W-2 companies are also vulnerable to various employee lawsuits from which 1099 employers are insulated.
For now, however, companies such as Hello Alfred, going above and beyond market demands out of principle, may be the gig economy’s best hope. And, occasionally, the principles travel. Blake Hinckley has already moved the most senior three of his six Happy Host staff cleaners onto W-2 status. The reason, he told me, is Sapone: they knew each other in Boston, and she convinced him that any honorable company owed its workers employment benefits.
There are a couple of things I found conspicuous by their absence in the article. The first was any real understanding of what working conditions of a half century ago were like. Since that was the working world in the early part of my career, I think I can sketch a picture of it.
You showed up at work on time and you stayed at work until the end of the day. Unless you were in shift work everyone worked the same schedule. In Germany bells actually sounded when you should start work, when it was time for a coffee break, when it was time to return from coffee break, when it was time for lunch, when lunch time was over, and when work was over. The company told you how to dress, how you should groom yourself, how you should speak and comport yourself on the job (in some cases off as well).
There were no cubicles. If you were a manager, you had an office. If you weren’t, you sat in a bullpen. In the bullpen there was no personalization of workspaces.
You didn’t have a computer on your desk. Unless you were a secretary you didn’t even have a typewriter. If you had a phone, it was a company phone. You didn’t make personal calls or long distance calls.
It was a severely hierarchical world. You reported to a superior and in the big business world, there was layer after layer of structure. Generally, your opinion was neither asked for nor wanted.
You corresponded in writing. You didn’t send memos up the chain. I’ve known people who were discharged for writing a memo to their boss’s boss. All of that means that you were dependent on other people for even basic business communications.
I think that most Millennials today would find that intolerable. I don’t believe they have the equipment to handle it.
The other thing I missed is that there did not seem to be any recognition that benefits, taxes, and administrative load figure in employee compensation. The more rules are imposed on the employer-employee relationship, the less predisposed employers are to add new employees.
