Gig economy is a one-sided contract. The employers pay for the time the skills used. But staying updated costs time and money since gig-economy workers do not have access to the Learning & Development departments the way regular employees do, nor do they have the opportunity to build pension funds, medical insurance leave alone wealth creation opportunities like ESOPs. This is where the government needs to create laws that govern gig-workers.The gig economy works great if you have a financial cushion built in. Then it is a great way to explore the hidden talents you never knew you had. But being a gig worker is also full of insecurity, loneliness and income volatility. The unorganized blue collar workers have always lived without the safety net regular work provides. As 30-40 percent of the workforce of our country is joining this new world of work, it is time to rethink the labor laws. Read more ...

The new products and service will create new roles and new work opportunities. But they will need people to learn new skills. While talent is fairly uniformly distributed, opportunities are not. The impact of job redundancies impacts people at the bottom of the pyramid far more sharply than those who are well cushioned. Where do we begin to prepare ourselves for the future? Education is a good place to start. This time, education will have to be far more than a way to land a job. It has to prepare us to think of others and not just ourselves. The future of work has to be designed not just as a tech solution but also as an ethical choice.

The pattern is clear about data breaches. The hackers sneak in to the databases. Since they are in stealth mode, their presence is not detected for months. Could it be that your employees’ data has been compromised and you are blissfully unaware?

The jobs that follow the “faster, higher, stronger” principle will progressively be taken over by machines. It is easy to program the robots to do something repetitively and do it blindingly fast. Not only can robots do the work faster than humans, they do not have Monday morning blues. They do not seek vacation days nor do they object to working on weekends. They can go through mountains of data in a moment and identify anomalies. They are better legal assistants than humans. They make better radiologists than humans. Any job that is faster for machines to carry out makes it uneconomical to be left to humans. That means we will have many of these jobs carried out by robots replacing humans – men to be precise.