Gigging

Gigging

I alternate in thinking that I am on overload one minute and on pause the next. As soon as I find myself thinking that my situation is unique and a direct outgrowth of my own choices and circumstances, I read something or see something on cable news that makes me see people talking about exactly the same syndrome. Let’s think for a moment about that all-important baseline. My baseline is that I am 66 years old and Kim is 62 years old (almost). In the “olden” days that would put us right at the cusp of being at retirement age. In most countries of the world, for reasons that defy any logic I can find other than historical gender-biased thinking, retirement age for men extends beyond the retirement age for women by anywhere from two to five years. Be that as it may, we are now out here in a retirement-like setting, which is to say a lovely garden setting the sort to which people generally aspire in their retirement. That means that the surroundings assist the mindset to prepare to disengage with whatever “work” activities we might have dragged with us from New York City. We are at a point where Kim has two lingering board obligations from NYC, which she prefers to stay with for now. I run a company remotely as CEO and I work on expert witness work that is all done remotely. Neither of us have 40-hour-per-week full time jobs and increasingly, my work is taking on a decidedly gig nature.

While a gig is defined as either a two-wheeled carriage or a narrow small boat, it is now most used to describe a temporary or contract employment arrangement as opposed to a full-time employment situation. Data suggests that 36% of U.S. workers work as gig workers in one way or another in either their primary or secondary employment. For example, I would qualify as a gig worker completely in my expert witness work (technically, my secondary employment) since I am neither an employee nor do I go to an office to work, but rather work on a digitized basis. However, I also qualify (I think) as a gig worker in my primary employment as I am now and would have anyway (not considering the Coronavirus lockdown) been doing most of my work as an employee on a remote and therefore digitized basis. The big issue for regulators is whether they can control employment practices with gig workers taking on increased range and abundance of tasks. Things like benefits, compensation standards and working conditions (ranging from all the #MeToo concerns to the sweatshop and child labor issues) are clearly much harder to monitor in a gig marketplace. For workers, the flexibility (WFH without commutation time and expense), autonomy (who doesn’t want to be their own “boss”), task variety (during the day and over time, avoiding “Joe and the Volcano” drudgery) and complexity (more mindful and less mindless tasks).

For the most part there have been two or three trends that have dominated the gig economy development over the last two decades. The most notable one is the advancement and penetration of technology for home and mobile use. The broadband revolution was a huge contributor to the momentum. Computer hardware and software trends and the general SAS (software as a service) and app movements have brought down barriers to entry. A gig worker can literally have as little as “have smartphone will travel” as their mantra. The remote and virtual supply chain and production process along with overall outsourcing has certainly driven gig work to larger and larger scale. Doing programming in Eastern Europe of customer service in Southeast Asia is anything but rare at this stage. I have always thought of garment manufacturing as the leading edge of these trends since the work inputs are so very labor cost sensitive and simultaneously so relatively unskilled that the garment trade is always moving like a gypsy caravan through the night to wherever labor is cheapest. Did you know that blue jeans are now mostly sewn in Sub-Saharan Africa and have been for a decade? Can you think of a cheaper labor pool?

It has been thought that continued advances in technology governed the pace of growth of Gig Work activity. It is true that new technology enables new forms of work that can be done online and remotely and thereby contribute to the growth of the Gig Economy, but there is a new, far more pervasive factor now that was largely heretofore ignored. We used to think that a drawback to employees of gig work was the lack of sufficient social interaction, particularly among younger, more socially engaged workers. Despite the advertised perils of “fishing off the company pier” or “dipping your pen in company ink”, who would debate that more couplings occur due to collegial fraternization? But now there is a two-headed phenomenon that will much more powerfully drive towards and not away from the gig economy adoption.

Those two trends are the steady demographic march of the aging workforce and its desire for a comfortable retirement and the new pandemic bugaboo that puts a direct health cost to social interaction, especially among older workers, but increasingly among all workers. The urban real estate market is already trying to anticipate what Coronavirus may have done of a permanent nature to the workspace trends. Will there be less need for office space due to more WFH? Will there be more immediate renovations to move from high-occupancy open floor plans to solo offices again and will density fall accordingly, driving space needs up in square footage? Will gig workers get so used to Zoom Meetings as a way of life that they simply accept the solo environment supplemented by digital gathering mechanisms? I think looking at these two trends in combination will tell us a lot about what the future holds for the working world.

Besides increased longevity (and its concomitant increased retirement income needs in a defined contribution pension world), we now have a reduced pension asset coverage issue or increased Unfunded Liability issue that the recent reset of the markets and lower growth prospects that a post-COVID world portends. Some might suggest that Coronavirus may do a fine job of curtailing longevity advances and perhaps even reverse them. This impact may well extend beyond the obvious defined contribution space and may force the hand of the defined benefit world (especially state and municipal pensions in the U.S., but also national pension schemes backed by their government tax bases) to recalibrate benefits downward. All of this means people working longer, which is a trend that was already underway and may now be much more mandatory. It is highly disruptive and will invoke the generational warfare I have been predicting for some time. If you think of the Coronavirus narratives that are battling themselves out in the public domain, the generational conflict has just been moved from back to front burner. This is no longer about grandma eating dog food in ten years, but now about grandma being at risk of needing expensive critical care ventilation next week.

What this all tells me VERY clearly is that the gig economy is here to stay and may well take on an increasingly age-driven demographic as retirees become the new advocates and devotees of gigging. I, for one, am already into gigging and find it a perfect use of my forty-five years of work experience, affording me the freedom and flexibility to contribute productively and still feel more free and flexible as the passage of time causes me to prefer. Now I just have to figure out what to spend my discretionary income on since this all takes so many of our guilty pleasures off the table.

NB: Kim reads “gig” as meaning her performer friends that work on episodic gigs. She thinks of these gigs as in serious decline as social distancing has killed the small performance venue business. To her and her cabaret gang, there is nothing digitized about their gigs. My comment might be that I too-tightly defined the Gig Economy as digitized work. But then it might also be that the barely commercial cabaret game needs to use this shift to become more digitized, reach bigger audiences and get more profitable.