Internet May Take Us Back To Middle Ages

Teams of “e-lancers” could become common in the 21st century as instant communications and changing business requirements reshape the job market.

That’s the view of two MIT Sloan School of Management professors who envision independent contractors teaming up to form a fluid, temporary network to produce and sell goods and services.

Once a job is done, whether it’s a day or a year, the network dissolves and the contractors take on new assignments.

Sloan Professors Tom Malone and Michael S. Scott Morton expect companies will become more decentralized and turn work over to e-lancers rather than maintain the hierarchical organizations common today.

As an example of how that model might work, the researchers point to the Linux operating system. It was developed largely by programmers worldwide, working independently without a manager and connected through the Internet.

E-lancers, the Sloan faculty members say, could find community, identity, benefits, educational opportunities and more through organizations similar to the guilds of the Middle Ages.

Execs are thinking small

More and more executives and managers are leaving larger corporations to take jobs at smaller Internet start-up companies, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based international outplacement firm.

Why? Apparently, says Challenger Gray, for the excitement of working hands-on to build a small company from scratch.

They might not be in it for just the money. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows wages at companies of at least 500 employees are almost 50 percent higher than at firms of fewer than 100 employees.

Here today, gone tomorrow

Temporary workers don’t stay at their assignments or work as temps for very long. The median length of assignment is 5.1 months, according to the Employment Policy Foundation.

The Washington, D.C.-based foundation found that 63 percent of temporary employees worked in their assignments for less than six months, 17 percent for less than a year. About 12 percent held jobs more than two years.

The Employment Policy Foundation estimates that temps comprise about 1 percent of the nation’s work force, totaling about 1.3 million workers.