00:00Hey, I'm Elisa Kreisinger, and every Tuesday I unpack my strong opinions with the help
00:05of an expert who might not have all of the answers, but they certainly know more than
00:09I do.
00:10That's why this is Strong Opinions Loosely Held.
00:12And on this week's episode, why are we working ourselves to death?
00:16Overworking has become so second nature to millennials that even ads are serving it back
00:21to us.
00:21Because there's no better way to relate to millennials than to remind us that we're
00:25going to die working.
00:26Take this ad for Timberland that informs us that we'll never be able to retire.
00:33Need a reminder that your hard work pays off for your boss?
00:37E-Trade has got you covered.
00:41And this is one of my favorites.
00:43Do you survive on coffee, have no time to sleep, but always follow through?
00:47Then this app would love to put that passion to work.
00:53Why are we so obsessed with working ourselves to death?
00:57Well, I recently learned that it wasn't supposed to be this way.
01:01Something called the gig economy was supposed to revolutionize work.
01:04It promised to take us out of the office and put an end to boring jobs altogether.
01:09Who wants to be working for the man when we could all be our own bosses?
01:14So the gig economy promised people that they'd have flexible schedules, be independent and
01:19that this would somehow be entrepreneurship.
01:21That's journalist Sarah Kessler, who explained to me that in order to be able to survive in
01:26the gig economy, we had to act like a boss of our own small business or startup.
01:31We had to have hustle, we had to be a mover, we had to be a shaker.
01:34We had to be a doer and we had to be a maker and we had to do it all
01:37for less money and
01:38faster than the person next to us or else we literally didn't get the gig.
01:43Startups have had this idea of the hustle and kind of glorifying working really hard
01:48and building something.
01:49And the gig economy kind of hijacked that mentality of like you're building a business and you
01:55have to work really hard and you're going to become an entrepreneur.
01:58And they applied it to things where you weren't really building a business.
02:01This is so fascinating to me because the gig economy took the idea of the hustle from
02:08like the startup world.
02:09But really in the gig economy, if you're an independent contractor, you're not really
02:14a small business owner.
02:16No, you're not at all.
02:17You are, you have no potential for like a big upside.
02:20You don't have the potential for a big financial upside because you are that big financial upside.
02:25It's between 20 and 30% less expensive to hire an independent contractor, a freelance
02:31freelancer than it is a full time employee.
02:33So that creates just an enormous incentive to hire as many people who are independent
02:38contractors or freelancers as you can.
02:41The reason freelancers and independent contractors are so cheap is because companies don't have
02:46to offer them things and not things like free bagels on Fridays.
02:50Things like health insurance.
02:51The way that we created kind of our whole social safety net in the United States is that it's
02:57based on the idea of being an employee.
02:59So if you're an employee, you have unemployment insurance, you have, you know, the right to
03:03take a paid lunch break, you get paid for overtime.
03:06If you're somebody who works in the gig economy, you have none of that.
03:09You're not even protected by discrimination, like anti-discrimination laws.
03:13And so if you make this transition and you don't have your own security, then you are
03:20really left with nothing.
03:21What's scary is that we millennials, we don't even expect to have the security and the stability
03:26that our parents had.
03:27According to a Pew study, 51% of millennials assume that social security, which by the way,
03:33we are all forced to pay into, will not be around when we're ready to retire.
03:38Which quite literally means we will work ourselves to death.
03:42So to recap, the gig economy borrows the idea of the hustle from the startup world.
03:48But when you're running a startup, there's a hope that you'll make a lot of money.
03:52In the gig economy, there's no potential for that big win because you're an independent
03:57contractor.
03:57You don't own the company.
03:59In fact, you're less stable because you lack the safety net that traditionally comes with
04:03full-time employment.
04:04And we millennials actually expect to be less stable.
04:08So those ads, they have a kernel of truth to them, which might be why I'm so outraged by
04:15them.
04:16Are you?
04:17Are you as outraged as I am?
04:19When do we push back and when do we start to do something about it?
04:22See you back here next time.
