3 ms·

The employment model needs to change. With the rise of gig work, constant firings and layoffs, large 30 year debts or school debts on people are unsustainable.

The employment model needs to change. With the rise of gig work, constant firings and layoffs, large 30 year debts or school debts on people are unsustainable. So is healthcare being tied to employer and 401k tied to employer. The risk is all individual, the gains are all to corporations and lenders aka asset owners. This is unsustainable. Something has to change.

tbrownaw 2y ago
Health care, yes. A 401k is your money and goes with you if you leave, it's the older pension model that has issues with people jumping around.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  The other issue with pensions is they're run and funded by the company. Some benefits are guaranteed, some aren't. It's also a distraction for the company. Their expertise is in making widgets, not running pensions. Plus it opens the door for funding shenanigans and liability (GE comes to mind). This always should have been outsourced to private pension managers or possibly governments.
- vinyl7 2y ago
  I think the model of staying at a single employer for your whole career then getting a pension is a better model than our current layoff and job hopping every 2-years just to keep up with inflation. Special knowledge of the product is lost, and it takes a lot of time to get up to speed on a new product. Then again, most modern products are throw away garbage that barely lasts two years anyway.
  - tbrownaw 2y ago
    What is you make a poor choice of job early in your career? What if your chosen employer runs into bad economic conditions and needs to shrink itself to match? What if something comes up with family and you need to move to a different state? . The 401k model is much less fragile if life goes less then perfectly.
    - vinyl7 2y ago
      The difference is sustainability. The current business model is maximizing profits for the shareholders over the next quarter, which will alway result in killing a product in search of higher profits or laying off to make sure net income is higher. In the other model, businesses focus on long term sustainability and consistent income over infinite growth. The infinite growth model breeds a graph like looks like a massive upword trend followed by an almost equal crash as things top out. You can either have a hill with an and up and down, or you can have a consistent much smaller and more constant incline.
- nine_zeros 2y ago
  > A 401k is your money and goes with you if you leave, it's the older pension model that has issues with people jumping around. I mean, IRA limits should match 401k limits instead of keeping 23k limit only for employer-sponsored accounts. There is zero reason an independent person should have to rely on fickle corporations for that limit.
Aurornis 2y ago
> With the rise of gig work, constant firings and layoffs, I’m honestly fascinated that people think gig work, firing, layoffs and 30-year mortgages are recent phenomena. If you had to pick a point in the last century to enter the job market, now is certainly not the best time. However it is far, far from the worst time. I think it speaks to just how distorted the tech job market was in recent years. For a couple years it felt like everyone was hiring, nobody got laid off, and you could always get a job as long as you had a pulse and could name a programming language. That wasn’t normal but many people’s expectations very quickly reset to that.
- nine_zeros 2y ago
  > I’m honestly fascinated that people think gig work, firing, layoffs and 30-year mortgages are recent phenomena. These things are not a recent phenomena but lack of union jobs is recentish - last 30 years. It was unionization that gave any sense of stability, which made the 30 year mortgage, 401k and, healthcare-from-employer sustainable. Gig work and constant hiring/firing was only left for small employment. Not at large City-sized employers. Now without unionization, the 30-year mortgage, 401k and healthcare from employer model is obsolete.
- pempem 2y ago
  I think you might be overestimating the number of people who could do this: "you could always get a job as long as you had a pulse and could name a programming language". Gig work has been found to be intensely on the rise, with very little of the already meager protections of full time employment. Companies that basically run saas + employment marketplaces reduced their overhead and risk strategically by only hiring 'gig' workers. Most of these people, uber drivers, doordashers, thumbtackers, etc, etc cannot tell you whether an LLC is better for them than an SCorp, cannot navigate a defined benefit plan and cannot afford insurance, retirement, sick days, and so on. This was purposefully strategic and shared openly. 30 year mortgages are not recent, but their relationship to the average income has changed drastically in just two years. Educational debt has been on the rise for 20+ years. These honestly are all well documented. People's expectations were that pensions would be replaced by 401ks, and retirement could start at 65. For many 65 means a job at walmart, sam's club, or other forms of low level employment.

tbrownaw 2y ago

Health care, yes. A 401k is your money and goes with you if you leave, it's the older pension model that has issues with people jumping around.

dehrmann 2y ago
The other issue with pensions is they're run and funded by the company. Some benefits are guaranteed, some aren't. It's also a distraction for the company. Their expertise is in making widgets, not running pensions. Plus it opens the door for funding shenanigans and liability (GE comes to mind). This always should have been outsourced to private pension managers or possibly governments.
vinyl7 2y ago
I think the model of staying at a single employer for your whole career then getting a pension is a better model than our current layoff and job hopping every 2-years just to keep up with inflation. Special knowledge of the product is lost, and it takes a lot of time to get up to speed on a new product. Then again, most modern products are throw away garbage that barely lasts two years anyway.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  What is you make a poor choice of job early in your career? What if your chosen employer runs into bad economic conditions and needs to shrink itself to match? What if something comes up with family and you need to move to a different state? . The 401k model is much less fragile if life goes less then perfectly.
  - vinyl7 2y ago
    The difference is sustainability. The current business model is maximizing profits for the shareholders over the next quarter, which will alway result in killing a product in search of higher profits or laying off to make sure net income is higher. In the other model, businesses focus on long term sustainability and consistent income over infinite growth. The infinite growth model breeds a graph like looks like a massive upword trend followed by an almost equal crash as things top out. You can either have a hill with an and up and down, or you can have a consistent much smaller and more constant incline.
nine_zeros 2y ago
> A 401k is your money and goes with you if you leave, it's the older pension model that has issues with people jumping around. I mean, IRA limits should match 401k limits instead of keeping 23k limit only for employer-sponsored accounts. There is zero reason an independent person should have to rely on fickle corporations for that limit.

Aurornis 2y ago

> With the rise of gig work, constant firings and layoffs, I’m honestly fascinated that people think gig work, firing, layoffs and 30-year mortgages are recent phenomena. If you had to pick a point in the last century to enter the job market, now is certainly not the best time. However it is far, far from the worst time. I think it speaks to just how distorted the tech job market was in recent years. For a couple years it felt like everyone was hiring, nobody got laid off, and you could always get a job as long as you had a pulse and could name a programming language. That wasn’t normal but many people’s expectations very quickly reset to that.

nine_zeros 2y ago
> I’m honestly fascinated that people think gig work, firing, layoffs and 30-year mortgages are recent phenomena. These things are not a recent phenomena but lack of union jobs is recentish - last 30 years. It was unionization that gave any sense of stability, which made the 30 year mortgage, 401k and, healthcare-from-employer sustainable. Gig work and constant hiring/firing was only left for small employment. Not at large City-sized employers. Now without unionization, the 30-year mortgage, 401k and healthcare from employer model is obsolete.
pempem 2y ago
I think you might be overestimating the number of people who could do this: "you could always get a job as long as you had a pulse and could name a programming language". Gig work has been found to be intensely on the rise, with very little of the already meager protections of full time employment. Companies that basically run saas + employment marketplaces reduced their overhead and risk strategically by only hiring 'gig' workers. Most of these people, uber drivers, doordashers, thumbtackers, etc, etc cannot tell you whether an LLC is better for them than an SCorp, cannot navigate a defined benefit plan and cannot afford insurance, retirement, sick days, and so on. This was purposefully strategic and shared openly. 30 year mortgages are not recent, but their relationship to the average income has changed drastically in just two years. Educational debt has been on the rise for 20+ years. These honestly are all well documented. People's expectations were that pensions would be replaced by 401ks, and retirement could start at 65. For many 65 means a job at walmart, sam's club, or other forms of low level employment.