The Industrial Revolution led to the creation of many large and mid-size companies in which people worked together to produce goods and/or deliver services. Having a good job meant working for one such company. These workers, many of them unionized, enjoyed relatively secure, stable jobs and a number of company benefits, including health care insurance, vacations and retirement pensions.
This corporate capitalism era, - characterized by hierarchically organized institutions, - reached its height in the US in the period following World War 2, when the country craved a sense of stability following the pain and chaos of the Great Depression and the war years. But those days are long gone. In the more recent past, these relatively slow moving organizations were not able to keep up with fast changing technologies and markets, nor could individuals assume that being loyal to a company would translate into a secure job with good benefits.
In its stead, we are seeing the rise of what The Economist called the On-Demand Economy in a recent article. “Ever since the 1970s,… Manufacturing jobs have been automated out of existence or outsourced abroad, while big companies have abandoned lifetime employment. Some 53m American workers already work as freelances.”
Two powerful forces have been speeding this trend toward on-demand workers and pushing it into more parts of the economy. First is the availability of ubiquitous and inexpensive computing power, sophisticated applications, and cloud-based services of all kinds. “Complex tasks, such as programming a computer or writing a legal brief, can now be divided into their component parts - and subcontracted to specialists around the world.”
“The other great force is changing social habits. Karl Marx said that the world would be divided into people who owned the means of production - the idle rich - and people who worked for them. In fact it is increasingly being divided between people who have money but no time and people who have time but no money. The on-demand economy provides a way for these two groups to trade with each other.”...MORETangentially related:
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