The Future of Work in America

The Great Recession represented a valuation re-set, an extinguishing of bloated and/or obsolete businesses and business plans, an acceleration of change in business practices and technology replacements for labor and a ground-up re-examination of the place of the “employee” in the American workforce. As a groundswell of Tea Party opposition rises against “Obamacare,” there is a hidden alteration in the “future job” landscape that might cause folks to reconsider such passionate opposition: the new job paradigm is “contract employment” (subcontractors working on a specific task for a defined period of time without any normal employment benefits), outsourcing (both foreign and domestic) where outside companies or individuals perform tasks once performed by permanent employees, and part-time employment. Independent contractors an d most part-time employees don’t get health insurance options or pension plans from their “employer.”

The lesson of the crash for many companies is how they could sustain and raise profits by cutting their workforce. They learned that having too many full-time workers requires housing them, giving them benefits and supporting them with human resources and other support staff… and sometimes dealing with union rules and pay scales. They came face-to-face with the “inflexibility” of large caches of employees in down economic cycles, the difficulty of implementing lay-offs, the disruption to morale and operational efficiency, and the natural trend of people who have jobs making themselves “indispensable” and requiring even more people to help them performing their “essential” tasks.

Add to this mix the expectations of a technologically sophisticated younger entry-level potential workforce, the ability to telecommute, the rapid changing of jobs as technology opens up new opportunities, and you begin to see a pattern of work, where benefits are no longer automatically provided by the core employer but are more likely to have to be generated by the individual. These are critical considerations as we overhaul our under-funded Social Security system and deal with how we provide healthcare to those who are not covered under employer plans.

The December 19^th New York Times: “Temporary workers are starting to look, well, not so temporary… Despite a surge this year in short-term hiring, many American businesses are still skittish about making those jobs permanent, raising concerns among workers and some labor experts that temporary employees will become a larger, more entrenched part of the work force.

“‘We’re in a period where uncertainty seems to be going on forever,’ said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ‘So this period of temporary employment seems to be going on forever.’… This year, companies have hired temporary workers in significant numbers. In November, they accounted for 80 percent of the 50,000 jobs added by private sector employers, according to the Labor Department. Since the beginning of the year, employers have added a net 307,000 temporary workers, more than a quarter of the 1.17 million private sector jobs added in total.” When consumer confidence and underlying demand is anything but predictable in this marketplace, bringing back full-time employees in this period of uncertainty is a non-starter for too many American employers. But more significantly, this ability to expand and contract like an accordion to meet actual consumer demands is very likely to become a permanent part of the American labor landscape, and it will vitally change who we are and what we expect out of life. We must adapt to the obvious and find a way to prosperity through this new and obvious trend.

I’m Peter Dekom, and fundamental societal changes are truly hard to accept and profoundly disruptive, but the signs are clearly on the wall.