Future Workers : A look at employment types in the next 3-5 decades
Hi All,
I hope you all are doing well and welcome to Dozen Worthy Reads. A newsletter where I talk about the most interesting things about tech that I read the past couple of weeks or write about tech happenings. You can sign up here or just read on …
First off, apologies for not being able to publish last week. Some weeks are just unpredictable. I usually hope to let you know in advance! Let's get into it …
I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about problems that creators have (as we’re building products related to creator issues). At the same time I came across an interesting article from WSJ : These People Who Work From Home Have a Secret: They Have Two Jobs and my mind kept coming back to employment models but I also started thinking about all other possible employment models and where bargaining power might lie in the future.
I define several different “types” of work but the intent is not to cover every single type of work but more to look at how they will evolve and who’d have power in the future. The general precursor to this COVID and the ability to work remotely. In the future many more jobs will be done remotely but the key question I think about is what are jobs that CANNOT be done remotely? Think about the street maintenance worker driving on 4th and Market in SF. Think about your favorite surgeon (can you even have a favorite surgeon?). Now these are two slightly different examples but can either of them be done “remotely”? Yes!
Your favorite surgeon can, today, do certain procedures remotely and MANY more in the future, remotely. Same with the street maintenance worker. A similar example : A miner operating a mine … remotely
A worker operates an unmanned excavator by remote control at Sandaozhuang Mine of China Molybdenum Co., Ltd. in Luanchuan County, central China's Henan Province, Aug. 12, 2020
So, let's assume that work can be done from anywhere. Your “world” of surgeons is no longer Ms. Expensive USA but now could be Ms. Cheaper India or anyone else anywhere else right? This is likely to create serious downward pressure on certain jobs in the long run. I do think it's quite a likely scenario but of course more complex surgeries will need to be done in person perhaps because of equipment or whatever other reason.
This leads me to believe that there will be four employment models in the future with different bargaining power
Gig workers
Creative workers
Intellectual “skilled” workers
Non-intellectual “skilled” workers
If you ever studied economics or have heard the term skilled, semi-skilled, and low-skill/unskilled labor; i’ve kinda redefined them because I think every job requires skill, some of it might be less intellectual.
Gig Workers
Gig workers has always been this catch-all term to encompass non-traditional employment. For example, are screen actors “gig workers”? Think of how movie studios work; Tom Hanks is not “owned” by a studio but rented out for a specific movie, so to speak, so technically Tom Hanks is a “gig worker”
Gig workers, however, will encompass more jobs where the work is fungible. Note this DOES NOT mean “unskilled”. It only means that the work will be extremely transactional in nature - similar to a Uber driver. I mean driving a car is a skill! Just ask Waymo that has the most brilliant minds trying to make a car drive itself or your pet cat.
Other examples such as a person working in a call center in the Philippines or someone in LA working on the copy for your new app might not work for you as a full time employee but they are not “gig workers”.
Regulation for gig workers will only increase, irrespective of gig worker type. In fact just last week a California judge ruled that Prop 22 (yes THAT prop 22, which I so hate) is unconstitutional because it infringes on the Legislature’s power to set workplace standards.
The best way to think about this is the work interaction. Someone “working” for you for an hour or a day might be a “gig worker”
Creative workers
In my opinion creative workers will be the ruling class. Not every creative worker will rule but MANY will try. Per : Research Proves 'Influencer' As One Of The Most Popular Career Options Among Children
According to a recent study which was conducted with 2,000 parents having at least one child aged between 11 and 16, it has been proved that social media influencer and YouTuber stood second (17 per cent) and third (14 per cent) in the list of most popular professions that children wish to pursue for their careers. Doctors topped the list with 18 per cent.
The point isn’t how accurate the survey is. The point is that 80% of the world will be entertained by 20% of the most popular creators. In order to get there, today, creators have to go through what I like to call aggregator tax. First you start off with a large media platform, put content out there, hope that you get noticed and get famous and you just might. Of course for every creator that gets “famous” there are thousands that DO NOT. Today, there are hundreds of companies in the creator economy. Some are creating the problem (you know which ones) and some are working hard to solve them. Today there are 50M creators per a SignalFire Report but given that we have ~8B people projected to grow to ~10B people in a mere 30-40 years. Even if 5% of this 10B population creates content we’re talking about 500M creators.
Creators are pissed with large platforms that technically provide them with discovery but when they become famous they hate paying 10-70% of their income to a large platform; I mean why should they? For the discovery? This of course is why aggregators are a special form of company. Aggregators have incorrectly thought that content is fungible and that creators are fungible. THEY.ARE.NOT. Aggregator media today is kinda realizing this. Every company from FB/Insta to Snap to Twitter to TikTok to Substack are providing creators with incentive to create content on their platforms. The purpose of course is not altruistic; it's to keep the content coming; keep the eyeballs rolling and keep those ad units. What are they not providing a creator with? Agency. I think there is a LOT of room for tech companies to come in and provide agency. Proving agency and discovery might just be different ends of the spectrum. Shopify for example provides a seller with agency (you own your website, you own your customer) and they provide light-weight discovery with their Shop App. I’m not sure how good a strategy this is but this is definitely one way out for creators; You have your OWN, owned presence so that no company can “throw you off” (at least technically because moderation can happen at any layer) and lightweight, non-algorithmic discovery. I mean why should Tom Cruise be the only one who can have a presence online and be a “destination” site (and no I don't much like him!)
I think there is a lot of tech innovation to be done for creators - to allow for agency, payments, presence, non-algorithmic discovery. Similar to the first wave of tech that was purpose built for knowledge workers, we’re going to see the number of companies investing in creator worker tech increase 10 fold. I have only, as you can tell, described one type of creator here but there are obviously places where this line can blur. Is a person who creates explainer videos a creator? Yes! The problem described above still exists for this creator, too. Discovery is a challenge, and algorithms and searches on an Upwork or Fiverr don't help and plus they take a good % of the earned income
There are a couple more interesting avenues here; Firstly creators will be able to raise money for a unit of stock in the creator’s future income. This is similar to Income Sharing Agreements that are becoming more commonplace nowadays. Creators will not have a “formal education” path in the sense that there will not be a college degree similar to an MBA (an MCA? Master of Creative Administration?). Secondly creators will start to “use” their fame more to create businesses; and not just the largest creators but also smaller and smaller creators who have a niche skill will also be able to do that in more ways than ever possible before.
Intellectual “skilled” workers
Today these are the uh 9 to 5 workers. Professionals with advanced degrees to a great extent with a bunch of intellectual skills, which I define as “brain work”. Now of course as the WSJ article above pointed out there are people who are doing multiple jobs and getting paid multiple times; this of course is wrong. The part that I think becomes reality is that a person will indeed have multiple jobs, working specific hours at each. There are several reasons I expect that this trend will continue to take shape and solidify. Firstly, there is no such thing as “lifetime” employment; employers of course are not innocent victims here - ticker pressure, investor pressure, market pressure etc force employers to lay off workers; A significant % of employees are always looking since they know that they don’t have a permanent home in that company. Secondly people are bored at work. Bored because of multiple things : repetitive work (the ill of intellectual specialization), longer turnaround times between employees across time zones; incorrectly positioned. Now this was expected to happen, especially if you have more college educated professionals and only so many “jobs” for those “college educated” intellectuals. There is going to be significant downward pressure on wages if two things hold good : Remote work and more non-college educated people being given a chance, which is good; and WILL happen!
I think holding multiple part time jobs is good for both the employer and the employee
The employer gets an employee that is motivated; less worried; and more likely to stay. The employee gets to learn from multiple different places, bring multiple experiences to work everyday; not be bored; and realize fulfillment. Furthermore, employees also have more “job security” since if you lose one of your jobs, you lose only a certain % of your income and not all of it. I expect a significant amount of investment in tech that enables “part time” work and I expect part time work will be the norm in the next 3-5 decades (and possibly I’ll be dead by then even if I am wrong)
I think what is also worth mentioning is that there are two trends at odd’s with each other in the intellectual, skilled workplace.
The first is this concept of “work family”. Look, let’s just be clear here that you can definitely have a good relationship with people you work with. I respect today, and have in the past, most of the people that I worked with/for but having an expectation that they’ll be there for you when the proverbial sh*t hits the ceiling will probably not be true. No, I’m not cynical, in fact, the people I hang the most with and consider my close friends are people I met through work BUT built a relationship outside of work. My message to my team generally is quite simple : You and me are here because work led us here but this is not the end of our relationship irrespective of where you or I work.
The second trend is workplace activism. If you’ve read the news you know which companies have this “activism”. Now you’ll see stories of “work family” and “activism” in the same companies. How can this be true at the same time. Some companies will treat you like “family” (We are here for you etc etc and in fact my previous employer from 2011 - 2015 was that way until it came down to me wanting to switch into Product Management. In fact I wasn’t even interviewed, just rejected with … get this … a very senior level exec stating to me “you’ll never be a product manager” .. Thank you “work family” ;)) but when it comes down to choosing people always choose the company - nothing wrong with it. I do think this trend will continue in the workplace where more and more skilled workers will come to a self realization that there are many options outside the “work family golden handcuffs”.
Non-intellectual “skilled” workers
The last category will be workers whose skill is seemingly less intellectual. Think of a job (or profession) such as a cook. Is a cook “unskilled”? If your answer is yes , you’ve obviously never tried to cook 4 things at a time and pretty much screw them all up! I think this group of workers will continue to exist but as the threat of automation sinks in to some of these specific jobs we’ll have fewer and fewer people working such jobs,
similar to agriculture and farming:
Overall, I think this is an extremely exciting time for tech to be able to enable, empower, and even accelerate these changes to how we’re going to work in the future.
Given the nature of the topic, I’d like to clearly call out that these are MY opinions and MY opinions only. Not those of my employer!
Thank you for reading. Stay safe, be well! If you enjoyed reading this please consider sharing with a friend or two (or sign up here if you came across this or were forwarded this)
