Been employed in the same place for more than five years? That's so uncool. What we all want now is a nice low-loyalty, high-tech, short-term portfolio job which we can ditch when we fancy something else. Richard Reeves investigates

Observer

Sunday January 30, 2000

When did you last change job? If the answer is more than five years, follow these simple instructions: pick up a felt-tip pen; turn to page 10 of the business section; find a new post. Join the job-hopping, low-loyalty ranks of the new economy army. Experience the exhilaration of surfing the waves of the flexible labour market. Get with the programme.

Conjure up the scene in Jerry Maguire , after the sports agent played by Tom Cruise has been fired. 'Momentum,' his girlfriend advises. 'Forward momentum is all. Get on a plane.' In a sentence, she summed up the emerging world of work.

Corporate downsizing, rightsizing, or - the best of the bunch - decruiting, combined with more aggressive employees, a shift towards a know-ledge-based economy and the erosion of the career path are creating a rapid-fire, short-term, mobile world of work. A world, if you believe the gurus, in which millions of us will be self-employed. Telecommuting will become the norm, and clever people will sell their intellectual labour over the Internet.

Alex McKie is a model new economy worker. After switching between three of the best-known advertising agencies, she ended up as a European planner for Saatchi's, of whom she says: 'They were spending more on my flight and hotels than on my salary.' She swapped the corporate Amex for a canvas, and painted for a year before deciding to work for herself. She now advises companies on creativity and is dabbling in e-commerce. 'I'm a woman in search of a job title,' she says, and wonders if the difficulty in describing what we do is a symptom of the changing workplace. 'I now have to give quite a rambling answer to the question, "And what do you do?" I think more and more people are having the same problem.'

The proponents of the 'all change' school of thought on work divide into two camps: the doomsday merchants, including Jeremy Rifkin, whose book The End of Work outlined a future in which technology deprives us of work, and the optimists, who think the power of knowledge and the equalising effect of the Internet will make for better jobs. Charles Leadbeater, author of Living on Thin Air, and given the dubious honour of being described as Tony Blair's favourite thinker, is an optimist.

He reckons that while shifting to a world of 'portfolio' working (working simultaneously for different employers), and living outside the corporate womb will be uncomfortable, the rewards will be great. The light-footed and quick-witted will thrive in a world in which 'thin air' products - ideas, analyses, creative breakthroughs - dominate markets.

In Microserfs, a novel by Douglas Coupland, coiner of Generation X, the main character notes that companies don't hire people any more. 'People become their own corporations. It was inevitable.'

The most compelling evidence for change comes from across the Atlantic, where the new economy first arrived. The average 32-year-old in the US, for example, has already worked for nine firms. But while much is made of the US jobs miracle, little attention is paid to the fact that lay-offs have been higher than ever in the last two years. Fearful American workers now put in the longest hours in the world.

John Philpott, director of the Employment Policy Institute (EPI), a think-tank on work-related issues, argues that knowledge-based industries will become more important to economic growth. 'The share of UK employment accounted for by knowledge-based services [finance, insurance, business services] has grown from 10 per cent to 20 per cent since the early Seventies,' he says.

But Philpott and his colleagues also point out that the hard data on the labour market show little change, despite the slightly breathless rhetoric of the new economists. The new world of work is supposed to be marked by flexibility, self-employment, frequent job changes. Here are some facts which dent the theory. Number of jobs left each minute: 3.6 in 1995, 3.5 in 1999; number of people in self-employment: 3.2 million in 1992, 3.1 million in 1999. Percentage of the workforce who do any teleworking: 24 per cent in 1992, 22 per cent in 1999.

On the face of it, then, most of the claims about the changing workplace seem to be thin air. It may be that the impact of computers on working life has simply not yet been felt, or that the 'baby boomer' effect, in which those born between 1946 and 1964 are less likely to job-hop, is distorting our data too.

But even if we are economically on the same path as the US, cultural factors are likely to slow the arrival of the Wild West workplace. As McKie points out, the US has much less of a problem with mobility than Britain, perhaps because of the sheer size of the nation, perhaps because of a lingering pioneer spirit.

In America, if a job goes, you hook on a U-HAUL trailer and go to where the jobs are. In Britain, we tend to stay put and hope someone (usually the Government) will bring the jobs back. 'People just scatter in the US in a way that we do not,' she says. 'People there might not see their sister or brother for years, which is virtually unthinkable here unless you've had a major falling out. Most of us still live and die near to where we were born.'

Nonetheless, it does seem that for young, highly-skilled workers, mobility is becoming the norm rather than the exception. Fewer younger workers seem set on a single career. With the stripping out of many of the rungs of the corporate ladder, the internal route up is in many cases less obvious in any case; to move up, you have to move out.

Andy Westwood, a researcher at the EPI, says the labour market seems to be hollowing out, with growing opportunities at the top but fewer chances at the bottom. 'At the end of the day, there are people whose only worry is getting into the labour market at all,' he said. 'If you tell someone who has been unemployed for 12 years that their neighbour is a portfolio teleworker, I'm sure they'd be really pleased.'

Earnings inequality is growing rapidly in both the US and the UK, with the 'winners' in the new economy hiring low-skilled workers to undertake the tasks they have no time for. The average dual-income household in London spends £5,000 a year on cleaners, gardeners, dog walkers and so on. The world of work appears to be splintering into a dual labour market of highly skilled, thin-air workers at the top, and lower-paid, home-care workers at the bottom.

And to those at the bottom of the pile, the exhilaration of the futurologists might be treated with some scepticism. While McKie, Leadbeater and their ilk can take some time out, then land another plum job, for the average British worker a spell out of work means a 10 per cent pay cut if they get another job.

The idea of the portfolio worker is in any case far from new to low-paid US service workers, many of whom have had multiple jobs for years. An urban myth that did the rounds of the policy circuit in the United States was about the response of a bartender/waiter/security guard to the release of some healthy employment figures: 'Yeah, I know about how many jobs have been created. I've got three of them.'

In the long run, the future of work may rest in the hands of the top brass at large corporations.

One factor driving talented employees to look elsewhere is the desire for greater freedom, for that cliché, the Better Quality of Life.

'The other day I was walking through the park in the sunshine, and I wondered to myself if that was why I'd given the corporate world up,' says one rat-race deserter. 'Just to walk in the park. And you know, I think in some ways it was. If only companies realised that.'