The Freelance Surge Is the Industrial Revolution of Our Time
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Permit me to doubt it.
off-topic a bit: What's a little odd to me is how much small/medium businesses rely on credit for payroll. I've got a friend at a small business, and they have a credit line they use for payroll every 2 weeks, and they've been worried that their credit line would be reduced, meaning they'd have to lay people off. I've asked around and some other companies do this as well. Is this practice really widespread, or just the few I spoke with?
gentle plug: the indieconf conference for web freelancers can help you adjust to this new industrial revolution :) http://indieconf.com
I am definitely not "feeding the economy" by buying a lot of stuff (being a good little consumer) as I would have 10 or 20 years ago.
I have traded a desire for and ownership of material things (house on the ocean and a beautiful sailboat) for a lot of freedom and control over how I spend my time. A good trade!
Outside of some work equipment/supplies, we've definitely been working on saving and having liquid cash available. We had multiple emergencies this year - my wife got very sick and we had an emergency room visit, and we had some deaths in our family which required a lot of travel. In all cases we were able to pay cash from savings rather than charge it, which, 10 years ago, would have been my default way of thinking.
It'd certainly be nicer to have some sort of different health care in the US such that a trip to the emergency room didn't cost thousands, but it is what it is.
If you need 10k to front the cash for 5 more staff at your restaurant, why not? The business will grow.
In general savings through austerity is better, but many companies would not grow past sole proprietorships without credit.
(Then one day the credit dries up and you're hosed, I'm not commenting on the wisdom of the strategy but my understanding was it is standard practice.)
The delivery guys sued en masse and got their contract re-qualified as salaried employees proper.
I'd be wary that actually the "freelance revolution" may be another big jump backwards to the 19th century for workers marketed as a "freedom gain".
That large pool of legitimate freelance labor has provided media companies with the cover needed to pass of their regular staff jobs as something other than permanent employment. The cynical (read: accurate) term used by people stuck in these spots is 'permalancing'.
If companies are only ever changing groups of freelancers properly gathered to accomplished certain tasks, what will differentiate them? The ability to recruit and pay the most talented freelancers? I'm not sure that will work out on the long run.
As someone already mentioned, many companies are already facing erosion of employee loyalty but not the most successful ones. I 'd argue that those companies that are market leaders don't suffer so much from that problem (mostly) because they are able to instill a set of values and principles across their workforce and this is very hard (maybe impossible) to achieve with freelancers, who easily come and go and are probably much more emotionally detached from their current employer.
I actually believe in this freelancer world, but I also believe there has to be a reinvention of the way companies work in which setting the right balance between culture/brand identity and decentralization/individualism will be critical.
The industrial and neolithic revolutions brought the masses together to form towns and then large cities, where as I believe with the increase of freelancing and e-jobs, along with better remote working environments, people will start to question the high cost of living within a large city.
The 'direct' cost - lower property taxes, for example - is offset by often having to drive further for basic stuff that you may be able to walk to or use public transport for in a larger city.
There's also a social cost - fewer human interactions - which, for some people, is actually a positive, but it's not for everyone.
Also, opportunity cost can be higher out in the country. You may simply miss out on experiencing things that you would in a city. But in a city, you might miss out on cleaner air, nicer sunsets, etc.
Though it will properly cut down on the amount of commuting people will have to do.
There are many advantages to clustering together that electronics and increased communication simply cannot replace yet (and I doubt it ever will, even video calling feels "phony" somehow).
20k is a town. 100 people is nothing.
The ability to walk down the street at 3 in the morning and see a non-trivial number of people around.
A friend was in a small town teaching for the summer, and he said "So then we went to the bar. I say the bar because there was only one." Where I live, there are 171 listed in the phone book.
It's all subjective, after all; but that's just off the top of my head.
I don't know how industrial revolution felt like to those who lived through it, but I am seeing more and more people around me jumping the ship everyday.
Our parents generation spent 10-20 years at a job. Our generation spends 2-5 max.
In my view this is great especially for the US because it means that more people get paid for the value they create as opposed to wasting a company's time/money by clocking in from 9-5 and just waiting for Friday to roll around.
I wonder if in some ways we're getting just as much done in those 5 years vs the 20 earlier generations spent. Perhaps there's a set amount of work at which people tend to move on (or get laid off) and we're just reaching it faster?
Far-fetched, I know, but still crossed my mind.
Income of highly skilled people in low wage countries will go up and income of low skilled people in the US who are working in areas where low wage countries can compete will go down.
Great that my new business idea is completely built around this trend.
A programmer working on a webapp has all the tools he needs (or may easily get them, often for free) to do the development on his computer. He has to ask nobody for permission and need not (even if he chooses to do so) work for somebody else.
Yes you still need hosting and coffee but those things are commodities (heck coffee is traded on the Chicago mercantile exchange) and the skilled tradesmen of the old needed copper, wood and tools too.
Interestingly enough this also means that the equalization between skilled and unskilled labor which the industrial revolution brought (the unskilled labors never had it better, compared to their contemporaries, than during and after the industrial revolution) has ended -- a person can no longer come out of school, work at the assembly line and expect a good solid middle-class job. At the same time those who take the time (and have the opportunity) to educate themselves can expect to make a pretty good life.
Some part of me feel a little sad that those big machines don't matter as much as they used to, but the rest of me is very happy they don't. I much prefer working with computers to standing in a factory.
The computer is one of the best mass production devices since the steam engine was invented.
But not every job consists of pure symbol manipulation.
- Every year it gets easier to start a new business.
- Every year big companies provide less job security.
Combine this, and there is a move to free agency.
This is great for people who can find a way to get paid for differentiated skills. It is awful for commodity skills.
For a short time industrialization meant that the least skilled could produce as much as the most skilled, but as pg argued that was as special case of a special situation. I know of no case where it has happened before or after, anywere.
If you only have commodity skills, the best thing you can do is to go down to the nearest community college.
This doesn't seem to be leading toward a more organized workforce with regard to compensation. That's probably not a good thing. There seems to be some opportunity here though for an enabling technology to work that out, but I don't know what it would be yet.