HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Sorry, Millennials, We’re Out of the Jobs You Want.

Millennials don’t want to work in sales, reports the Wall Street Journal. They think it’s exploitative. They also hate the idea of variable compensation; they want a nice, steady job where the company takes the risk, not the worker.

The feeling that sales is exploitative is not new; people have always been uncomfortable with the idea of selling something or being sold. And, of course, many people have always been uncomfortable with the idea of variable compensation. But if companies are having a harder time finding people to take sales jobs and reworking compensation packages to decrease the commission component, that is worth noting. . . .

Unfortunately, as Farhad Manjoo noted last week, they may be coming of age at a moment when the economy is moving toward more variable work, not less. Uber and similar services are making it relatively easy to employ people in a high-tech version of piecework: discrete tasks that are parceled out moment by moment, entirely contingent on demand. Robert Reich thinks this is terrible. If the Journal’s article is any guide, it’s not what the new generation of entering workers wants. But it may be what’s available.

In some sense, the 9-to-5 salaried position is an artifact of the industrial era. Such jobs existed before then, of course, in government offices and large institutions. But most jobs were much less defined. Armies of people worked for themselves, as farmers or traders or craftsmen, working only when there was demand and making only whatever profit they could eke out from their sales. Others were domestic servants, who had a steady salary but no steady hours.

Economies of scale created a lot of work doing routinized tasks that needed to be planned well in advance. The easiest way to coordinate this was to have set shifts of workers who showed up at the same time every day, prepared to do the same thing. The conversion of a huge fraction of the workforce to this sort of employment was a major revolution in human affairs. After two centuries, however, it seems natural.

Technology is making it much easier to do things on a smaller scale.

Huh. That sounds kinda familiar.