Employment derivatives

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Employment derivatives
/ɪmˈplɔɪmənt dɪˈrɪvətɪvz/ (n.)
Financial instruments designed to manage the risk of employment variability. First developed in the early part of this millennium by derivatives pioneer and perennial boiler of pots, Hunter Barkley.

Genesis

When midway through his annual rant about the meaningless of life as viewed through the lens of income, Hunter Barkley had an epiphany. He knew his own pay packet was an unhedged contingency in his life: the perpetual disappointment it rained upon his sorry existence was well beyond his practical control. He knew, too, that his experience was common to the great dreary sweep of humankind as it blearily clambered across the clanking gears of global industry.

That was not his revelation, but this: just as that great collected horde of wage-slaves were at the several whims of wanton Gods, so too were their bosses. Logically, they must be: they were on the other side of the same trade.

Ergo, firms were long what their servants were short — only at a far greater scale. Businesses — particularly boring businesses — bobbed ineptly at the mercy of hysteria’s fickle ebb and flow.

A single servant has one unit measure of this risk; her master has, literally, thousands. An employer of turgid multitudes — a good-sized bank, for example — would be locked in constant struggle with those batty tides just to prevent its pedestrian, but vital, operations personnel from being washed away.

The foe upon this reckoning was the swarm of exciting but stupid enterprises propelled at any time by that deluded current of techno-optimism. Why they believed things to be different this time scarcely mattered — there was always some hare-brained hot take to glom onto — but it often had to do with technology.

At the height of any such craze, merely stemming an outward stampede could cost a bank billions of dollars. Then, as the inflated expectations in the new sector foundered, the bank would find itself spoilt for choice of excellent available workers, but absurdly overcommitted to pay those it had managed to retain. The usual means of correcting this was tactical redundancy, but that was expensive and tended to dent the morale of even those who got to stay.

In any case, this employment cost volatility bore little relation to the bank’s own performance, none at all to its employees’. It was a simple measure of that background market euphoria.

An idea

Hunter Barkley’s experience as a junior interest rate swaps trader provided a perfect analogy and gave him an idea. Why not hedge away this volatility?

Different types of firm were “long” or “short” this babbling hysteria, which he labelled π, at different points in the hype cycle. “Π” came from the Greek παράνοια, (paranoia), and conveyed the pleasing idea of not just madness but circularity, running on a hamster wheel and so on — all fundamental properties of the employment relationship.

At its onset, “trad-fi”, “bricks-and-mortar” firms are short, and delusional start-ups, long π. Eventually, the lunacy levels off, reality sets in and employment relations revert to mean, whereupon the π curve flattens and then eventually inverts.

If one could only match off long and short exposures, Barkley realised, firms on either side of the bid could hedge their exposure to π.

In one of those cruel ironies to whose martial cadence our lives keep time, before he could figure out a way of monetising his idea, Hunter Barkley was laid off and, shortly afterwards, imprisoned for manipulating LIBOR.

The idea of employment derivatives would lie fallow while he served out his porridge.

A chance encounter at a bar in West London

As she neared her gin horizon, Wickliffe Hampton HR manager Anita Dochter embarked upon a long and elliptical disquisition to her old pal Cass Mälstrom. Dochter was, as usual, agitated. Today, it was the unstaunchable stream of defections from her firm, a sleepy mid-market broker headquartered in Peterborough. It was haemorrhaging hundreds of compliance and onboarding staff each month to venture capital-funded dotcom start-ups. Indeed, Mälstrom herself was an example: not three months earlier she had been bid away from a workstream lead role in the firm’s client money compliance change management programme. She was now Co-deputy CIO of legaltech darling lexrifyly.

lexrifyly had no product to speak of, no business model, customers and no obvious plan but was flush with stupid amounts of cash, a great deck and an unshakable conviction in goosing its burn rate by overpaying for bums it didn’t need on seats it didn’t yet have.

Dochter was livid. “But, Cass, we actually need our people. They do productive things for us. You know, MIS reports. Operational deep dives. Netting audits. They lead workstreams on client money remediation programmes. But unless we pay your stupid rates for them, which we cannot afford to do —” at this point, she fell off her stool briefly — “and give them free fruit, unlimited working from home, safe spaces and a soft play area — they won’t stay with us. But, you,” she hissed, clambering back up and jabbing Mälstrom on the lapel, “right now, you don’t need any goddamn staff: you just need to show your investors you are clever, imaginative and on point doing fashionably insane things. That does not take actual staff. So stop taking ours.”

“Well, how else am I meant to splurge away all this free money?” Mälstrom lit a cigarette with a fiver.

As luck would have it Barkley, fresh out of gaol and making ends meet waiting tables, was rostered on their table for the evening. Presenting them with the check and some after-dinner mints, he cleared his throat.

“Forgive me for imposing, but I could not help overhearing. If you are not actually hiring anyone, why not hedge your employment rate risk to someone who is?”

Dochter fell off her stool again.

Barkley dropped a slim document on the table.

Mälstrom prodded the booklet. “What’s this?”

“An NDA. Call me.”

The first employment rate swap

So was the very first “employment rate swap” conceived. For an initial period of three years, Wickliffe Hampton would pay its entire operations wage bill, controlled for performance, to lexrifyly. In return, lexrifyly would pay its absurd, grossly inflated but as yet unallocated budget for an equivalent team — there was no such team, of course: this was exactly the point — to Wickliffe Hampton.

This way, Wickliffe Hampton had the cash required to preemptively bid back restless staff, and lexrifyly could, in time-honoured fashion, guilelessly piddle its investors’ cash up a wall without troubling the operating resiliency of the banking sector, or for that matter, its own HR department, which didn’t currently exist in any case.

If this seemed like a bad trade for lexrifyly, in actuality it was not: firstly, it didn’t care: what was money, when it came to it? Secondly, Barkley’s models demonstrated that the economics could change in any number of circumstances: for example, a market crash, hawkish monetary policy, the dissipation of mass hysteria or incipient tech winter. For these continencies the ERS was a natural hedge. While widescale redundancies and hiring freezes gripped the fintech sector, the boring old banking industry would box on as it always had done. At that point, a fintech startup that was short negative π under an ERS would have a sensible amount of cash coming in from its bank counterparty to keep the lights on.

The “PIEBOR” submission process

It was easy enough to quantify a bank’s presumptive wage bill since, once you controlled it for hysteria, it was more or less a fixed rate. But what about the ever-changing hypothetical wage bill of a startup? How to gauge that in real-time? And what was to stop a startup gaming the rate easily, by just pretending its actual preparedness to pay stupid money was lower than it really was?

The market needed an observable, objective measure of “prevailing startup insanity”, which Barkley approximated for “π”. Barkley supplied it. Under the auspices of the British Human Capital Managers’ Association (BHCMA), a committee of fashionable startups would meet each afternoon in a WeWork in Shoreditch and over kombucha martinis to state publicly, in front of a panel of venture capitalists, how much they would be prepared to pay an underperforming settlements and reconciliations clerk to join them and drive customer engagement. They expressed this as a premium or discount to π', being the equivalent value for the preceding day.

The BHCMA would weight the submissions by reference to the volume of cash the venture capitalists lobbed at each startup, trim the top and bottom estimates, average the remainder and compile and publish the trimmed arithmetic mean rate as the London Inter-Employer Basic Offered Rate. Quickly, PIEBOR as it became known became the de facto measure of π and was soon factored into the “floating” leg of employment rate swaps as standard.

Credibility spread

PIEBOR was not the only component of an individual swap: short counterparties would also be assigned a weighted average “credibility spread” over (or under) the prevailing PIEBOR rate. This was a competence assessment made by independent human capital rating agencies of the median quality of a given counterparty’s staff, routinely marked to market and adjusted by way of a 360° credibility appraisal process.

The credibility rating could yield anomalies. Though HR departments assiduously graded staff against an internal 5-point scoring metric and would force-rank staff to a curve, there remained risks that employee “alpha” could be mispriced or too overly concentrated. Furthermore, interdepartmental secondments were beset by credibility rating, diversity arbitrage and cheapest-to-deliver scandals, especially over quarter end.

Meantime, the need for periodic reductions in force was greatly reduced and could be handled quantitatively without reference to individual performance or value — as it was now baked into the portfolio credibility rating. This led to the curious phenomenon of businesses laying off those staff with the highest credibility ratings first. This was not the last unintended consequence of the financialisaton of employment.

Expansion

By this financial engineering Barkley had unwittingly created a tradable instrument out of an abstract benchmark. Due to the offsetting nature of ERS transactions one needed to be neither long nor short actual staff but could trade directionally on abstract π without having a job, or any workers, at all. These “synthetic” instruments were valuable for sectors affected by the vagaries of the labour market even where not themselves directly exposed to it. Recruitment consultants, employment lawyers, HR Consultants — that kind of thing.

Individual workers began to buy π-linked contracts for difference as a way of laying off their own intrinsic loyalty discount, a sort of negative carry that comes from unreflective devotion to a single monolithic corporation. This restricted the need to quit to a narrow run of unmanageable idiosyncrasies such as cultural fit, business relocation and visceral hatred of the boss.

Before long more exotic ERS payoffs emerged. Capital protected RIF puts, employment collars, diversity forwards and synthetic collateralised gender pay gap swaps. All these risks, and more, could be managed in the hypothetical with out adjusting the physical staff roster at all.

Banks even began selling employment derivatives directly to their employees, saving the bother of having to hedge themselves.

So began the sad chronicle of employment rate swap mis-selling. In this dark episode, banks would separate the employee’s fixed rate, and pay that under a physical employment contract, then separately hedge out their π risk with a linked derivative. Before the emergence of ERS, the π risk was intrinsic to the employment contract and could not be abstracted and traded separately.

The scandal blew up when it emerged HR departments were being offered incentives to place employee counterparties on performance management, arranging with other firms to bid them away or just peremptorily laying them off, leaving staff holding a twenty-five year out-of-the-money employment rate swaps with no actual job, and badly exposed should crypto go tits up.

Such “self-referencing employment derivatives” are now not permitted in many jurisdictions, and attract penalty risk weighing in the UK.

See also

• Interest rate swap mis-selling scandal
• Credibility derivatives