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How Technology Is Increasing the Number of Jobs We Have (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: An article at The Guardian takes a look at the way in which we hold jobs as technology as changes. Its central thesis is this: "My father had one job in his life, I've had six in mine, my kids will have six at the same time." This may compress the generational changes a bit, but it's an interesting point; the average time people spend at one job has been trending downward for a long time. As technology enables the so-called "gig economy" (or "sharing economy," if you prefer), we're seeing many more people start to hold multiple jobs, working whichever one happens to give them something to do at a given time. Economist Jeremy Rifkin says, "This sharing economy is reestablishing the commons in a hi-tech landscape. Commons came about when people formed communities by taking the meager resources they had and sharing then to create more value. The method of regulation of these systems is also comparable. If people are trusted and vouched for they are accepted as part of the sharing economy group. If they behave badly they are excluded. Your social capital means everything in this new economy."
And at what point can we reevaluate this and say "six jobs at one time is not a job, it's being taken advantage of". If everyone is complicit in it then it's nothing but being taken advantage of by mob mentality.
I hardly find that reassuring.
People who are working six jobs at once are unlikely to feel secure about their financial and social position. The people I actually know in the "gig economy" are doing it out of some combination of insecurity and desperation. If this is really the future, look for extreme political instability in our country.
Forget for a moment that the sharing economy is based upon some very wrong assumptions about human nature - things that any parent can tell you are not a normal part of human nature, and focus upon the inspiration for this new economic model - Feudal Europe, the village commons, the Great Depression. Nothing in the article is hopeful or progressive - it's all been done before by desperate people trying very hard not to starve to death. How many jobs did people have during the Great Depression? Lots. They just lumped them all together and said "We did what we had to do to survive." This is just another rich asshole's version of "you are poor because you are lazy - now get another low paying job." This goes completely away if wages are required to be livable.
The concept of the Sharing economy is stupid at its core. This "panacea" is ignoring the basic human territoriality regarding property. Children have to be FORCED to share. They will throw a temper tantrum when required to share. Adults are little different. Smoother, less prone to emotional outbursts and more prone to murder than toddlers. The idea of a "sharing" economy is as dumb as any other Utopian vision that makes assumptions contrary to human nature. Every sharing economy is based upon an outside requirement - men with weapons making unarmed peasants work the land in the Feudal "Sharing Economy." Starvation in the Great Depression. Otherwise, people revert to their nature of territoriality over property.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
The summary states "The average time people spend at one job has been trending downward for a long time.
but the site that is linked to this statement http://www.marketwatch.com/sto... shows the opposite: it says the average time people spend at one job has been slowly trending upward, rising from 3.5 years in 1983 to 4.6 years in 2012, the last year for which figures are available.
The article linked seems to think that the upward trend is significant, but I think it's easily explained. Younger workers change jobs more frequently, and hence the length of time spent at a job increases as a worker gets older (according to the same site, "Over half of workers age 55 to 64 and those age 65 and over had 10 years or more of tenure in 2012, compared with fewer than 10% of workers in their 20s and 30s."). So that upward trend is just the demographic bulge (the "baby boomers") getting older. I expect that number to drop when more of the baby boomers retire, and the people who started working in the 2000s start making up more of the workers surveyed.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
And at what point can we reevaluate this and say "six jobs at one time is not a job, it's being taken advantage of".
It's not being taken advantage of. It's called being a freelancer. There is lots of work in the world that does not require being in a single place for 40+ hours each week. Just because it is different doesn't mean it is worse or that you are being taken advantage of. I've held as many as 3-4 "jobs" at a given time. It's normal if you are a freelancer.
I don't pretend to know what the future will look like but the one thing I'm certain of is that it won't look like today. The job market your parents had isn't the one you will have and the one your kids will have will be different still. Get used to it.
The reason your dad (or grandfather) likely held the same job his entire life is because 50 years ago, employers were invested in, and took care of, their employees. My grandfather worked for GE his entire life (outside his time in WWII), and it wasn't because there weren't other jobs he could have gone to. They offered him a pension, which you just cannot find anymore. Today you get crappy health care, and if you're lucky a 3% pay raise every year, and if you are high enough on the ladder, a Christmas bonus that actually means anything. Employers just don't invest in employees like they used to.
Followed by the executives saying "We've saved $10 million so let's give ourselves $11 million raises. Oh no, we're in the red again. Time for more layoffs!"
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
"Welcome to being an entrepreneur. You want time off? You earn enough to take some time. You want work/life balance? You earn it. Sometimes getting there requires working pretty hard for a while. You talk about work/life balance as if it is something you are entitled to have rather than something you earn. There's nothing wrong with working for someone else but very few people can earn a substantial income without a lot of time, effort and risk."
A freelancer is hardly a true entrepreneur. A freelancer is effectively an employee without benefits. Freelancers are capped by the market rates for staff plus the cost of providing them benefits. This is quite different than truly being an entrepreneur making the value of what he is producing. There is a huge gap between the market rate for labor and the market value of a laborers output... if there weren't nobody would hire employees or entrepreneurs. Actual entrepreneurs are exploiting this to make a profit on the work of others without adding value themselves (at least not beyond the value of any one of the workers) and they absolutely owe those workers benefits.
60% of business ventures fail and most of the ones that don't fail aren't profitable in the first five years. You better have one hell of a safety net to be taking that kind of roll of the dice. It does depend on the business of course but the only ones I know of that significantly improve that outlook are effectively just employment opportunities minus benefits.