Companies are doing mass layoffs while complaining about not being able to find enough employees.
Some workers are min-maxing the system by working multiple fulltime jobs at the same time while others need to work hours of unpaid overtime at just one job.
This is not to mention that the gig economy is consuming entire sections of the workforce.
The 9 to 5 was created by American labour unions in the 1800s and became mainstream over 100 years ago when jobs looked like this
And this was revolutionary for its time but how many of the modern problems in the corporate world are caused by trying to make an outdated system fit with every single modern job.
A large section of the population is now working multiple jobs despite wages going up.
This is called being over employed.
People now need multiple jobs just to pay rent and groceries.
A report by the management consulting firm McKinsey found that 2/3rds of the average human's wealth is in the work they can do over their lifetime.
Everybody has time, effort and experience that they can trade for money and those tradable commodities are worth at least twice as much as all the other assets that the average person possesses.
A regular 9 to 5 job has been a great way for billions of people to safely exchange a predictable amount of their time for a predictable pay check with predictable career advancements as they gain more experience but this one- size fits-all model for work doesn't fit with every job and trying to make it work has been bad for employees and bad for companies for three reasons which is causing three equally terrible trends in the job market
The first trend is that it makes time a worthless asset - the Ford Motor Company was one of the first businesses in the world to adopt the 9 to-5, 40 hour work week.
Henry Ford did this to make his company the most attractive place for auto workers to get a job.
This allowed him to pull talent away from other automakers without paying his workers more.
In order to compete with Ford, other automakers were forced to offer the same 40-hour work week with paid overtime.
Eventually, in order to compete with the automakers, other companies were also forced to offer 9-to-5 jobs so that their best workers didn't quit and go and work on the car assembly line.
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These auto workers had tightly defined and repetitive tasks so unless the workers succumbed to exhaustion, they could do a consistent amount of work for every hour they spent at their post and every additional hour would produce the same amount of output.
If you work in a modern office job, you will know that your work is nothing like this.
Sometimes there is a lot to do and sometimes there is nothing to do but you still need to be there 8 hours a day looking busy no matter what.
Back when the 40-hour week was being fought for by workers’ unions, most people in the growing middle class worked in manufacturing but today most people work in the services sector which is more diverse than you might expect.
Unless you are working on a farm or in a factory, you are most likely a service worker and your job could be anything from making strategic corporate decisions to making coffees.
Clearly these jobs are very different and should have a different schedule but most of the corporate world has tried to make the 9 to-5 fit all jobs but this doesn't work because no service jobs have tasks consistently delivered on a fine-tuned production line.
Work comes and goes as internal and external customers make demands, and that means when people are busy and need to do more than 8 hours in a day to finsh their work, they are expected to work “reasonable unpaid overtime”.
According to an ADP Research Institute study of office professionals, paid overtime jumped to an average of 99.2 hours per week in 2021, more than a full extra day to keep up with employer demands but when there is little to no work to do because a project has just been completed or sales are seasonally slow, workers are still expected to put in the 40 hours a week because that's what the business is paying them for.
If you're in this kind of job, your best option is to try and find something that makes you look busy but if you don't have something to work on, you are probably going to be given meaningless tasks just to fill the mandatory 8 hour day.
If this was just another story about companies screwing over their workers with outdated business practices, it wouldn't need a newsletter but the 40-hour work week isn't even good for companies!
It’s time to find out why we might be in the midst of the overdue collapse of the 9-5.
According to data from the US Census Bureau, McKinsey & Company and compiled by Statista, growth in gig work and freelance Jobs have outgrown typical permanent jobs by 500% over the last decade.
Gig work apps have become very popular with unskilled workers due to their low barrier to entry and flexible working arrangements.
Someone with a phone and a bike can start working for a food delivery service like Uber Eats, Postmates, Door Dash, Grubhub, Zomato, Swiggy or all of them all at the same time in less than an hour by filling out an online form.
This has been a highly appealing alternative to minimum wage jobs that still rely on the antiquated process of handing in a resume, spending weeks doing job interviews only to still get ghosted by a small to mid-sized company offering $7.25/hour for an unpredictable schedule.
Gig work jobs usually also pay terribly but people get to work as much as they want, when they want and they can work around another full-time job for extra money.
Even with all of the problems of gig work, you can see why it has become so popular.
If you enjoyed this breakdown on the emergence of the gig economy, you’ll definitely enjoy tomorrow’s issue on the rise of private contracting and freelancing (and why it might be a trap!).