Good day, Fellow Trogs. Today I’m thinking about jobs. One current trend is an increase in contract employment. Not too difficult to understand: it’s a lot cheaper for a company to hire you as a contractor than as a fulltime employee because it won’t have to pay for your benefits, which are roughly 40% of an employee’s overall package.
Yesterday's NYT had an article about considering whether to become a contract employee. It's funny how the inherent assumption is that it will be your choice. The likelihood that you will have to consider this at some point in your life is not insignificant, and it will probably not have been your initial choice. Your initial choice would have looked like a fulltime job with benefits. Your initial choice probably didn’t include a layoff. Or a company that called you back several months later to do what you like to do, what you’re skilled at, for a salary that probably won’t cover the “benefits” you’ll now have to pay out yourself. (Language query: If you pay for them yourself, are they still benefits? Should I start calling my weekly grocery expedition the Food Benefit? Quick, get Safire!)
But while the article details ideas like whether you can afford your own health insurance and how much you like bookkeeping, there's no real discussion of the idea that you will have to put away for your own retirement, or what you would do if you were to become disabled. It doesn’t address whether you’re covered, as a contract employee, under Worker’s Comp. And it doesn’t mention that people who aren’t putting in facetime at an office aren’t getting promoted, either.
Hey, a job’s a job, and there are times when you do what you have to for food on the table. There are also times when it really is your choice, and the value of working from home and not worrying about dry-cleaning or having to commute and not having to put little ones in daycare is worthwhile. I'm not disputing that.
I just don’t want contract employment to seem like some halcyon holiday, b/c if the company really gave a crap about your having balance in your life, they could still pay your benefits and you could work from home. It doesn’t take a whole lot of vision to see that happy employees are better employees, but who can talk vision when that pesky bottom line keeps getting in the way?
As far as future trends, BlogTrog’s crystal ball says: When the baby boomers retire, there will be a lot less workers in the market. It's an opportunity for the workers who are left to demand better wages. However, I’m betting on a revival of Edward III’s approach.
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/jobs/22contract.html
http://www.britannia.com/history/docs/laborer1.html
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