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Silicon Valley Has Been Treating Workers 'Miserably' Since the 1970s, Economic Historian Says (recode.net)
Don't blame Uber for the problems of the gig economy -- they didn't start it, economic historian Louis Hyman says. Recode: "Uber is the waste product of the service economy," Hyman said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, a podcast. "It relies on a bunch of people who don't have an alternative." Hyman told Recode that the number of people who have to rely on temporary, freelance or other "alternative work arrangements" has been growing since the 1970s, when the era of bloated corporations gave way to businesses that optimized for short-term profits and began treating workers as disposable. "The alternative to driving for Uber is not a good job in a factory with a union wage or working in a stable office job, it's slinging coffee at a Starbucks where you may or may not get the hours you need," he said. "That is what people are shoring up. They're shoring up getting enough hours, trying to make ends meet. Oftentimes, people talk about the gig economy as 'supplementary income' ... It's not supplemental if you need it to pay for your kids' braces, or food, or rent." Hyman argued that this phenomenon could be traced back to the legions of undocumented migrant laborers who built early computers, before those manufacturing jobs moved overseas.
I joined the industry in 1976, starting as a depot-level tech at Data General gate-banging CPU boards, disk controller boards, etc. that had been swapped out in the field. At that time, every single part of every computer (except the core stack on core memory cards) was made here in America. Everything from the castings for the disk drive frames, through the manufacture and chip-stuffing of every single PCB used, to the special lights used on some disks for positioning to the discrete components (resistors, caps, etc).....EVERYTHING was made here, and those businesses - and associated suppliers - employed millions of people.
Today, other than some special mil-spec companies, ZERO electronics are made here. THIS is what brought us to this point: that either you're an app-appy developer or a low-tier drone with no room to grow. Basically, we've squeezed the piss out of the entire industry's middle with most of the rewards going to the Squillionaires and the rest of us left fighting over - Yes! As Pelosi said - "the crumbs".
I'm glad I got the chance to ride the wave long enough, but the tide has been going out for decades.
When I see job insecurity called "labor mobility", my BS meter goes up. You pegged it and then smoke started coming out!
It wasn't that long ago when the common expectation was that you would graduate, then get a job you would be at until you retired. It wasn't that uncommon that jobs becoming obsolete would be vacated mostly through attrition or the workers would be retrained to fill another position at the same company. Many employers felt a duty to their loyal employees.
That was the social contract.
These days, it's not that uncommon to be laid off and end up doing the same job somewhere else.
As long as the world won't let me plow my yard for cropland and go hunting in the neighborhood, it does, in fact, owe me an alternative.