Cheap Thoughts

Practically speaking full employment can be defined as follows, anyone who is interested in having a job can find one and anyone who wants to work more hours can get those hours.  I have always considered full employment to be unobtainable, something an economy should strive for but which could never be feasibly achieved.  Are we entering a world where that no longer the case?  

My central question is whether or not the sharing economy (Uber, TaskRabbit, Instacart) can actually get us to full employment?  As a side note, I realize that you need a car to drive for Uber or Instacart among some other basic prerequisites, but I want to stay focused on the bigger picture here.  All three of these companies allow individuals 1) The chance to earn income above the minimum wage 2) The ability to clock in and out of work at their convenience 3) Earn income directly proportional to the amount of time they are on the job.  Furthermore, they are looking to rapidly expand their workforce meaning as of today workers can add more hours whenever they want.  Phrased differently, these companies offer employment to almost anyone interested and give their employees a (nearly) endless amount of work to do.

I realize that working for these companies is not "work" in the traditional sense of the word, in Uber's case you are a contractor, not an employee, but I also doubt there are many companies on earth who are hiring as quickly as Uber is right now.  The impact these companies are having on society/the economy should also force us to rethink how we define and achieve our objectives.  My brother is currently in college driving for Uber on the side to make some extra cash, and while I couldn't tell you exactly what he is making per hour it is DEFINITELY over the minimum wage, and he gets to go to work whenever he wants.  For all the debating over exactly what an Uber driver can earn I suspect that everyone is earning above minimum wage salaries.  This new breed of companies gives (almost) anyone the ability to do the same.  I understand there are a whole range of issues that need to be resolved by these companies, their employees. and regulatory bodies, but at the end of the day shouldn't we praise companies who enable that type of workforce productivity?   

I read an article last week where Finnish Prime Minister, Alexander Stubb, blamed Apple for many of the country's recent economic woes.  The gist of his argument was that Apple had crippled Nokia, the nation's largest private employer and as a result the Finnish economy has been on a steady decline for some time.  He also blamed the economic decline on the Finnish paper industry, which is wholly unsurprising for a number of reasons.   

I was fascinated that a single company could have such a huge economic footprint in a developed country in Western Europe so I decided to do a little digging.  I was absolutely stunned to find that Nokia directly employed 22,000 Fins and indirectly employed another 20,000.  At it's height the company also accounted for 1/5 of the country's total exports, 2/3 of the total value of their stock market value and it's $25 billion in sales was nearly equal to their entire national budget (which probably put a nice dent in Finnish tax revenue when they started declining.  

I'm going to spend a little time researching to see if I can find any other country that is so reliant on a single private company as an engine of economic growth.