Unbundling Work from Employment (2020)

https://www.atelierventures.co/content/unbundling-work-from-employment

34 60 5 years ago

Flankk2• 5 years ago

I think a lot of people have realized their time is more valuable than money. Sure, you can make money through entrepreneurship. Even better than that is you're finally free.

zivkovicp• 5 years ago

It is very difficult, time consuming, and stressful to run a business. More so if you have employees. Self-employment does not always provide the freedom most people imagine.

I have gone back to employment myself, it's less stressful, and allows me a lot more time for my family. To be fair, I never had any significant success, I'm sure I'd be singing a different tune otherwise; so I guess the takeaway is "your mileage may vary". :)

Flankk2• 5 years ago

I don't disagree. I think people are looking for change regardless.

k__4• 5 years ago

I quit my last employment in 2013 and never looked back.

Even when working remote, essentially being "on call" for at least 40h a week isn't a life for me.

sdze2• 5 years ago

but how exactly did you escape? Where do you get your work now?

sillysaurusx2• 5 years ago

Just quit! It's great. Turns out the door is right there. We can all walk through it.

To be less sarcastic, the answer is very likely that their spouse works. I put my wife through college, then she carried us the next four years, aka way too long. But now I'm making so much money in ML that it's actually hard to spend it, so it all worked out.

Another way to phrase it is "You know, the usual. You just have to get super lucky in life. Just don't be unlucky, duh."

k__4• 5 years ago

I just quit and lived a year by my savings. Later I did a few web and mobile projects to pay the rent. Started blogging for marketing, but it turned out I'm reasonably good at it, so companies approached me and asked if I could write for them. So, I basically transitioned into technical writing/developer relations/education. That's what I'm doing to make money right now, and since every article is also an advertisement for my work, new clients find me online.

roschdal• 5 years ago

Being employed in one company is more stable and less risky, than being an individual freelance-worker.

WJW2• 5 years ago

Is it? It is true that you need to look for new employers less often, but if you get laid off then you lose 100% of your income instead of just a part. A freelancer with 4-5 companies that regularly need some work done may have a higher chance of being fired from any one of those, but probably a much lower chance of being fired from all of them than a regular employee has from their single job.

The "needing to find additional employment" are less frequent but much higher impact for an employee than for a freelancer.

krageon• 5 years ago

Is it?

Yes, if you live in a country with good worker protection (in the US a lot of "salaried" work is effectively freelance).

if you get laid off then you lose 100% of your income instead of just a part

Yes, if. With good protections and a solid company choice, such a scenario has a likelihood approaching zero.

The "needing to find additional employment" are less frequent but much higher impact for an employee than for a freelancer.

I would say the freelancer has a higher impact of this, because their entire work history is filled with needing to find new work. That is the nature of doing work without an enduring relationship.

amacasubstack• 5 years ago

The world has changed dramatically. I change company until I find one which is ok with me working fewer hours. This is hardly done as employed.

Most freelancers are now employed full-time (like permanent employee) and can quickly change job until they find one with good work/life balance [1].

[1] https://amaca.substack.com/p/how-i-got-wealthy-without-worki...

cadamson2• 5 years ago

How?

lou1306• 5 years ago

Could somebody please let the banks know that "work is being unbundled from traditional employment"? At least in Europe, I am afraid they still expect your employment to be quite traditional (or your collaterals to be quite valuable) if you want to get a loan.

chrisseaton2• 5 years ago

When I've applied for a mortgage and things they've always just looked at my income not my employment. Like most people I've got multiple little incomes and you need to consider them all.

Balero• 5 years ago

In the UK they looked at employment first, and some sort of secondary income separately.

Like most people I've got multiple little incomes and you need to consider them all.

I was also a little skeptical about your usage of most here, but wasn't sure if that was because I am in a bubble. For the UK it looks like about 4% of people are in second jobs. Do you think this differs where you are?

- Workers with second jobs UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor... - Number of workers UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...

PopAlongKid4• 5 years ago

In the U.S., if you can produce one or more W-2 tax forms (annual report of wages paid) adding up to about a full-time job, the banks check it off their list and move on to the next item. However if you are self-employed, they want multiple year copies of your detail business income tax form, and letters from your accountant or tax preparer stating that your business is profitable, viable in the future, etc (which is just the banks trying to meaninglessly off-load some of their risk to a 3rd party).

ravenstine• 5 years ago

How are they supposed to make a profit on delinquency fees and high interest rates if you're capable enough to generate your own revenue? ;)

moffkalast• 5 years ago

Yeah that is quite the downside. As someone living in the EU working a remote job for a foreign company on an hourly basis it's impossible to get a loan. Credit score doesn't exist and banks tell you to go fuck yourself if you don't have a full time job. Hell they even limit you to like 300€ per month on credit cards, I had to start using a prepaid card to actually pay for anything.

betwixthewires6• 5 years ago

Sort of a side tangent, but what banks are looking for specifically is demonstrable collateral for a loan that they can get access to, and the risk landscape is such that they're very constrained in what type of collateral this is with regard to people without a lot of capital. They look for employment because that's where most of the risk can be offloaded to.

What would be nice to see would be forms of collateralized loans where the lender doesn't have to take custody of the collateral until default, which requires that they can actually take possession at a later date. We see this with homes, equity loans and the like, primarily because homes cannot be moved, but more importantly because lenders have a way to stop a sale before the loan is paid. With assets that can be moved around it is much harder, but imagine a scenario where for example, you can borrow against stock or a CD or something else, and the lender never touches the asset but becomes entitled to it if you default. This would significantly reduce lender friction and allow more people to take out loans with more different sources of income.

TheRealDunkirk5• 5 years ago

This is just another paean to making all white-collar work "gig" work, undermining the security and benefits of traditional employment, in favor of making better-looking numbers on balance sheets for startups. Don't buy into this. Some people can do it; other's can't. I could, but I don't want to. It's too much stress on my interpersonal skills. The single, biggest, best change we could make with employment in this country -- which would benefit employer and employee alike -- is to decouple health insurance from it. It'd be better to break it out and let us buy health insurance like car insurance, but we'll eventually get nationalized health care or socialized medicine or whatever you want to call it. Either way, this will alleviate a lot of pressure on companies on their hiring decisions, and on people who get locked in jobs because of health issues.

cadamson2• 5 years ago

What are/is the security and benefits of traditional employment?

sklargh2• 5 years ago

Directly to this question - paid sick leave (generally), limited protection from physical harm and healthcare (US). In Europe, extensive protection from the unemployment’s demonstrated nearly irreparable harms, including hunger and reduced lifespan.

Broadly - oh my goodness, this article is pure regulatory arbitrage amalgamated with some kind of hellscapish McKinsey/VC dross. Net - firms would like to reduce you to an expendable, unprotected line item without recourse to traditional employment law. There is nothing innovative or interesting here, a pure desire to extract maximum value from fellow humans without consideration or care for what we owe each other.

Enough of this shit, in particular the aggregation of labor for the purpose of building a surveillance sensor aperture for ads.

Mezzie2• 5 years ago

In my experience as somebody who's worked as a freelancer/for myself and also as an employee, I like that I don't have to find my own work. That tends to be its own job on top of the work I actually like to do. I also don't need to brand myself or maintain a bunch of public projects so I can work in a few months.

In addition, taking a few months and putting in almost no effort at work to focus on other parts of your life has a lot of value and that's really hard to pull off in the gig-type economy. The last few months, I've been giving very little at work due to some mental health issues (I've still done my job just fine, but the extra things I do to build my skills + benefit my company aren't getting done), which in the long term is going to do way more for my productivity and quality of life than chasing the next gig. This can also be true of health, or family (e.g. if a family member needs your help after surgery).

There are benefits and drawbacks to each work arrangement.

Take this with a grain of salt, though, as I don't work in tech, and the primary reason why is because I wasn't willing to forego all my other hobbies for it. Tech is for fun: The times I've to support myself with my tech skills I hated it.

A lot of the benefit of conventional employment in my experience is being more able to leave work at work. It's also, in some ways, more beneficial as you age and are more likely to accumulate additional non-work responsibilities. That said, this is only if you get DECENT traditional employment. I'd take gig work over what they do to retail and food-service workers ANY day of the week.

ebiester• 5 years ago

Minimum wage, protections against discrimination, safe working laws, unemployment...

try_again• 5 years ago

When you state "in this country", please specify what country that is. Despite the use of English as the lingua franca here we're amongst a geographically diverse group. I'm going to assume you mean the US. If that's a correct guess, as a European the US work standards frighten me. Health insurance so tightly coupled to work that if you get into an accident shortly after being laid off and don't have (expensive) private insurance you could be bankrupted by it. Two weeks vacation per year seems to be common and I've repeatedly heard that employees are being pressured to not actually use their full paid time off. Maybe I've just been too coddled by the working conditions here in Belgium but I simply can't imagine working in the US without going completely mad or sinking into a depression. I know that I pay incredibly high taxes, but a higher income at the cost of living in such a cutthroat environment simply doesn't seem worth it to me. And to be honest I consider my standard of living to be very high and comfortable, both in spite of and thanks to taxes.

TheRealDunkirk5• 5 years ago

This is a forum run by a US VC firm talking about US startups. One could almost forgive the assumption that people would understand that I was referring to the US. ;-)

graycat2• 5 years ago

you could be bankrupted by it

It's tough to be an expert, to be well informed on how US medical care gets paid for. I'm no expert, but I know a little more than nothing:

So, for "bankrupted", yes, sort of ....

But the US has Hill-Burton hospitals, likely named after two guys in Congress who got the bill passed. With the Hill-Burton act, if are starting a hospital, then can get funding via the act. BUT: Have to accept all patients independent of ability to pay. Soooo, a large fraction of city hospitals are Hill-Burton. Then there are the medical school teaching-research hospitals -- again commonly or always, patients are accepted independent of ability to pay.

If someone really is broke, then they can qualify for Medicaid -- "never receive a bill for medical care."

For people old enough to be retired, there is Medicare. Part A covers a major fraction of hospital charges and is free. Part B covers physician charges, and is not free, maybe a few $hundred a month. There is another part for drugs.

For poor people, there is the HRSA (Federal Health Resources Services Administration) or some such -- clinics with sliding scale charges based on ability of patients to pay.

It goes on this way. It's a patchwork system. Not all the important details are really clear. E.g., there is a lot of over billing, that is, charging too much, and in this case the insurance company has a talk with the physician/hospital and negotiates lower charges. For drugs, the prices can vary enormously based on whatever.

There has been at least one effort to get the medical providers to publish a price list, i.e., to clear up the lack of cost information.

I don't know all the details, but my understanding is that it is very rare for medical care charges actually to bankrupt someone.

E.g., one approach is for a patient who owes big bucks to pay, say, $10 a month for 6 years -- then by laws of debts, the rest owed is forgiven, that is, not owed.

One way and another, in summary, from 50,000 feet up, generally, the US tries really hard not to have all of medical care run by the Federal government, or any level of government. E.g., there could be a system single payer where the there is only one entity that pays for anything about medical care; of course, that entity likely is run by the Federal government and gets a lot of tax money. Single payer has been proposed 220,872,879 times and rejected by that many times.

Some of the scare is that single payer would result in some or all of (a) taxes way too high, (b) too much just wasteful, silly, and unneeded medical care, (c) low quality of care and, thus, too many people hurt or dead, (d) too little capacity where too many patients die from waiting too long for care, etc. I don't know what if anything is right/wrong with (a) -- (d), but these are concerns commonly voiced.

Maybe the US could borrow from, at least learn from, Switzerland, England, ....

But actually bankrupt from just losing a job? I suspect that is actually not very common.

Oh, by the way, if fired, then commonly get to continue medical insurance coverage for some length of time.

betwixthewires6• 5 years ago

We both know it's better than a guess. Most of the users here are Americans, no need to have a cow over it.

Cthulhu_• 5 years ago

Health care being linked to employment in the US is a form of 'golden handcuffs', a means to keep you at an employer and persist even though you're dissatisfied.

Some IT companies (especially startups, but it varies) do it with stocks or stock options as well, tying them to your employment.

Anyway, no civilized country should require you to be employed to be entitled to health care. Not making health care available to everyone, regardless of wealth or employment status, is classist eugenics.

PopAlongKid4• 5 years ago

There was a major change in this regard with the Affordable Care Act (now in place over 10 years). It eliminated the ability of insurers to deny health coverage if you have a pre-existing condition and have not maintained continuous creditable coverage. So the risk of leaving a job and losing health insurance is now much lower, since you can always get insurance later, or get it as an unemployed individual with a large subsidy if you don't have much total income. Neither of these things was true before.

betwixthewires6• 5 years ago

While I'm with you on decoupling health insurance from employment, I'm not too convinced that moving white collar work into "the gig economy" is bad. IMO the two things appear to go hand in hand.

The security benefits of being a company man are to be weighed by each individual against their own priorities. For some, doing whatever work a company needs how and when they need it in exchange for a secure paycheck or other benefits is the smart choice. For others, the lowered perceived security is worth being able to decide what to work on and how and when to work.

Generally speaking, if those security benefits that come with giving one entity a monopoly over your skills and productivity were as strong as they once were the gig economy wouldn't exist. The benefits IMO are overstated. In a world where these entities treat professionals as fungible, it only makes sense that the professionals treat those entities as fungible as well, and it is only fair, and freeing and empowering, if that sort of thing appeals to you.

jmbwell• 5 years ago

Does this describe actual entrepreneurship, or does it describe working for a number of platforms instead of working for a single employer?

It seems to me the platform is the entrepreneur, not the person logging into the app to try to hustle for fares.

betwixthewires6• 5 years ago

This IMO is the biggest problem we have in this gig economy thing. It's not that people can choose what work they want to do and when, it's that the market is dominated by middlemen and rent seekers. Products like Uber and Upwork and the rest are marketed as platforms that people can network and professionals can find clients and people can find services they need. The vision is nice, but what winds up happening is these "platforms" cease to be platforms in short order and become a new employer masquerading as an unbiased order book to continue to skirt the responsibilities of a traditional employer.

There's a better way, a truly unbiased platform or set of platforms to enable people with services to offer and people who need those services to network with one another without the rent seeking. Perhaps that comes in the form of a non profit org, perhaps a distributed social networking system specifically targeted and certain kinds of work, I don't know, but I do know that if the middleman can be eliminated we can have something better than what we have now both in terms of gig work and traditional employment.

PopAlongKid4• 5 years ago

When workers are unbundled from institutions, they lose access to many of the services and benefits that traditional employment conferred: income smoothing with automated tax withholding (i.e. a paycheck), healthcare, employer-sponsored retirement plans

In the U.S., self-employed workers who make a profit have the same access to retirement plans (401k, SEP-IRA) as employees, and also have the same ability to pay for health insurance with pre-tax dollars as employees. In fact, self-employed people can contribute far higher amounts to tax-deferred retirment plans than employees in most cases.

Unbundling Work from Employment (2020)

Related Stories