Innovation helps millennials cope in the ‘gig economy’
The future of work is as bleak as it is glamorized. The flexibility and variety of the “gig economy” sometimes do facilitate creativity and freedom. At the same time, the decline of the permanent full-time job and rising costs mean that young people entering the workforce will have less security and wealth than previous generations.
An estimated 1.9 million Canadians work as freelancers, and that number is expected to go up a lot in the next decade. Simultaneously, youth unemployment has risen precipitously, while automation promises to further erode entry-level jobs.
Creativity and freedom can be exciting. Financial insecurity, cutthroat competition for low-paying jobs and rising costs? Less fun. What is to be done? Millions of people around the world are asking the same questions, and answers are beginning to emerge. At Transform Montreal, a twoday conference at the end of April, we’ve invited the entrepreneurs behind some of the most innovative responses to the gig economy to Concordia University’s downtown campus to share their experiences.
SMart is a Belgium-based cooperative with more than 100,000 freelancer members. It restores some of the stability of full-time employment through the services it offers. These include invoicing, collection, accounting and facilitated participation in social security and employment insurance. SMart is growing by 10 per cent annually, and because it is owned by its members, they are the ones who benefit from the income earned from providing those services.
As economic inequality deepens, especially across generational lines, young people are looking for solutions that address all the contributing factors, from living costs to distribution of profits and ownership structures of businesses. As unions struggle to adapt to the decline of the full-time job, millennials are adapting an old tool — co-operatives — to new ends.
In the United States, many are discovering that co-operative ownership addresses some of the dynamics that keep communities poor. As Esteban Kelly, a keynote speaker at Transform Montreal, recently put it: “worker co-ops are ending structural extraction of wealth by anchoring money and resources in low-income communities.”
These new kinds of co-operatives do more than provide economic stability while embracing the new flexibility. They address the democratic deficit at the core of the old employment by giving workers a direct say in how their work gets done and where the proceeds get spent.
We don’t have a blueprint that shows how to solve the massive challenges young people face, but on April 29 and 30, we’ll get a pretty good preliminary sketch.
Keynotes will outline innovative solutions and dozens of workshops will share entrepreneurial knowledge, from financing to conflict resolution.
The trend lines for young people may look bleak, but things that can reverse them provide hope: living spaces and workplaces with more flexibility, more solidarity and more democracy.