Class of 2013: Welcome to the 'New Hustle' This is an undeniably difficult time to be graduating from college (or high school) and entering the workforce. Even with overall hiring holding steady this spring, the number of jobs available to new talent is even lower than forecast six months ago; the competition fierce, most starting wages still depressed. The class of 2013 -- part of the most-educated, yet most-indebted generation in history -- faces a long slog. If there is an upside, it is the emergence of a new way of making a living. I call it the "New Hustle." The Great Recession of 2008 uncovered serious structural changes to our economy -- exposed plate shifts we managed to avoid or ignore for years. The big casualty was the American job -- the traditional contract of engagement between employee and employer. If you survived the Great Recession with a job, you considered yourself lucky. But in your heart of hearts, you knew things had changed forever. The epiphany: We are sometimes employed by others but we always work for ourselves. The post-recession years have not been easy. As vexing as the dearth of jobs has been the problem of underemployment. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of persons employed part-time for economic reasons -- i.e., because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time position -- is about 8 million. Newsweek/Daily Beast surveyed American workers in 2009 and found that fully one-third of us were working either freelance or two jobs. And these were not the under-educated or the permanent poor -- these were middle- and upper-class workers, college-educated Americans earning more than $75,000 per year. The outlook for millennials isn't improving much. In 2012, the Society of Human Resources Professionals (SHRM) surveyed new college graduates six months after graduation and found that 53 percent of them were unemployed -- more than one-third (36 percent) of those on the "employed" side of the data were working part-time jobs or temporary contracts. "People's perception of the stability of corporate life is eroding, if not totally gone. People know it's not smart to solely rely on corporate employment," says Pamela Slim, author of Escape from Cubicle Nation. The ever-present threat of job cuts and the reality of wage stagnation now mean that holding down one job may be risky business. For many, the new order of the day is to combine multiple jobs to make a livable salary. Millions of workers who hold a 40-hour per week full-time job have a side hustle going on. According to the US Bureau of Labor, in 2011, 7 million Americans worked a second job (up from 6 million workers in 2009) -- many holding down multiple gigs. This is the new reality for millions of people who can't make it on one salary, or who don't want to trust their fate to one employer and want the security of multiple income streams. Boise native Angie Baker is well acquainted with the new hustle. As .

1. Class of 2013: Welcome to the 'New Hustle'
This is an undeniably difficult time to be graduating from
college (or high school) and entering the workforce. Even with
overall hiring holding steady this spring, the number of jobs
available to new talent is even lower than forecast six months
ago; the competition fierce, most starting wages still depressed.
The class of 2013 -- part of the most-educated, yet most-
indebted generation in history -- faces a long slog. If there is an
upside, it is the emergence of a new way of making a living. I
call it the "New Hustle."
The Great Recession of 2008 uncovered serious structural
changes to our economy -- exposed plate shifts we managed to
avoid or ignore for years. The big casualty was the American
job -- the traditional contract of engagement between employee
and employer. If you survived the Great Recession with a job,
you considered yourself lucky. But in your heart of hearts, you
knew things had changed forever. The epiphany: We are
sometimes employed by others but we always work for
ourselves.
The post-recession years have not been easy. As vexing as the
dearth of jobs has been the problem of underemployment.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of
persons employed part-time for economic reasons -- i.e.,
because their hours had been cut back or because they were
unable to find a full-time position -- is about 8 million.
Newsweek/Daily Beast surveyed American workers in 2009 and
found that fully one-third of us were working either freelance or
two jobs. And these were not the under-educated or the
permanent poor -- these were middle- and upper-class workers,
college-educated Americans earning more than $75,000 per
year.
The outlook for millennials isn't improving much. In 2012, the
Society of Human Resources Professionals (SHRM) surveyed
new college graduates six months after graduation and found

2. that 53 percent of them were unemployed -- more than one-third
(36 percent) of those on the "employed" side of the data were
working part-time jobs or temporary contracts. "People's
perception of the stability of corporate life is eroding, if not
totally gone. People know it's not smart to solely rely on
corporate employment," says Pamela Slim, author of Escape
from Cubicle Nation.
The ever-present threat of job cuts and the reality of wage
stagnation now mean that holding down one job may be risky
business. For many, the new order of the day is to combine
multiple jobs to make a livable salary. Millions of workers who
hold a 40-hour per week full-time job have a side hustle going
on. According to the US Bureau of Labor, in 2011, 7 million
Americans worked a second job (up from 6 million workers in
2009) -- many holding down multiple gigs. This is the new
reality for millions of people who can't make it on one salary,
or who don't want to trust their fate to one employer and want
the security of multiple income streams.
Boise native Angie Baker is well acquainted with the new
hustle. As she explained to MSNBC, in a typical week she puts
in 40 hours as a personnel technician for the Idaho Department
of Finance. Straight from there she heads to her second job as a
night manager for a small independent living facility, where she
and her husband live. On the weekends, she routinely works
another 12 to 16 hours at a third job in the bakery at a local
grocery store. Nearly 100-hour work weeks have paid off,
helping Baker and her husband pay down credit card and student
loan debt and save up a down payment for a home.
"This is the new normal," says Ellen Ernst Kossek, a university
distinguished professor at Michigan State University's School of
Human Resources and Labor Relations in Lansing and author of
the bestselling CEO of Me. Employment experts have identified
a new category of workers, "moonpreneurs," because they have
full-time jobs and start businesses on the side. A recent Elance
survey found that 36 percent of responded were starting or
operating a business while working traditional full- or part-time

3. jobs; 35 percent of independent workers on Elance had begun
freelancing to earn supplemental income. "There is this brand
new phenomenon," says Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at the
Kauffman Foundation, an organization that focuses on
entrepreneurship. "People [are] being entrepreneurs almost in
their spare time, which you could never do before, at least never
do in a way that was profitable." Kedrosky calls these side-gig
hustlers "fractional entrepreneurs," and notes that the federal
job data doesn't catalog their job creation. "We capture people
losing jobs in an orthodox way, but we don't capture them
gaining jobs in an unorthodox way."
Freelancing -- once a euphemism for unemployment -- is now a
completely normal way to make a living. According to the
Freelance Union, today more than 42 million Americans are
independently employed -- more than the total number of
autoworkers, teachers, and doctors combined. We're not talking
about unskilled temps -- today's contract workers are lawyers,
accountants, journalists, daycare workers, graphic artists,
videographers, software writers and so on. The Harvard
Business Review has labeled these free agents "supertemps."
Companies like Odesk, Behance and Elance.com are succeeding
by giving people at all levels a platform to market their own
skills on their own terms.
The New Hustle is not merely an economic phenomenon about
substituting one way of making an income for another; it is
more profound than that. The arrival of this Ad Hoc Economy
was driven by a confluence of new technology, economic
necessity and social change. The Great Recession exposed the
fragility and instability of the traditional job market, while new
app and mobile technologies have empowered individuals and
untied them from physical workplaces (further breaking the
psychological bond between worker and employer). There has
been a cultural sea change also -- people came out of the
downturn re-evaluating their materialism, questioning the value
of being a wage slave. And along the way, geek culture kicked
in and we began celebrating the heroic entrepreneur and the bad

4. boy(or grrrl) hacker, broadly embracing of open source
movements and the sharing economy. Perhaps the most
significant change is society's evolving view of what it means to
be a success (and a failure). Simply put, your mom says it's
okay to be indie.
And, truth is, there has never been a better time to start your
own hustle. Time was, in order to launch a business or even a
sideline you needed to make big investments in machinery,
equipment, real estate. Nowadays the only thing that you need
is a computer or smartphone, a connection to the cloud and a
decent idea. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman
wrote that the new tools are "making it easier and cheaper than
ever to publish your own book, start your own company and
chase your own dream. Never have individuals been more
empowered, and we're still just at the start of this trend."
Technologies that became the crowning (and you might say
closing) achievements of the industrial age set the table for the
new age of free agency. Telephony, computerization and
software code language led us to smartphones, PCs, tablets, the
Internet, the Cloud, ubiquitous wireless and thousands of
practical business apps and new ways to be productive. Using
new social media career tools, like the service I started,
Mepedia, individuals can build a personal brand and navigate
their own way, whether up the corporate ladder, in their own
business, or some hybrid of the two. Atomized and
decentralized by the centripetal forces of mass connectivity and
24/7 globalization, the corporation -- as an organizing principle
-- makes less and less sense. Today's corporation has become a
constellation of loose relationships and inter-dependencies -- a
shrinking proprietary core surrounded by "rented" resources and
spheres of influence. Breakdown of the corporation is a force
redefining our working lives that began with distributed
computing, accelerated with the Internet, and went mainstream
with the mobile communications revolution.
Neither side of the job contract thinks the current reality is still
a good deal. In general, employers are questioning whether it

5. makes sense to build or lease sprawling campuses (and annually
sink $10,000 to $15,000 per head) to warehouse employees so
that they can end up spending the day emailing, texting,
conference calling and Skyping each other from neighboring
cubicles. Employees don't think the time and expense of
commuting long distances (or investing in dress clothes for the
office) to work at a crappy job that might evaporate at any
moment is a good deal either.
Graduates, the corporate job picture as we knew it is being
obliterated -- the center cannot hold -- and the world of work
we once relied upon is fracturing into myriad new combinations
and permutations. Few people have a regular job anymore: we
are sometimes employed by others but we always work for
ourselves. Like it or not, we're all in a new game. Anxious
parents, watching Junior return home after college to regroup,
may be wondering if he will ever be able to move out on his
own. The truth is this generation, like all others before it, will
find its own way. Like the detritus of a sea storm washing
ashore, the cleverest among them are picking over the wreckage
of the old economy and finding new and novel ways to make a
buck. It won't be a conventional career the way we experienced
it -- but perhaps that is not a bad thing. (Adapted from Tom
Hayes in the Huffington Post, May 6, 2013)
Assignment
Answer the following questions and post your responses to
Blackboard. Your submission should be approximately 500
words.
1. a) What does Hayes mean by the “New Hustle?”
b) What are the positive elements of this approach to work,
from an employee’s point of view? From an
employer’s point of view?
c) What are the negative elements, from an employee’s point of
view and from an employee’s point of view?
d) Take a position – what do YOU think about this approach?
Feel free to use supplemental research and or your own

6. experiences to support your position.
2. Visit at least one HR crowdsourcing (e.g.
www.elance.com) or micro job site (e.g. fiverr.com). Identify
the site you visited and provide the link. Describe the site and
at least one job that you found on the site.
3. Read at least two of your classmates responses and
comment on their posts.
Blackboard Assignment 1
1 point
2 points
3 points
4-5 points
Posting is late, length does not meet criteria, several major
errors in spelling and/or grammar
Did not post to classmates comments
May be late, length does not meet criteria, several major errors
in spelling and/or grammar
Posts to classmates lack flow
Posted on time, assigned length, several minor errors in spelling
and grammar
Posts to classmates are appropriate and follow the discussion
Posted on time, assigned length, few or no errors in spelling and
grammar
Posts to classmates are professional and add to the discussion
Post is unclear and lacks accuracy, demonstrates a limited
understanding of the material

7. Post is somewhat clear and may lack accuracy, demonstrates
some understanding of the material
Post is usually clear and accurate, demonstrates a good
understanding of the material
Post is clear and accurate, demonstrates a thorough
understanding of the material.
Limited or no connections between articles and course concepts
Some connections between articles and course concepts
Appropriate connections between articles and course concepts
Complex and engaging connections between articles and course
concepts