From status to contract
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010Just had another call from a head hunter. They’ve lined up a gig they say will last “3 to 6 months”. For some reason this makes me recall being in college in the late 1980s, and some of the professors trying to give us students some career advice:
Whatever you do, never a quit a job unless you’ve been there at least 2 years. 5 years is better but 2 is the minimum. Even if you hate your boss, try to stick it out. If you quit before 2 years, then you’ll get a reputation as a job hopper. No one will ever hire you again. No one wants to hire a job hopper.
Hilarious, compared to nowadays. Things have changed 180 degrees.
For the most part I like the change, though I realize some important things have been lost. Back in the 40s and 50s and 60s (the New Deal era) the ideal was big, safe corporations that gave you life time employment. America had a secure middle class. People worked less, and people in the poorest 40% were better paid then than they are now. But, god, how boring to stay with one corporation for your whole life. That’s the stifling conformism that Kerouac and Ginsberg were rebelling against. It is tragic that we have lost the security offered by those years, but I can not regret the loss of the enforced homogeneity of life goals. The end of the office, and the future of work sums up the changes:
The middle of the 20th century was the age of the great employer: Mainstream success was a stable job at a single company, steadily ascending from middle to upper management. That began to change in the 1970s and 1980s, for reasons that were social as well as economic: American conglomerates began to face stiff foreign competition, and the country accustomed itself to – and even began to celebrate – a more mercurial, less cosseted brand of capitalism. The Organization Man was replaced by the worker as free agent, one who might with little regret leave a job when a competitor gave a better offer, or who might be left jobless when his company merged with another. The arc of the average career trajectory grew more fractured.
What we’re seeing today, says Thomas Malone, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the author of the 2004 book “The Future of Work,” is a further shift. The growing freelance workforce, he argues, is made up of people who see themselves not as having a single job so much as having several at once. To describe the current change, Malone borrows an image that the sociologist Alvin Toffler used to describe the earlier one.
“One of the things [Toffler] said was that we should move from the idea of a career as a linear progression up the ranks in a single organization to that of a career as a portfolio of jobs that you hold over time in a series of different organizations,” says Malone. “What I’m just now realizing is that many people today see their career portfolio including a combination of jobs at the same time.”
Malone believes that new forms of freelancing will help drive this change. Companies like iStockphoto (a stock photograph and image site containing the work of over 70,000 artists), Threadless (a T-shirt design company where anyone can submit designs and evaluate others), and Elance (an online source of skilled freelance labor) are models of companies where not just secondary jobs but the core function of the business is outsourced to a diffuse online workforce. All are helping connect client companies and freelance laborers to each other easily, without a traditional intermediary and with stricter standards than online marketplaces like Craigslist.
These sites allow freelancers to field and respond to far more offers than they would previously have been able to, and to create a far larger and more diverse slate of jobs at any one time. Successful Elance workers often have nine or ten projects going at any one time.
I grew up close to this future. My dad was a freelance stock photographer from 1950 to 2007. He made a fantastic living at it, at least till the Internet hit the industry in the late 90s. For all of my childhood, he loved his work and enjoyed a very flexible lifestyle. From a very young age, I knew I wanted to grow up and enjoy a lifestyle similar to his.
To some extent, the change strikes me as a continuation of the movement from status to contract. When everyone is their own freelance agent, then the last vestige of status will fade from this world.
