Tale of the Diverging Working Class
Perks like work from anywhere, flexible hours, 4-days work week seem nice and many startups have adopted at least one of these policies. Despite being the go-to strategy to attract talents, I would argue that such a perk is not a force for good.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve enjoyed at least some of these perks. I saved hundreds of hours of getting stuck in traffic thanks to working from home. I was able to spend more time with my baby daughter thanks to flexible hours.
However, I worry that in the long run, these policies can be damaging to one essential aspect of work: empathy.
What’s the reality?
While these perks have been offered to the laptop class, the same couldn’t be said for our working-class colleagues.
Before we dive even deeper, a clarification on a couple of terminologies:
The laptop class is used to describe a class of employees whose work and output are predominantly conducted through laptops and emails. These people are the management, product managers, software engineers, and more.
I use the term working class to define those who do the work and deliver values on the ground. This category includes permanent employees whose jobs are field sales agents or customer service. It also includes what we startups typically call “partners”. They are the drivers for ride-hailing services and couriers for delivery services.
The rift
The work-from-home arrangement was introduced during the pandemic to help curb the spread of the virus. However, even during this time, the working class doesn’t really enjoy this luxury, having to risk themselves infections to ensure that the value chains keep running, products or services continuously being delivered to consumers.
As the pandemic spread starts to slow down, the laptop class didn’t return to offices. Instead, companies are expanding the arrangement to work from anywhere, allowing the laptop class to travel abroad or move out of expensive cities while maintaining their employment status.
Even more recently, more and more perks are being offered. One of the latest trends is implementing a 4-days-work week. Numerous startups have started the transition. However, again, these trends are not being offered to the working class. While the laptop class enjoys this perk, the working class continues to work long hours.
Customer services have to be available 24/7, which means their agents will continue to do their normal shifts. Field agents and partners like drivers and couriers are often given target and/or rewarded bonuses based on completed tasks/trips, and they will have to continue working long hours to ensure these targets are met.
What drives this rift?
While the pandemic has been a key driver of the rift, the job market is also a factor here. The bar to fill the laptop class role is high and is constantly increasing. It often requires a specific set of skills, both hard skills and soft skills, that is not easy to acquire without proper training, experience, guidance, and networks. Graduating with a degree alone often is not sufficient.
This means that the talent pool is quite small, and it is not expanding anytime soon. With hundreds of new companies being established and foreign companies entering the market, the talent war is becoming too real. Hence, to attract this limited pool of talent, it was deemed a necessity for companies to offer various perks to increase their pull power.
What’s the consequence?
Here’s the real meat of the article. I would argue that these perks can damage the relationship between the laptop class and the working class to the extent where empathy is thrown out of the window entirely.
The laptop class works in management where their output is often decisions, systems, or SOPs. The working class is at the bottom of the food chain, where they receive instruction and work within the designed systems or SOPs that the laptop class has set for them.
I will share some illustrations to better depict this relationship.
For example, a laptop class employee at a ride-hailing startup designs an algorithm to route which orders to which drivers. The drivers are simply accepting these orders and complete. While completing the order, they are also bounded by the SOPs including but not limited to how they make the order at a restaurant, how they approach customers, that a laptop class employee has designed for them.
Another example would be field sales agents, tasked to acquire customers. They will have to work within the set of areas that have been assigned to them, as well as achieve a certain target that their manager has set.
In an ideal world, the laptop class would have the responsibility not only to ensure that values that being delivered efficiently, but also to emphasize to the working class on a personal level. It is important to see that these are people, not tools, to achieve certain goals.
Sure, profit incentive does exist, where treatment of the working class correlates with the company’s capacity to generate revenue and profit. For instance, better treatment of drivers correlates to retention which is important so that these drivers are not poached by competitors.
However, unlike the laptop class talents which are scarce, the pool for working-class are larger. When equilibrium is not met, delivering fair treatment to the working class is not a priority for the laptop class compared to other tasks such as ensuring driver compliance or designing a more efficient system that benefits the consumers at the expense of the workers.
When profit incentives are missing, the only hope for humane treatment of the working class comes from empathy. In this case, I use the word empathy to depict a relationship where a person truly cares about the fate of another regardless of their status.
Empathy can be nurtured when an individual in the laptop class sees the working class as equal. It can be nurtured when they interact on a daily basis, understanding the concerns of the working class as people, not tools. With empathy, they would be able to design systems that humanize the working class, ensuring they have enough breaks, given realistic targets, and more.
Unfortunately, perks such as the work-from-anywhere arrangement, 4-days work week, and others added more distance between the two classes. It results in a situation where a product manager of a ride-hailing app works in luxurious cottages in Bali while their working-class counterpart has to experience the heat and pollution in the concrete jungles of Jakarta.
Aside from the rift in an actual real-life situation, these perks have also shifted the mindset of laptop class employees. It has designed a mindset where they are of a different class and developed a sense of entitlement. That I deserve this life and you don’t because we are fundamentally different.
These two factors, the misalignment of profit incentives and workers' treatment plus the lack of empathy resulted in the diverging fate of the two classes.
Well then, it’s not their fault
Totally. I am not blaming anyone or any company on this matter. Again, don’t get me wrong. I’m a firm believer in structural reform, not someone who points fingers at others.
I do believe that education reform will bring balance to the talent pool. I believed in having stronger labor laws and regulations to ensure that the rights of the working class, be it full-time employees, contract workers, or gig workers are protected. I believe in the effort to enforce a better taxation structure to ensure that the state has more resources to close these gaps and provide better social security.
While I would advocate for individual workers to treat each other better I also agree that handing over the burden to improve the lives of millions of drivers upon the shoulders of a single product manager at a ride-hailing app is idiotic. However, I believe that all of these structural reforms require huge political will.
To ensure that the state has enough political will, we need to ensure that people from different classes, a factor that is entirely removed when the rift in the working-class fabric keeps widening from time to time.
Caveat:
- Views are my own, not representing companies or associations that I’m affiliated with
- It is written from the point of view of Rizqi, the social & political science graduate, not Rizqi the marketing guy
- It is based on my limited observation of Indonesia’s startup scene, and might not apply to other geographies or other industries
- Feel free to disagree civilly in the comment sections
