By Matt Roush
Great Lakes IT Report
March 16th, 2005

There are a lot of people who worry about a future work force populated by temps and independent contractors.

But as long as some admittedly thorny issues like health care and pensions can be worked out, author Daniel H. Pink celebrates it.

Pink's seminal 2001 book, "Free Agent Nation," chronicled the rise of a permanent class of people who he said want to throw off the burdens of corporate life for the relative freedom of being "freelancers, e-lancers and proprietors of very small businesses. A lot of people aspire to do this. And for companies, these types of workers provide a window into the most talented people there are."

In fact, Pink said, "in a weird way, the biggest impact of Free Agent Nation may be its impact on corporate America."

In an interview Tuesday, Pink said that a few years ago, leaving corporate America for life as a freelancer "was like leaving Cuba and swimming to Florida. You had to denounce your former captors, and you were blacklisted and could never go back. Now, there's a detente. The border is getting to be more like the United States and Canada than the United States and Cuba. There is much greater migration back and forth between freelancing and corporate employment, more and more people with dual passports."

However, Pink acknowledges there are "gigantic public policy issues" to be worked out before the full realization of Free Agent Nation can happen. None is bigger than health care.

Pink noted that the United States system of employer-provided health care is a historical accident, brought about by wage controls imposed around World War II. Unable to compete for workers on price, employers  instead added what were called "fringe benefits" like health care. That system quickly solidified. And with health care now far more expensive than it was in the 1940s -- unexpected health care costs are a major cause of personal bankruptcy -- health coverage is far more important.

The solution, Pink said, is to have "health care come from your status as a citizen and a human being, not because of your status as a W-2 employee ... We need some kind of a system of universal health insurance. How you do that and how you pay for it is obviously a very complicated issue."

Pink said the problem of pensions, once provided by paternalistic corporations offering lifetime employment, is less severe, "because systems are in place where you can save money in a tax-advantaged way."

Pink was in Detroit Tuesday to speak to an event of the organization Create Detroit.

Pink's new book is "A Whole New Mind," due out next week. It contends there are three major forces moving us to a new style of work -- one in which the computer-style, "SAT thinking" personality is less important. In this world, qualities like artistry, empathy, caregiving and big-picture thinking are more important.

"These are abilities not measured by the SAT and largely ignored in school and in the hard headed business world often looked down upon," Pink said.

Those forces?

Abundance, a world in which the revenue of the self-storage industry that stores our excess stuff is bigger than Hollywood; Asia, code for the fact that routine work that can be reduced to a script or a spec sheet is being offshored; and automation, which is self-explanatory.