FTE

Note : Cross posted from LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/fte-cityvp-manjit

A real full-time job and I mean that in the biggest and brassiest term FTE represents in the modern world work is becoming a luxury. That world of the FTE is being riipped asunder. We still read about people who write heroically about "going it alone" or "I am leaving my full-time job" as if the full-time position is still an established norm and 9-to-5 is still the primary corporate religion. The fault-line on that kind of job security began to shift a long time ago and more and more people are falling into the fault line as low paid workers or workers committing to insane hours.

The "smartphone" was smart for the people who built it. It was smart for companies like Apple because it brings in a billion moolah, but it has contributed to people working insane hours, while looking forward to more technologies that we contemplate will "disintermediate" us. That was one of the great romantic dreams of the technologists who designed this new future for us, little did we know that we were the "middle-man" in between the corporations who have FTE's and the technology that can now squeeze the life out of this brand new spanking sandwich, indeed it would be more appropriate to refer to a "smartphone" as a "shitsandwichphone".

No one really refers to AI as FTR or "Full Time Robots" but with the arrival of "transparency" which really means the end of privacy and the rise of the naked employee, who would have thought that it was the employee rather than the emperor that has no clothes on. Who would have thought that wages would remain stagnant for decades while the national debt was being handed out to the 1% - lets be clear about this, today it is the employee who has no clothes and the rest of us who say next to nothing about this massive shift of wealth, which now has reached a new level of contemplation as the FTE will be further disintermediated by the FTR.

Ironically customer relationship and customer experience have become even greater concepts than ever before - and this as we collectively contemplate in well dressed words that align with our new finely woven clothes of personal brand. Yet white collar and blue collar jobs are open to automation and when that happens what exactly does a customer mean, especially a customer that has no job or means of having disposable income?

We don't need terrorists to arrive in a city and blow it up to smithereens - the very fabric of our society has been glued together with a semi-intelligent relationship between earning and consuming. Once people do not have the net worth to sustain economic structures, those economic structures go to pot. The resulting landscape then begins to resemble a war zone, though not a single bomb or missile has been dropped or fired. Nobody declared war on Detroit but we know how large parts of that city looked like when it became a no-go area.

At the end of all of this distintermediation is the reality that the 1% will soon have its own 1% and this form of economic fascism will have reached its climax, when the super-rich will have killed this golden goose that had kept them rich beyond their wildest dreams. So wealth continues to be collected like an exclusive reservoir as we put our faith in an automated world that is created by idealists who do not have the visionary zeal of unintended consequences. Why would this new digital elite really care about these unintended consequences when they are beginning to see the "Promised Land" - that virtual mirror where they can see themselves as the new elite, the "Chosen Ones" called the 1%.

I look forward to the life of poverty ahead me as we work longer hours, for less pay and with increasing stress and ironically we will still have just enough money to replace our old "smartphone". There are many contingent workers out there working what is now called precarious jobs and most of them are given a locker, because they need a place to lock up their precious smartphone. Meanwhile that old corporate term FTE is becoming every more the luxury and those same contingent workers jostle for positioning as they hope to enter this more exclusive terrain of the Full-Time Employee with surprisingly old fashioned perks and benefits. Yet it is no longer the 9-to-5 existence our grand-dad used to know.

I don't know about anyone else but all of this feels like a "Mad World" and though I don't personally have a smartphone and increasingly find it difficult to "opt-out" of this in my present idealic lifestyle, I would still click on YouTube and watch Jules singing about it.