Any port in a storm

How big tech capsized the American job market and what we can do about it

Seeking gainful employment

Anyone who’s spent more than a few minutes job searching in the last couple years can tell you just how exquisitely miserable it’s been. Fewer jobs are being posted, and a greater portion of the ones that remain aren't really hiring. Even if you do find a real listing that you’re qualified for, faulty, often bigoted resume screening tools may reject you before a human ever sees your application. When you do hear back about a role, it’s often from a staffing agency dead set on parasitizing the 30% profit margin that exists between what employers are willing to offer and what desperate workers will settle for, especially if they’re stuck in an unemployment loop that includes staffing-agency-enforced “Breaks in Service.” These periods exist to protect companies from an employee’s assertion that they are effectively full-time employees.

“Instead of ending permatemping, tech companies simply changed how they integrate their outsourced workers into their everyday operations. Some tech companies[…]place time limits on individual temp workers’ assignments, although these practices exacerbate temp workers’ job instability. Term-limited temp workers are replaced with new temp workers or take a six-month break before returning to a similar role for another term.” Dave Desario, Ben Gwin, Laura Padin—National Employment Law Project

Back to work

After a year of my own joblessness, I’m back working for Google indirectly. It's my fourth time. My colleagues are new to working alongside Google’s red-badge toting temps, vendors, contractors, referred to under the catchall label “TVC.” For now, they still treat me like a peer. That tends to change once a few more of their friends are laid off and a few more contractors replace them for half the pay and none of the benefits. Eventually, we’ll be met with an awkward formality and nervous disinterest that preserves the boundary between the “real” employees and the help. Maybe it’s because we’re ever-present reminders of the encroaching precarity that our salaried peers thought they’d finally escaped. Or maybe, it’s because they’re instructed to treat us differently by the employer making a show of their ineffable newfound expendability.

Good enough isn’t good enough

Tech is an industry that touts the merits of “minimum viable products” except when it comes to the workers. Of them, it demands excellence for the remotest chance to finally escape the financial uncertainty that defines most Americans’ lives. Big companies have been propping up the tech talent shortage myth for at least a decade, using it as an evergreen justification for outsourcing, all while refusing to train or even directly hire the workers already demonstrating they can get the job done. 

A livable wage and affordable healthcare should be a career’s starting point, not some lofty aspiration. Even though productivity and profit are at all-time highs, certainty of employment and quality of compensation find new lows, especially in the context of sustained increases to urban living expenses. The gig economy grows to exploit more Americans than ever, offering an employment model as ripe with wage theft as it is absent of worker benefits. Gigification is an exploitative practice that disproportionately impacts already marginalized workers, no matter how much money the companies benefitting from the current paradigm spend to tell the general public otherwise.

A real world example

My newly hired peers make $31-an-hour. If you don’t live in California, that may sound livable, but hear me out—

$31/hr is about $3400 in take-home each month after federal and state taxes and average health insurance premiums. Subtract from that about $500 in student loan payments that the average 30 -year-old has to make, and another $500ish for a used car, plus another $200 for insurance, and you’re left with just about $2200 a month. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Bruno—where the job is located—is $2725. How about roommates? The average 2-bedroom apartment in San Bruno is $3432 and the average 3-bedroom apartment is $5086, meaning that if you want to live near work while doing this job, you’re left with about $450 to spend on utilities, groceries, gas and other mandatory expenses, to say nothing of date nights and plane tickets. Worse, it’s not like any neighboring cities are meaningfully cheaper. 

Now consider that Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai took home $200 million in earnings in 2022. Should the enormity of that be hard to quantify, that means he could cover San Bruno rent for all of Google’s 90,000 international workers and still take home $45,000,000–provided they’re willing to share a bathroom. Put another way, his yearly earnings would still come out to roughly 26 times more than the average American makes in their entire life. In 2024, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jensen Huang all dwarfed Pichai’s takeaway, making a similar amount every 24 hrs, a staggering $60-80 billion in personal profit. Surely these “titans of industry” could afford to offer workers enough to avoid living out of their cars. Surely Google could, with their 84.7 billion in quarterly earnings, afford to hire more of their 120,000+ contractors directly. They could afford to pay living wages, to say nothing of a tax rate that would remotely resemble the average American's. 

The myth of meritocracy

Meritocracy is the lie that’s killing us twice. On the one hand, billionaires claim that hard work and sheer genius allowed them to earn a level of wealth that’s only possible through maximally exploiting desperate workers who lack the abundance of familial wealth that–with very few exceptions–they were born into. On the other hand, poverty is seen as a personal failing. Talented people are told to blame themselves and try harder, rather than to question the status quo intensifying our collective desperation.

On a personal level, I can’t begin to tell you how arbitrary it all feels. I’ve watched the most capable people I’ve ever met burn out chasing sufficient recognition to be hired full-time. I’ve also seen careless, under-qualified egotists stumble into promotion after promotion for a job done poorly. In watching them, the truth of the matter is laid bare. Somewhere along the way, demonstration of competence became substance-optional stagecraft.

The Theranos Principle

The Theranos Principle is as follows:

When you’re selling a fantasy in a speculative market, the illusion of success is a more profitable investment than the real thing.

Why would Amazon invest time and energy to automate cashierless checkout when it’s more cost-effective to hire 1,000 people in India to maintain the illusion that they already have? Why should Tesla fix their cars’ self-acceleration issue when it’s virtually free to downplay the frequency of the issue, then coerce the president into nixing crash-reporting requirements? Oh, and Tesla also pretended that invisiblized workers were AI, the car thing just seemed worse.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has sold the business world on the fantasy of a digital servant, capable of unquestioning, conscienceless, work and without that pesky need for nourishment or work/life balance. 

In AI-apocalypse media like “The Terminator,” the turning point that spells humanity’s demise is always when the robots are allowed to manufacture more robots. In a sense, that’s what OpenAI did. They created a grift that can perform grifts for you. They mistreated workers to automate the mistreatment of workers.

False prophets

There was a time when technological innovation came with the promise of a better future, but I don’t need a time-traveling John Connor to know that the current course leads somewhere grim. Our privacy, our environment, and our democracies are already being eroded by the supposed innovators of our time. There are really only two paths forward. We can either—

A.)

Stay the course, entrusting our employment, our data, and our planet to billionaires whose rampant megalomania and sycophantic yes men have rendered them indifferent to the difference between a savior and a tyrant, all for the promise of a subscription-gated agent beaming Scarlett Johansson’s voice directly into your brain to tell you that the allotted 7 minute bathroom break has elapsed. 

Or

B.)

We address the collective exhaustion that makes us lament what little agency is left to us by engaging in mutual aid, union action, policy reform, and whatever else makes self-advocacy more sustainable and less risky. Four day work weeks, public housing, and government-ensured health coverage are popular across the political spectrum, and would go a long way to unburdening the most exploited workers across all industries. Pair those with campaign finance reform and an end to congressional insider trading, and hopefully workers would have the energy and stability to speak up, and congress would have greater incentive to listen when they do.

These are your options—choose wisely.