Once upon a time the portfolio career was seen as pretty sexy and came to typify the “free agent nation” spoken about by Dan Pink way back in 2001. As with the gig economy, there are many following this career path that do so in a fulfilling and rewarding way, with the combination of assignments giving them a rich and diverse professional life.
A recent paper shows that there are over 10 million such people operating in the European Union, but whereas many such people are highly educated, the paper argues that they often suffer from poor working conditions and institutional support that is simply not geared for this modern form of work.
“Alternative workers, who accounted for 15.7% of employment in 2019, grew at a rate higher than the average for overall employment,” the authors say.
Slash workers
Such workers are also categorized by researchers by the somewhat derogatory moniker of a “slash worker”, as they put slashes between the multiple roles they perform. Such individuals are often highly educated individuals, and indeed, it is often this level of skill that distinguishes slash workers from the traditional self-employed, who are characterized as lower-skilled individuals.
“In fact, the level of qualification is one of the key factors for employment growth in the 2011-19 period, playing an important role within the salaried-employee category,” the researchers say. “Under each of the contractual modes, high-qualification work registered a more positive trend than the low-qualification employment, with the lone exception of the traditional self-employed.”
The trend towards a more portfolio-based career is something the researchers believe has been exacerbated during the pandemic as people strive to protect themselves from the fragility of the labor market. The authors argue that a portfolio of somewhat diverse, if inevitably complementary, roles can spread the risk of disruption during tumultuous periods as we’ve seen during Covid-19.
Different needs
Despite that, the report expresses concern about the working conditions of portfolio workers and argues that these conditions are often exacerbated by social protections that are ill-suited to this new way of working, and a lack of collective representation that can undermine their bargaining power.
Indeed, interviewees often said that they view each section of their portfolio as akin to a watertight compartment, each with its own requirements and dynamics. It’s a depiction that underlines the need for new forms of representation to accurately reflect this way of working.
Portfolio workers told the researchers that they very much regard trade unions as representing solely salaried employees. The struggles were reflected by a comment from the Spanish General Union of Workers (UGT) that portfolio workers need to identify their main commercial activity so that they can be more easily pigeonholed.
Banding together
The report highlights the work done by Smart, the freelancers cooperative founded in Belgium before spreading out into seven other EU countries. The group has developed a model that it believes effectively meets the wide and diverse range of needs of portfolio workers even inside the traditional national legislations. Smart does this by employing the freelancers directly, thus pulling them into traditional support structures, and issues invoices on the behalf of each freelancer. It’s a situation they believe gives them greater security and safer working conditions.
Despite slow progress towards an infrastructure that better identifies and supports portfolio workers, there is clearly still a long way to go before institutions adequately adapt to the new realities of the workforce of today.
“We have to stop creating new business statuses such as the ‘auto-entrepreneurs’ in France and the ‘mini-jobs’ in Germany,” says Smart co-CEO Maxime Dechesne. “At first, they might seem attractive for slashers, because they can legally issue invoices and pocket more net income. But this status offers no protection and – in the long term – it is disastrous, both for workers and for society as a whole.”
While there is an obvious need for greater support both in the national legislature but also at the European Union Level, more immediate support for European portfolio workers may come from projects like SURE, which is a financial assistance program specifically aimed at short-time work schemes. It provides loans of up to €100 billion to member states. It’s by no means a silver bullet, but it is perhaps a start.
