Hustle Till You Die

Free Agent Nation: How America's New Independent
Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live
By Daniel H. Pink (Warner Books)

A few short years ago, Daniel H. Pink wore starched shirts and worked 14-hour days in a straight job for a hierarchical organization. Then he quit, and embarked on a career as a freelance writer. And he noticed something: ''Several of my friends and neighbors were making similar moves'' — that is, they too were becoming ''free agents.'' He later wrote a cover story for Fast Company magazine on this phenomenon and its implications. Soon, he reports, ''elites were shouting me down.'' Next, he set out to travel around America and interview other people like him. They agreed that people like them are important. ''Work,'' Pink announces in Free Agent Nation, ''has been undergoing perhaps its most significant transformation since Americans left the farm for the factory a century ago. Legions of Americans . . . are abandoning one of the Industrial Revolution's most enduring legacies — the 'job.' '' This, in turn, means that ''large permanent organizations with fixed rosters of individuals are giving way to small, flexible networks with ever-changing collections of talent.''

So Pink is making an ambitious case here, and more or less explicitly positions Free Agent Nation as a sequel to the 1956 book The Organization Man, William H. Whyte's famous examination of the ''ultimate harmony'' that had developed between many members of the middle class and the institutions they worked for (or ''belonged to''). Whyte, of course, was concerned that in giving themselves over to their organizations, a good number of Americans were losing the ambitions and independence of spirit that are so crucial to the American idea. What Pink is here to celebrate is the end of all that.

Pink also echoes that Whyte’s line that his subjects "are the dominant members of our society …. and it is there values which will set the American temper One of the things that made that such a fine bit of phraseology on Whyte’s part is that it freed him from having to deonstrate the significance of the Organization Man in dull statistical terms. Pink, however, deliberately yokes many of his arguments to big numbers. There are, he asserts, 33 million free agents, a ''staggering'' total — and a startling increase over the 25 million figure he tossed out in his Fast Company story from just three years ago. ''One-fourth of the American workforce,'' Pink adds, ''has declared its independence from traditional work.''

Curiously, The New York Times reported just the opposite this past December — that the number of self-employed Americans actually declined between 1994 and 1999, to roughly 12.9 million. What's the deal? The Times was looking at figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which Pink says he finds inadequate. Here is where his numbers come from:

Although temporary workers ''are often free agents by default,'' Pink counts 3.5 million of them in his total. He also adds a category he calls ''microbusinesses,'' which have ''two or three'' employees: he starts with an estimate of the number of home-based businesses from a relevant ''trade association,'' knocks it down by 4 million to prevent overlapping with the incorporated self-employed, then knocks off another 10 million ''to be conservative,'' arriving at 13 million. Then there are the ''soloists,'' like Pink himself. Here Pink relies on a survey by something called Aquent Partners, which in 1999 found 33 million ''independent professionals'' in the American work force. (Actually, in 2000, Aquent found only 25 million, but never mind.) Pink halves the 1999 figure -- again to ''err on the conservative side'' — and announces there are 16.5 million soloists. So add up these three categories and there you are, at 33 million free agents.

Well, whatever. It's hard to say why Pink seems so determined to play these unconvincing numbers games — unless it's just to provoke those elites into shouting him down — because they don't really matter to his book's main themes. One of these is that the quasi-familial social contract between big companies and their employees (which was arguably at the core of what Whyte was concerned about) has deteriorated. The other is that there is a class of worker out there that is thriving anyway, and that perhaps the most important characteristic of (certainly the most interesting thingabout ) these free agents is that their work is "a source of meaning." It seems plausible that these things might set the American temper. The question is how.

In answering this, ''Free Agent Nation'' often reads less like an investigation than a sales pitch, dense with enough slogans and catchwords to launch a dozen marketing campaigns. Soloists and microbusinesses and ''mamapreneurs'' are replacing Taylorism with ''Tailorism,'' or ''My Size Fits Me.'' They practice ''horizontal loyalty'' or ''high-tech muckrizing'' and form ''entreprenetworks.'' They look forward, finally, to the pleasures of ''e-tirement,'' which involve continuing to work for the rest of one's life.

Pink implies that there is room in the future for ''large permanent organizations,'' since they are generally the clients of the graphic designers and marketing consultants and copywriters who fill his anecdotes, and since he considers such nonsmall companies as Kinko's, Starbucks and Office Depot to be key elements of America's ''free agent infrastructure.'' He also acknowledges that there are downsides for some. But for the most part, he believes it's better to stop focusing on security (the coddling health care plans and retirement benefits of the past) and concentrate instead on opportunity.

What gets lost in the sloganeering, however, is that this is a far easier shift for some workers than for others. For instance, Pink, the antagonizer of elites, was not an assistant manager of Kinko’s before he went free agent. The hierarchical organization he quit was the executive branch of the United States government, where he was a speechwriter for vice president — not a résumé line that one immediately associates with a lack of opportunity. There’s nothing wrong with free agents like Pink pursuing opportunity as far as they can and to whatever success they can achieve; I’m sure Pink will do well solo, or within the large organization of his choice.

But in wrapping up a discussion of the disadvantages of temping toward the end of the book, Pink observes, ''The source of inequality in work today is not between who's an employee and who's a free agent — but between who has skills that are in demand and who doesn't, between who can exercise bargaining power in the new talent market and who cannot.'' This observation may not be particularly new, but it's probably the most unassailable point Pink makes. In fact, it seems truer than ever, not least because of the corporate evolution that Pink writes about.

Maybe that's good news for him, and for whichever of his friends and neighbors are equipped with the skills to bargain for power. But for others who look to work not as a source of meaning but as a source of survival — and there’s little question that this would include not just the cashier at Starbuck’s and the shelf-stocker at Office Depot, but a large number of workers even among Pink’s 33 million "free agents" — a world in which they are free to fend for themselves for their entire working life and beyond, in which they are free to hustle until they die, that world does not sound like such good news at all.

A similar version of this review appeared in the April 29, 2001 issue of The New York Times Book Review.