Employment derivatives: Difference between revisions

{{Drop|W|hen yet another}} junior customer services manager quit for a crypto startup, Hunter Barkley had an epiphany. His own salary, he knew, was an unhedged contingency apt to rain disappointment across his meagre aspirations. However much he liked his job — it had moments of passable distraction — and however good he was at it, he had little practical control over how much he was paid to do it. He was, in the argot, structurally long an option to the market, though one that was stubbornly, deeply, out of the money. In a time of expansion or innovation, when demand was high, his salary ''should'' ratchet up in pleasing annual notches. In times of recession it would not. The record of his own payslips reflected a great preponderance of stagnation.  

A corporation employing tired multitudes to turn its turgid wheels — a good-sized bank, say — is locked in constant struggle with this tide of batty expectation just to stop it's human capital being washed away.   

At fault were the exciting but stupid technology enterprises whose sails the voguish delusion filled.

In times of giddy optimism, stemming this outward tide could cost a bank ''billions'' of dollars. Then, as inflated expectations foundered, the tide would turn. Throngs of good workers would be suddenly available on the cheap. Firms could rebalance by tactical redundancy, but it was expensive and tended to dent morale somewhat.  

Different sectors were “long” or “short” this crowd madness, which he labelled ''[[π]]'', at different points in the cycle. (“[[Π]]” came from the Greek παράνοια, (''paranoia''). It conveyed the pleasing ideas not just of collective madness but circularity, running on a hamster wheel, Ourboros’ tail and so on — all fundamental properties of the employment relationship.)  

“Employment derivatives” would thus lie fallow  

while he served out his porridge. But their time would come.

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 capitalist]]s, 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 venture capitalists would vote by throwing money — literally, from a stack of bills on the table before them — at the “pitching” start-ups.  

The BHCMA would weight the submissions by reference to the volume of cash the venture capitalists lobbeda 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 was known, became the ''de facto''  measure of ''[[π]]'' and was soon factored into the “floating” leg of [[employment rate swap]]s as standard.