I would recommend Charles Stross’ novel Accelerando for an exploration of this. It is brilliant.

I would argue that another factor that you’ve not mentioned is that employers experience volatility in work volumes and competition mandates that they try to externalise that risk. The relative weakness of unions compared to 2-3 decades ago makes this more possible. The first examples that come to my head are Peter Jackson trying to break the acting unions (it’s hard to find a better example of a job that pays very well but provides very inconsistent volumes of work) and Ports of Auckland trying to break the wharfies unions and replace them with contractors who are only paid to show up when there is work to do. Another example would be Chorus trying to shift their lines repairers to independent contractors. None of these positions I would characterise as the kind of well off ‘professional freelancers’ and certainly not as entrepreneurs, in fact all of these groups voiced considerable opposition to their casualisation.

There are substantial benefits from companies in doing this, carrying a large workforce and assett base (the Chorus contractors own their own van and tools) incurs a lot of waste and underutilised resource. The glaring example of this kind of waste is POA having to pay an entire workforce for 6 hours of no work because they finish unloading a boat in 2 hours and have a contract that mandates 8 hour shifts. I think the model of employers adopting the risk of workload volatility and giving workers decent conditions and a reliable income is a good one – but the fact is that time has passed – our companies are competing directly with the likes of coastal China that has a flexible labour pool of around 300 million migrant workers who have very little in the way of labour rights.

Have you read Gareth Morgan and Susan Guthrie’s Big Kahuna? I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on their comprehensive capital tax proposal. Given this view of a future in which there are entrepreneurs, owners of capital and a swathe of people who are niether and who scrape by providing services to these two groups (the servant class?) what do you think of capital being taxed and expected to pay it’s way on a flat playing field with labour?

Oww that sounds exiting.  Will do.