Well I never thought I would walk the line at a picket but there I was this morning for an hour on University Avenue. I will not put in the 4 hours a day that the full time folks are doing but I will do an hour a day.
Why? Every workplace is really a community with all the norms of every community. These are my buds.
I am the lowest of the low at CBC, a part time contractor - the kind of position the CBC want more of and that the full time staff fear will be their fate. I occupy the same low life job at UPEI where I am part of a growing band of sessional lecturers. I also work as a consultant, spending sometimes years in and out of the same organizations.
So what is it like being a contractor? If these organizations are like a body, a full time employee is like a body part. I am more like useful bacteria that say digests food. They key for people like me to be useful not just to the management but to the whole corpus. I do my best to join the community. I need community as much as a paycheck.
I think that in the end formal organizations will be much smaller and will mainly have a lot more folks like me attached. But attached not at an arms length way like today but attached as we see in the film making business where say a lead director gets a film and calls his 5 go to guys, one of whom is his favorite photographer. He then makes 5 calls one of them to his favorite electrician and so on. One of the aspects of contract work that makes people fearful is that there is a pretense that every job is a new experience and that it should be contracted de novo. The Feds whole contracting ethos is built on this idea - of course it only applies to regular folks like me. There is also the idea that you remain as a contractor still dependent on one client. Bad move - that is when you do lose your power. But if you have several clients, then you are the free agent. You have power and you have freedom.
In the end there is more security in having say 5 contract jobs than one full time job. Nor do you lose your community if you really join.
