The Delusion of the Knowledge Worker

This line jumped at me during some late-night reading of The Washington Post: "For nearly half a century, since the hippies first flocked to Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco has been associated more with cultural and lifestyle liberalism than with such New Dealish concerns as advancing workers rights."

So it is with every American city with a young and educated professional workforce. This should be called "à la carte liberalism". Young professionals can discuss freedom, maybe even dignity, but can they advocate for equity outside of a dinner conversation? Do they want to?

Your answers to those questions depend on how you define labor and laborers. Many young professionals acknowledge that domestic workers and retail workers do hard work, but we don't really respect their work. "Home health aide" and "cashier" are not positions to aspire to, so it's not surprising that any opposition to increasing their wages and benefits has an undertone of "Why are we focusing on them as opposed to ___?". Our society is more proud of an unpaid intern at a literary journal or a tech startup than a cashier at McDonald's. We still believe that the positions of these "knowledge workers" implies greater professional traction than they will ever get and if the reality was different, intern lawsuits wouldn't make so much news.

Wired published a piece last April on the "Internet-enabled intimacy" that the sharing economy has catalyzed, but I find that anything Internet-enabled is by definition less substantive and less immersive, whether it's communication or shopping. The magazine called this new intimacy an economic and cultural breakthrough, but not every breakthrough is positive in the way that not every talented person is kind. Here's the relevant quote:

"We are hopping into strangers’ cars (Lyft, Sidecar, Uber), 

welcoming them into our spare rooms (Airbnb), 

dropping our dogs off at their houses (DogVacay, Rover), 

and eating food in their dining rooms (Feastly). 

We are letting them rent our cars (RelayRides, Getaround), 

our boats (Boatbound), our houses (HomeAway), and our power tools (Zilok). 

We are entrusting complete strangers with our most valuable possessions, our personal experiences—and our very lives. In the process, we are entering a new era of Internet-enabled intimacy."

Make no mistake, young professionals are underpaid and overqualified, but we were raised to expect a certain level of comfort. Enter companies like Uber and Handybook, the best substitutes for the full-time drivers and maids we can't afford: full-time comforts on a part-time budget (with no benefits). We've pivoted from the full-time, life-long servitude depicted in "Downton Abbey" to building a pool of contractors, part-timers, and freelancers who truthfully can't expect too much more long-term. Sure, part-timers can get full-time roles, but how often does that happen? At the same company? I'll wait.

This won't be a call for greater political engagement and concern for "the common good", you can watch a Rock the Vote video for that here. Instead, this is a warning to mind your economic interests. To the "fellows", "specialists", and "analysts", low-level employees who really do the work of mid-level and high-level employees without the titles or pay to prove it (and leverage for better jobs), read this:

Just because you order your meals from Seamless and hire (temporary) personal assistants from TaskRabbit doesn't mean you're doing much better than the people who perform these services. A desk or a corporate email address can't substitute the calm that comes with economic security. The line of the disenfranchised is long and you're at the front of it, but as long as the services of any worker can be taken for granted, your meager position will never be secured, let alone increased.