New Social Contract: Human Cloud Edition
How do we want to work? Rather than letting politicians, thought leaders, and marketplaces tell us, let's define it for ourselves.
Leaders,
We’ve been waiting a long time to ship this. We’re talking years. And numerous ‘wtf’ moments.
Today we have a chance to completely re-build work. Not in an angry political scientist way. Rather a practical, tech driven, economic way.
What’s different this time? The tech and social acceptance. We can talk for literally days about Coase’s Theory Of The Firm.
Instead, the reality of today is that us leaders can build without the constraints that made full time employment and offices the best way to organize value creation.
Which means we can write a new social contract for how we want to work.
As Jeremy Heimans, author of National Bestseller New Power and CEO of Purpose said in his endorsement:
“The convergence of AI and the freelance economy is a huge deal - not just for the future of work, but for the future of our social contract. Like it or loathe it, every worker, leader and institution urgently needs to understand what’s really shifting, what a new generation of workers and entrepreneurs expect, and how they can help shape these changes to benefit all of us.”
Why We Need A Social Contract ASAP
Governments are trying to tell us what’s best for us and coming close to legislating away our rights and freedom. Whether IR-35 in the UK, AB-5 in California, or the proposed PRO Act in the US.
In reality, they’re using “what’s best for us” as an excuse for how to tax us.
So instead of letting them trick us, let’s be explicit about what actually is best for us.
We’re stronger together than alone.
While we LOVE our freedom, we need strength in numbers. Insurance is a perfect example of this.
It’s a gradual process, and the first step is highlighting the structural obstacles in this contract.
What We Have
We’ve built a self service template that you can copy/paste into your contracts no matter what tools or types of process you use.
Personally, we copy/paste from various parts for each client.
We’ve broken it into two categories:
Values
Master Service Agreement (MSA) Terms
Why not make these categories into one?
Because while values feed the working relationship, an MSA makes it effective.
Where We’re Going
This contract won’t be adopted overnight. There’s plenty of structural obstacles:
Enterprises will need their own paper for the foreseeable future
Third parties like freelance platforms and staffing agencies will handle the majority of Enterprise work for the foreseeable future
As with anything legal, there’s the law, the court’s ruling, and the size of the pocketbook. We aren’t immune.
But if we slowly bring parts of these values and legal terms into our business then we can all create the grass roots campaign that makes this reality ‘gradually then suddenly’.
We need to Crawl » Walk » Run
Our High Level Roadmap
Phase 1 (where we are today): General awareness and adoption
Get leaders to adopt it by having the best freelancers and Virtual Companies adopt it
We’ve adopted this at The Human Cloud with both our freelancers and the companies we work for
Phase 2: Legal oversight
We’ll translate our common sense language into legal language that can be used as legal precedent.
*V2 will add compliance protection for clients
Phase 3: Platform acceptance
I honestly don’t think we’ll ever live in a marketplace-less world. And honestly, I think marketplaces will always be at least 60% of our space.
Increasingly marketplaces will become partners as they’re forced to compete for the best freelancer talent. Some might just become outsourced sales/marketing for freelancers.
Phase 4: Enterprise Acceptance
There will always be large companies, and we can reasonably assume large companies will always be the majority of B2B spend.
Once legal checks are in place, and platforms have adopted this, enterprises will be comfortable with it.
How To Contribute
The social contract is in your leader portal (at the bottom of this). Comment, add your own clauses :)
Why are contributors contained to the leader portal? Why not open it up to everyone?
Honestly we’re super torn about this, but our logic as of now is:
We have to maintain the quality of input. This quality is a product of proximity, and we know or know who invited everyone in the early days.
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