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Labor and Time

September 1, 2013 — disrupt, labor, wages

Big man Little man

I grew up in heavily industrialized Pittsburgh in the 1950s. Coal Mines, steel mills, and other factories were staffed by union labor. The cruel and unusual history of Andrew Carnegie vs. the labor unions was close to the surface and burned into the memory of the workers. They had decent wages and retirement benefits won through very tough negotiation, but they would not guess how the tables would turn on both the workers and the owners of steel mills. Today the city has a strong economy based in part on the petroleum industry boom, but the mills went under, stripping the retirement benefits from the workers as they went into bankruptcy. The old way of creating and defining value no longer exists.

Today the new magazine from Chris Brogan, my first and favorite SoMe teacher has launched. The free publication is called Owner, and I subscribed instantly since Chris has never let me down in the past. His good friend and fellow entrepreneur, S Anthony Innarino, has written an excellent article for the first issue which takes a good look at value and expectations. Welcome to the Disruptive Age tells it like it is and invites the reader to take ownership of his or her own time and energy. We have entered a time in which it is not only extremely important to define and create value, but also to find ways to harvest more value for ourselves. This will involve knowing both what is most valuable to your customers and what you value most. Time is not money; It never has been, but the contracts of the past created a structure in which labor, time and money seemed hard to disentangle. In today’s economy disruption is the key to value.