SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Until the 1980s, big companies in America tended to take a paternalistic attitude toward their workforce. Many corporate CEOs took pride in taking care of everyone who worked at their corporate campuses. Business leaders loved to tell stories about someone working their way up from the mailroom to a C-suite office.
But this began to change in the 1980s. Wall Street investors demanded that companies focus more on maximizing returns for shareholders. An emerging corporate orthodoxy held that a company should focus on its "core competence"—the one or two functions that truly sets it apart from other companies—while contracting out other functions to third parties.
Often, companies found they could save money this way. Big companies often pay above the market rate for routine services like cleaning offices, answering phones, staffing a cafeteria, or working on an assembly line. Putting these services out for competitive bid helped the companies get these functions completed at rock-bottom rates, while avoiding the hassle of managing employees. It also saved them from having to pay the same generous benefits they offered to higher-skilled employees.
Of course, the very things that made the new arrangement attractive for big companies made it lousy for the affected workers. Not only were companies trying to spend less money on these services, but now there were companies in the middle taking a cut. Once a job got contracted out, it was much less likely to become a first step up the corporate ladder. It's hard to work your way up from the mailroom if the mailroom is run by a separate contracting firm.
[...] The existence of such a two-tier workplace is especially ironic in Silicon Valley, a region that takes pride in its egalitarian ethos. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a remarkably candid assessment of the situation in 2012, in a statement quoted by author Chrystia Freeland.
"Many tech companies solved this problem by having the lowest-paid workers not actually be employees. They’re contracted out," Schmidt said. "We can treat them differently, because we don’t really hire them. The person who’s cleaning the bathroom is not exactly the same sort of person. Which I find sort of offensive, but it is the way it’s done."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 02 2020, @11:36PM (7 children)
Why is this 'news' ??
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 02 2020, @11:48PM (5 children)
No, I think this is something different. Isn't gig economy like Uber where an individual contracts directly with the customer, while Uber mediates the transaction (and takes a fee)?
This is contracted labor, the best/worst example I know is a local R&D company, several hundred employees and fairly large buildings with other high-tech tenants. Some of the work onsite is classified. Through the 1970s they always had their own security force and regular visitors (I was one) would get to know the guards--made for a very secure place because the guards had time to worry about anyone they didn't recognize as a regular. Labor relations were generally good and the turnover in the guard staff was minimal.
New owners of the company in the late 1980s switched to a rent-a-cop security service. All of a sudden the morale of the whole place changed. Security staff was always changing (because the service didn't pay well or have good benefits). Because of the rapid turnover, the guards were checking everyone all the time, very annoying--could never get to know any of them. For a brief period one of the rent-a-guards was an ex-military guy who (a few years later) was convicted for domestic terrorist bombing!
Company changed hands back to local/management ownership sometime in the 2000s and they quickly went back to employing guards as regular employees. And morale is back up across the whole place (I still have business there every month or two).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @12:02AM (4 children)
"No, I think this is something different."
Nope, just the same shit that has existed in Hollywood for decades.
Movie producers don't hire workers, they contract it all out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @12:49AM
Dude, you really need to stop making posts about things I don't care about. Have some consideration for once! /s cause it probably has to have it
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @01:54AM (2 children)
> Movie producers don't hire workers, they contract it all out.
But that makes sense to me -- the movie crew comes together for some months (or maybe a year or so) until the movie is done, then splits up. No permanence in the crew because the project is over. Same for the actors, they audition and if they get the role they are employed for the duration of the project (and may also share in revenue, depending on their contract terms).
I have no idea, but maybe in the distant past, studios had a regular crew that was made of employees? If so then the studio management would have to always be ready to make the next movie (or else the company would be paying the crew to be idle).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @03:13AM (1 child)
You are right. Back in Hollywood's "Golden Age", the studios would crank out the movies. If you were an actress or a stage hand, you never stopped working.
Things are more "blockbuster" driven these days: much larger bets placed on much fewer movies. In the Golden Age, the more frequent release cycle worked because people didn't have televisions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday March 03 2020, @01:34PM
My wife is friends with a couple who are both professional set designers. The husband has worked on blockbuster movies (if you saw the scene in I Am Legend where Will Smith is hunting in a forested section of Midtown NYC, that's his handiwork), but has mainly been employed by the TV series Gossip Girl for the past decade. The TV shows seem to have a more regular crew that produces each episode.
He has often remarked how grateful he is for the steady work of the TV show, because it's hard to raise a family on the random gigs that are blockbusters--you have to hustle all the time to line up your next job while you're still on the current job.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @05:23AM
This has literally nothing to do with the gig economy. The gig economy is a person to person service system where a third party arranges the meeting and takes a cut. This a business to business system.