Professional Unions in 2031

It has been ten years since we finally escaped the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic. We try not to talk about it much, not only because of the human losses but also because of how we allowed people to separate us into factions that were delineated by what each of us seemingly didn’t have. One of the most interesting things was how it changed the way we work and get paid. I sometimes wonder how it could have been today if different choices had been made, but there’s no turning back now.

As the pandemic raged, many of us moved out of cubicles and into our dining rooms and guest bedrooms. We learned of the benefits of working without commutes and someone constantly watching over our shoulders. We also learned that many of us thrived in the social community that our workplace offered us. Most importantly, we finally started to realize what our companies had been trying to tell us (but not show us) about work-life balance.

Many of us were able to pick our kids up from school without the guise of a doctor’s appointment. Some of us no longer missed Friday night football games that we were unable to attend because of our long drive home. Many of us came to embrace our newfound flexibility and, yes, freedom, even as we struggled to figure out how to keep them if our companies called us back into the office.

We adapted more quickly than we would have guessed. By the end of the second year, the 50 and 60 hour work weeks and hour-long commutes that were the hallmarks of success in the 1990s and 2000s seemed pretty dumb to many of us. We had grown up in a world with no middle ground. Either you worked a million hours, answered emails on the weekends, and made your job your “family” or you weren’t successful.

When the call came to return to the office our employers seemed more than happy to return to the old paradigm. We asked for better pay AND more reasonable hours. They sometimes offered the former, but their business and staffing models depended on us working 9 or 10 hours a day. We asked for more time and better equipment to work from home, but many companies would not move away from the “command and control” structure built over 80 years of post-WWII results.

When our requests were not answered some of us refused to work, others demanded change. When our demands accomplished nothing we, for the first time as skilled professionals, rose up and organized. We saw how pay for other “professional” fields like pilots and baseball players raised wages and protected time off. We realized the pact between companies and their professional staff had been broken. We were no longer upper-middle class. We no longer took relaxing, work-free vacations. We no longer worked “full-time” we worked “all the time.” So we organized.

It is funny to look back at how short-sighted and self-interested the leaders of those companies were. It would have been so easy for them to adjust their model to deliver more pay and balance to employees and slightly lower returns to the market and executives. They swore the changes we wanted could not be done. It turns out the success they wanted couldn’t happen with us. In the end, they lost that battle and lost even more in the long term.

Sadly, we also lost in the long term. The current world may provide more balance, but it no longer provides the leveraged upside that some of has had from equity compensation. It is now nearly impossible to start a new company without tons of money in advance. Yes, we have more in some areas, but we all have less in many. It would have been so easy for companies to have made the right moves in 2022 and 2023 to avoid all of this. But we are where we are and it’s time for me to head off to my kid’s baseball game.

Dan Walter is a CECP, CEP, and Fellow of Global Equity (FGE). He works as Managing Consultant for FutureSense. Dan is also a leading expert on incentive plans and equity compensation issues. He has written several industry resources including a resource dedicated to Performance-Based Equity Compensation. He has co-authored ”Everything You Do In Compensation is Communication”, “The Decision Makers Guide to Equity Compensation”, “Equity Alternatives” and other books. Connect with Dan on LinkedIn. Or follow him on Twitter at @DanFutureSense.

Comments

[E James (jim) Brennan]

While looking into your crystal ball, Dan, please put me in contact with that professional HR/TR union that will negotiate multi-million contracts for me. In all modesty, I feel that TR expertise should be worth more than ball-handling skills, but I'm not greedy; I will accept half what a comparable sports pro gets.

If that union has not yet signed up enough of our membership for adequate negotiating power to force "Fair Pay for HR" or "Better Rewards for TR", let me know if they need an old pro for their organizing section. I've been both a union member and a labor relations manager, and consulted on both sides of the aisles.

The organizing slogans need improvement, too. We need to be prepared for the next decade!