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Pfizer, for example, has set "increase business agility" as one of its four goals for the coming year. The company created an internal labor marketplace called PfizerWorks that lets employees bid on work from each other. Executives at Siemens told me that one of their biggest challenges today is moving engineers into new roles so they can focus on new business areas. InBev (Anheuser Busch), Scotiabank, and MetLife have all launched global talent mobility programs to force people to gain global awareness and expand business opportunities.

In our research we call this "the borderless workplace," a concept which explains how workers work seamlessly with people inside and outside their organization on a continuous basis. And this shift has redefined what a “job” actually is.

What this all means is that in today's high performing companies, people now take on "roles" not "jobs." They are responsible for "tasks" and "projects" and not simply "functions."

Le homeshoring est un centre d’appel à domicile. Cette organisation permet ainsi à des salariés de travailler de manière durable ou temporaire depuis chez eux ou en un lieu dédié. Ce mode de travail très en vogue aux États-Unis est apparu en France en 2005. On dénombre aujourd’hui quelques centaines d’agents employés comme télétravailleurs depuis leur domicile. Les téléopérateurs sont recrutés n’importe où en France sous réserve qu’ils possèdent une bonne connexion ADSL.

Pour les sociétés spécialisées, ce mode de travail présente de nombreux avantages : une économie sur les mètres carrés de bureaux à louer et une plus grande flexibilité sur les horaires de travail des employés. Le téléopérateur peut par exemple travailler 2 heures le matin et 2 heures l’après-midi. Cette planification serait difficile à mettre en place dans un call-center classique car cela obligerait le salarié à effectuer plusieurs allers et retours dans la journée.

Les inconvénients du homeshoring résident surtout au niveau du contrôle de la qualité et de la surveillance des employés. Bien que la communication se fasse en temps réel, il est toujours important de pouvoir constater de visu le travail de chaque téléopérateur afin de définir avec lui les points à améliorer. Un centre d’appel à domicile ne peut avoir la même performance qu’un call-center qu’à condition de trouver un moyen d’améliorer la relation avec les freelances. Pour y parvenir, nous pouvons citer JobPhoning qui enregistre chaque appel émis par les téléopérateurs et proposent un paiement au résultat, un service sur mesure et adapté aux tendances du marché.

Now several startups, including CrowdFlower and CrowdSource, have written software that works on top of Mechanical Turk, adding ways to test and rank workers, match them up to tasks, and organize work so it gets double- or triple-checked. “In the past [crowdsourcing] has been more experimental than a real enterprise solution,” says Stephanie Leffler, the founder of CrowdSource. “The reality is that it’s tough to do at any kind of scale.”

Two years ago, researchers at New York University estimated that 41 percent of all jobs posted to Mechanical Turk were for generating spam, generating clicks on ads, or influencing search engine results (see “How Mechanical Turk Is Broken”).

Why? The authors conduct a series of regressions and, some would argue, show the limitations of social-democratic policies:[R]eturns to skills are systematically lower in countries with higher union density, stricter employment protection, and larger public-sector shares.The analysis shows, for example, that a 25% point increase in union density (the difference, say, between Belgium and the United Kingdom) leads to a 3.5% point lower wage increase for each one-standard-deviation increase in numeracy skills.

The hierarchical organizational structure is outdated. Those outside the organization, including employees after work, have more connections and better access to knowledge than inside. Traditionally, companies have been users of human capital, demanding all intellectual property for themselves. But networks can empower individuals, building upon the strengths of each member. The innovators are moving away from companies and into networks already. Today, most new companies are hiring fewer employees and many existing companies are shedding employees at every opportunity. The newly unemployed often realize their professional networks outside the organization are inadequate. The industrial era social contract between capital and labour is broken. Workers are starting to get more professional value from their social networks than from their companies, especially through open knowledge-sharing.

Ultimately, he sees freelancing as the future. “We’re coming towards an automation kind of economy; most of Amazon will probably be automated within 10 years. As technology is liberating us, we’re becoming less necessary for routine jobs. Like Arthur C. Clarke and Buckminster Fuller said in the 1960s, 90% of people should just stay at home and play in the parks and have fun. If you build automation for the society, then the society can be free--and that’s starting to happen.”

The new site may help make that transition a little easier. “Airbnb has liberated apartments, and we can liberate people from their 9 to 5,” Hooks says. “We believe that most of us can freelance, most of us can Airbnb our place, most of us can take a day off to hang out with friends. That kind of shared economy is a visionary idea that is happening now.”

The design is basically an updated and more stylish version of an internet cafe, intended to encourage more interaction. The structure is a simple glass wall or cube, so everyone is visible while they work, like in a miniature version of the Apple store on Fifth Avenue in New York City, "As opposed to being tucked away by yourself at Starbucks, WW offers the opportunity to connect with fellow entrepreneurs while being 'out there' and seen by the public doing business," Berdou explains

According to Marx, automation that displaces workers in favour of machines that can produce more goods in less time is part and parcel of how capitalism operates. By developing fixed capital (machines), bosses can do away with much of the variable capital (workers) that saps their bottom line with pesky things like wages and short work days.

Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth.

In Marxist theory, capitalists create profit by extracting what’s called surplus value from workers—paying them less than what their time is worth and gaining the difference as profit after the commodity has been sold at market price, arrived at by metrics abstracted from the act of labour itself. So what happens when humans aren’t the ones working anymore? Curiously, Marx finds himself among the contemporary robotic utopianists in this regard. Once robots take over society’s productive forces, people will have more free time than ever before, which will “redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation,” Marx wrote. Humans, once freed from the bonds of soul-crushing capitalist labour, will develop new means of social thought and cooperation outside of the wage relation that frames most of our interactions under capitalism. In short, Marx claimed that automation would bring about the end of capitalism

In a climate of continuing high unemployment, however, people like Ms. Guidry are less microentrepreneurs than microearners. They often work seven-day weeks, trying to assemble a living wage from a series of one-off gigs. They have little recourse when the services for which they are on call change their business models or pay rates. To reduce the risks, many workers toggle among multiple services.

Certainly, it’s a good deal for consumers. Peer marketplaces democratize luxury services by making amateur chauffeurs, chefs and personal assistants available to perform occasional work once largely dominated by full-time professionals. Venture capital firms seem convinced.

In July, 9.7 million Americans were unemployed, and an additional 7.5 million were working part-time jobs because they could not find full-time work, according to estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.There are no definitive statistics on how many people work in the gig economy. But according to a report from MBO Partners, a company that provides consulting services to independent contractors, about 17.7 million Americans last year worked more than half time as independent contributors, among them project workers.

Uber has long claimed it’s a technology company, not a transportation company. Uber’s drivers are promoted as entrepreneurs and classified as independent contractors. The company claims to provide only a platform/app that enables drivers to be connected with passengers; as an intermediary, the company relies on the politics of platforms to elude responsibility as a traditional employer, as well as regulatory regimes designed to govern traditional taxi businesses.

Drivers must submit to a system that molds their interactions, controls their behavior, sets and changes rates unilaterally, and is generally structured to minimize the power of driver (“partner”) voices. Drivers make inquiries to outsourced community support representatives that work on Uber’s behalf, but their responses are based on templates or FAQs.

Uber uses surge pricing to lure drivers to work at a particular place at a particular time, without guaranteeing the validity of the surge incentive if they do follow it. Surge is produced through an algorithmic assessment of supply and demand and is subject to constant dynamism. The rate that drivers are paid is based on the passenger’s location, not their own. Even when they travel to an active surge zone, they risk receiving passengers at lower or higher surge than is initially advertised, or getting fares from outside the surge zone. Drivers will be locked out of the system for varying periods of time, like 10 minutes, 30 minutes, etc. for declining too many rides. They also get warnings for “manipulating” surge.

But Flex operates year-round, not just during the holiday season, which suggests there’s another reason for it: It’s cheap. As the larger trucking industry has discovered over the past decade, using independent contractors rather than unionized drivers saves money, because so many expenses are borne by the drivers, rather than the company.

The company doesn’t share information about how many drivers it has, but one Seattle economist calculated that 11,262 individuals drove for Flex in California between October 2016 and March 2017, based on information Amazon shared with him to help the company defend a lawsuit about Flex drivers.

“A lot of these gig-type services essentially rely on people not doing the math on what it actually costs you,”