The New Job Market

Here is an interesting, and depressing, article about the new job market. People don’t have jobs anymore, claims Tina Brown. Instead, they have gigs. These are temporary jobs that don’t pay very much and which of course don’t have benefits. Plus, one probably needs more than one of them at a time to make ends meet.

I’ve been having gigs for about twenty years now, and the gigs I've had lately have been teaching or tutoring in Arabic as well as doing a little programming. But I’m in the lucky position of having a spouse with a solid full-time job which pays decent money. Many other people with gigs will have a much harder time than me. These are the people who recently graduated from college and who have massive amounts of debt.

If they were in debt to corporations, the left would blame this on the greed of the CEOs, but because the debt comes from getting a college education, no leftist wants to blame it on the greed of our colleges and universities.

But no matter whom we blame, it is a depressing state of affairs with no end in sight.

Comments

[Mark Spahn]

As I understand your distinction, a job comes with a salary, a gig does not. But a lot of people have an all-gig worklife. Examples: any independent (= unsalaried) plumber, repairman, house builder, hot-dog vendor, real-estate lawyer.

[John Pepple]

Well, I think one point Tina Brown is making is that the practice of having gigs has now been extended beyond the plumbers, etc., to people with college educations who expected to get a salaried position.

I also think there is a difference between plumbers and this new group that have gigs. I don’t know what to call them, but try intellectual handymen. Yeah, I know; it’s a sexist term, but still useful.

1. Plumbers just do plumbing, while these intellectual handymen do a variety of things.

2. Plumbers got their training by being apprentices, or else by spending a couple years in a trade school. The new people have a college education, with huge debts to keep them at the bottom forever.

3. Plumbers advertise in the phone book, while intellectual handymen don’t. In other words, plumbers basically wait for customers to come to them, while intellectual handymen must hustle to get jobs.

Being a plumber looks like a better bet to me.