I've often thought that a company could recruit really great people by restricting the work week to three days and paying a proportionately lower salary.
How about we regulate the number of hours in the work week according to productivity? If productivity is skyrocketing, why are we all still working at least 40 hours a week?
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/
"An average worker needs to work a mere 11 hours per week to produce as much as one working 40 hours per week in 1950. (The data here is from the US, but productivity increases in Europe and Japan have been of the same magnitude.) The conclusion is inescapable: if productivity means anything at all, a worker should be able to earn the same standard of living as a 1950 worker in only 11 hours per week. "
Because of 1) inflation/devaluation/taxation and economic mismanagement at the national level, 2) outsourcing/global wage-competition (when there are extreme global disparities), and contracting rather than long-term employment, 3) increasing corporate returns and executive remuneration coupled with the very small number of people who own stocks that would allow a person to actually benefit from corporate growth, and last but not least, 4) social-status competition and financial irresponsibility (for example, having children without financial stability, because everyone else is or because your spouse wants children, etc, etc).
Also, very few of us own our own businesses so we are particularly subject to items 1, 2, and 3. 4 never helps, but it is hardly uncommon.
Item 1 also has a nefarious hidden aspect to it: optimization without ownership is suicide. Ie, we are largely optimizing the processes and property of other people. Think of the workers displaced by the Industrial Revolution who lost their jobs. We are now working ourselves out of information jobs (publishing, for example). That in and of itself is not a problem but progress, however by working for a wage as the majority of us do, we retain no ownership of the proceeds and so have gotten no farther ahead, while prices continue to rise (say hello to our old friend communism). The lack of ownership results in modern resentment and job protectionism, and the economic equivalent of Munchausen syndrome by which we create new problems, or sustain existing ones, in order to remain the recipient of a benefit. (For example, we delay technological convergence in order to capitalize on the transition...)
That said, IMHO, it's necessary to break up monopolies.
The problems are obvious with that though: people feel like they are being robbed of their earned property and will argue that the free market should sort things out and that it is indeed socialist to intervene at all (I mostly agree).
The sad fact, however, is that countries do exactly that (at least every one I can think of) through taxation and inflation (among other methods) to make holding uninvested wealth undesirable. In that sense, socialism is already employed to attempt to redistribute the benefits of progress.
I strongly dislike taxation though, so I want to approach the issues in terms of capitalism and the free market.
To do so, I think it is necessary to draw a line between young and mature markets. A young market is closer to a free market by virtue of it's low barriers to entry, high size/potential for profit, and lack of incumbent monopolies. Monopolies are a well-known and undesirable symptom of a market that has stopped changing and is not accessible to competition. I would also suggest that a heavy focus on financial derivatives over real wealth (real estate, manufacturing, durable goods, etc) would indicate an overly mature market - one that's difficult to add value to as a new entrant - and I think that's exactly what we can see today (and what's more, we bail them out to keep them going).
The first stages of market development are almost idyllic: new products and services are possible, and wealth can be created by adding value. In a mature market, value is difficult to create under the burden of monopolist control and market manipulation, often to the extreme of halting progress to maintain the incumbent's advantage (cornering a market, or inflicting technological restrictions like DRM, for example). By definition, the further growth of a anti-competitive monopoly is a detriment to the market, and therefore to society. There is no clear line, but sometimes we choose to intervene.
There are laws specifically targeting anti-competitive behavior, insider trading, etc, for example, in order to promote the early-growth period, but there are more things that could be done that are less reactionary and of broader benefit...
One that stands out to me is to eliminate copyright and patents, etc. I know to expect criticism on that regard in this forum, but those are exactly the sorts of monopolies that are blocking the redistribution of value and are being exploited by incumbent monopolies to the exclusion of individuals and developing business who might use them to create new value, solve real problems, and thus distribute the benefits of progress without resorting to "socialism." Instead we are extending copyright, and our society is becoming focused on protecting imaginary property, a situation that is analogous to letting Henry Ford have, and helping him maintain, a monopoly on the assembly line when the assembly line clearly benefited all modern businesses. It would be absurd to scale up enforcement of "assembly line infringement." The modern equivalent, easy copying and, dare I say, copyright infringement, clearly benefits everyone (distributing knowledge and tools), and also serves to redistribute wealth without taxation and government intervention (which has many other undesirable attributes). This is the fruit of a hundred years of effort, and what's more, it's proliferation fosters growth in conventional markets: for example, I am convinced that the early PC hardware industry boom benefited hugely from software and music proliferation (before the monopoly protectionism set in), creating wealth across the board, and the decline in hardware sale coincides with the modern crackdown on copyright infringement, destroying revenue.
The goal then, IMHO, is to stop protecting monopolies. Let technological, industrial, and other types of progress, be used as public resources freely and encourage every generation of growth to make the most of the resources available instead of encouraging monopolies that stop them at the gate.
Furthermore, by avoiding explicit intervention to begin with (by not protecting monopolies to begin with), we would avoid the trap of having to maintain the artificial balances that result that lead to cronyism, and minimize intervention.
Unfortunately, once an organization (government, NGO, etc) has an official reason to exist, paid positions, and a granted authority/monopoly, it is difficult to get it to relinquish it's role. In those cases, direct action may be required to escape gridlock, but the moral is still to avoid the trap in the first place.
As such, organizations need deliberate limitations to prevent monopoly abuse (and to prevent resorting to socialistic taxation).
He was disappointed he only got a 1 year contract as opposed to 2 years - I was flabbergasted when I heard that - not sure anyone would ever get that kind of employment guarantee here in the US for contract work.
It's about time we started considering salary employment contracts for fewer days than the standard five.
There's also a corporate culture where anyone working part time or remote isn't as committed to the company. Guess who's first in line for layoffs?
I started with some of the freelancing sites. It's hard to find decent work, but if you do it with an eye on building relationships it can be worthwhile. (pro-tip, put some money through the site and hire yourself; takes about a week to do without arousing suspicion, but then you have ∞ly more chance of geting hired [$50-100 dollars should be fine])
Business forums for accountants, truckers or anything, can also provide you with leads. Just make sure that you show an interest in their work, not just in getting work from them.
Next, find a way to help the people that you've built relationships with make money. Adwords, I didn't know much about it, but a few hrs later and I had turned a 50€ a day campaign from loosing ~1/2 the π (profit) to doubling every day. (email me for some of the tricks)
Google apps script is just js and easy to learn. With a small number of regexen etc and the simple APIs into google's services GAS gives you, I have been able to speed up ~5-10 jobs that were done daily, from taking ~3hrs, to the time it takes to click a button. Apps that would take a week or two elsewhere are 10hr/day jobs with GAS.
This took about 6 months, but I have been working for about 1yr now at ~10hrs a week and I just ensure that people realise that 10hrs is my schedule and not to ask for more. I'm sure the _value_ I have provided to these businesses would allow me to double my rate tomorrow and face zero resistance; from ~£80k p.a pro rata, and I would say I am a moderate programmer at best.
(well, it's always offered, but they post in on HN Who's Hiring on the 1st)