Survival in the Gig Economy
Freedom from the nine-to-five or another form of exploitation? The gig economy is both!
Book gives you the truth about about what to expect and helps you make a plan when nothing is predictable.
Freedom from the nine-to-five or another form of exploitation? The gig economy is both!
Book gives you the truth about about what to expect and helps you make a plan when nothing is predictable.
Get it from: Goodreads * Bookoutlet * Amazon
Here is yet another book aimed at laid off and downsized middle aged and older workers with purportedly “practical” advice to “stop feeling sorry for yourself and get back out there with gusto.” The author is a self-proclaimed “Law of Attraction” booster who also honestly admits that repeating positive affirmations wasn’t going to be enough to get most people “back on the fast track.”
These self-help-for-the-unemployed books tend to be repackaged versions of a handful of recurring themes, and this one is no different:
No one can argue with the proposition that you aren’t helping yourself by wallowing in self-pity. While rising above bitterness and feelings of victimhood is generally good advice for getting out of a funk so you can be productive again, it does nothing to help one redirect legitimate rage toward a system that screws the majority of us.
Even if you have been subject to age discrimination or other real unfairness (here we go with the pitch) there is nothing you can do about it, so buck up and move on. While a defeatist attitude means that you are already defeated, this approach also deflects criticism of the system—a system where most of us are dependent on impersonal institutions for our livelihoods and even sometimes our self-worth—and thus any collective attempt to change it.
Although a lot of this advice is couched in terms of encouragement; e.g., “you are more than your job,” “you have been successful in the past, so you have it within you to be so again,” the flip side of this tends to have a certain “blame the victim” ring to it:
I personally would like to see someone (probably a psychologist or behavioral scientist) explore in depth our cultural tendencies to place so much of our self-worth (as well as the worth of others) on our jobs and not on who we are. If we are better able to understand this dynamic, we might be better able to accept the loss of a job with more equanimity (and less angst) because it will not be deemed such an existential threat to our core identity. A better safety net to keep us afloat in the interim would also be helpful.
While I certainly agree with the need to keep yourself informed and am generally in favor of lifelong learning, the problem here is the implication that our “learning” is directed toward conforming ourselves to the demands of the corporatocracy rather than finding ways to resist it. Yes, our work should do something to provide value to others or to “give back,” but for whom is value being created and for what purpose? What we do should make use of our natural talents as well as acquired skills while it benefits our community or society at large. But most of us need a paycheck and so end up doing whatever is necessary to make money for corporate shareholders without thinking through the larger implication of how what we do impacts society.
In addition to the constant upgrading of skills, you must also conduct exhaustive and never-ending research about which skills are going to be “in demand.” If you stop and think through all the ballyhoo about “staying ahead of the future,” you may start to think about what size supercomputer will allow you to do this. Wall Street and other fat cat firms who attempt to do this themselves have armies of staff and other resources that those of us seeking employment can only dream about. Researching trends in a specific industry will not be enough, but must also encompass demographics, globalization, and workforce trends generally. If you can find a way to download and process literally terabytes of constantly changing data into your brain, you might have half a chance. If you do all the research you ideally “need” to do, you won’t have time to look for work.
One useful suggestion was to avail yourself of free MOOC’s, or massive open online courses. Many of these courses are offered by prestige schools like Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Berkeley and even Oxford through platforms such as Coursera, edX, Cognitive Class, FutureLearn, and Udacity.
Most of us know or have heard about the “informational interview” strategy. This is part and parcel of your research, but it also helps you expand your network. The informational interview is most definitely not about asking for a job (or appear to be looking for a job), but gathering information about industry trends as well as names of others to interview.
The author here suggests that you “call in all your chits” by asking everyone and anyone you know for help. While this exercise can be helpful, you might have to make a number of calls before someone agrees to meet with you. It’s not that people don’t want to help, more like everyone is super-busy. But this technique has been known to work for those who are persistent. One good thing about Covid is that more people are willing to meet on Zoom, Skype or other platform where you won’t have to scrounge up a couple quarts of gas or a bus ticket to get there.
All of the advice around the informational interview (or any job interview in general) is that above all you cannot appear to be needy. Even if you are living in your car or haven’t eaten in days, this must be avoided at all costs. It would be interesting if someone produced a YouTube video on “how not to appear needy when you are out of work.” Just for fun, of course.
Younger workers are favored because they are perceived as cheaper and more energetic. To compete, older workers must have a “specific useful, skill set” as well as the ability to brand and market it. We get a breathlessly excited suggestion to “Do a TEDx Talk!” to “advertise your relevance.” Which the author admits could be “difficult to get,” but “the process is very enjoyable.” Too much of the relentlessly cheerful hype we see all the time in corporate types.
The author exhorts us to be constantly innovating and thinking like a “start up.” She relays stories of wunderkinds who are in perpetual motion, constantly creating new companies, swimming in venture capital, “thriving on and craving change…Innovators rule because they are driving the change that is coming. Innovation is valuable, and it’s exactly what companies want.”
Besides making me tired just reading this, it also brought to mind Dr. Robert Hare’s work on psychopathy. Psychopaths thrive in chaos because they are incapable of empathy. A highly functioning psychopath is often successful in business or politics, and they tend to be attracted to “entrepreneurial” organizations. Psychopaths also often appear to have high energy levels—due to inherent impulsivity, thrill-seeking, and ruthlessness—with which they can wear down their opponents.
The author proclaims that the bottom line for a corporate hire is the answer to the question, “Where do you stand on the runway into the future?” This presumes that “companies,” i.e., the corporatocracy, and not the people, will be the ones creating the future. And “We the People” better not dare to get in the way.
The author advises boomers interviewing for jobs not to bring up your age or make it an issue: “Don’t create divides when you don’t have to.” This is good advice not only because a Millennial is likely to be your boss, but also because there is so little solidarity in most workplaces that you want to be building it rather than destroying it.
Moreover, the Millennials are not to be blamed for the corporatocracy, even though they are its favored inputs right now. You really can’t even blame the Boomers—most of us were still kids when former President Dwight Eisenhower issued his infamous warning about the “military-industrial complex.” However, the Boomers became the corporatocracy’s biggest boosters, because they grew up in the Faustian bargain where corporate jobs were the source of middle-class comfort, upward mobility, job and retirement security. Until all of this went away. We can’t be blaming Millennials because the deal we thought we had has been unilaterally abrogated.
Toward the end of the book, the author includes a chapter that gives an honest assessment of legal obstacles connected with age discrimination. Even before Covid, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that 2.4 million workers aged 45 and older were underemployed. Since Covid, this number has tripled. According to the author’s legal sources, assertive older women are the “most discriminated against group.”
Age discrimination cases are hard to prove, and there often is no “smoking gun” evidence, like there is for sex or race discrimination. Typical other reasons why a person is terminated, like “too expensive” or “doesn’t meet standards,” (the employee may have met standards for years—standards which may have suddenly changed) are perfectly legal, even if they are no more than dog whistles for “too old.” Employers have become quite proficient at finding ways to “document” performance problems to avoid claims of discrimination. The burden of proof is on the employee that the adverse decision (termination, failure to promote, etc.) was entirely due to age. With other forms of discrimination (gender or race), the employee only has to prove discriminatory motive was a contributing factor. Finally, damages for age discrimination cases are limited to financial impacts; i.e., lost pay and benefits. There is no provision for emotional distress or “reputational” damages. Because these cases are harder to prove and damages are limited, it is harder for an employee to find an attorney willing to take the case on a contingency basis.
The author does not address alternatives to the corporate job market until the final two chapters. The first and most obvious of these is self-employment. The second alternative (the short, final chapter) is all about downsizing your lifestyle to fit a reduced income stream. These latter two scenarios—and quite possibly a combination of them—are probably going to be the more likely outcome for most of us. As someone who herself made a deliberate decision to leave her journalism job and then built a successful freelance writing and speaking career, the author likely has a gold mine of information and experience about the pros, cons, and general logistics of self-employment. Rather than spending the largest portion of the book on rehashed bromides about repackaging yourself for sale to the corporatocracy, it would have been better to have a more beefed-up section on alternatives to corporate jobs.
In the chapter on being your own boss, we get the almost formulaic story about a software company started out of a dorm room that made the owner a multi-millionaire by age 32—which the author concedes is a “winning the Powerball kind of story.” Where are the stories about how people with no money—no savings, lost job, out-of-work for months or years—who somehow find ways to make it. Even if such stories are about scrambling for survival and then finding a “new normal” rather than raging success, they are more likely to reflect reality for more of us than the wunderkind overnight rags-to-riches stories.
Like so many books of this kind, it urges us to view ourselves as a self-interest-maximizing individual whose primary objective is to make ourselves “relevant” by continuously scanning the environment, researching which skills will be in demand tomorrow, acquiring these skills, and then branding and marketing our “skill set” in exchange for some semblance of subsistence and dignity. None of the plethora of these books (at least none that I am aware of) suggests ways to completely revolutionize the way most of us earn our livelihood or any form of collective action to challenge the system as it exists. Instead, we are urged to be constantly jockeying for advantage in the fight to “come back” into a system which is stacked against us by design.