I turned down a future of work job because the pay was a joke

Have we forgotten that work is about getting paid?

Welcome to A-Mail. I’m Anna Codrea-Rado, a business, tech and culture writer. My current reporting obsession is how work makes us feel. The vibe of this newsletter is somewhere between a reporter’s notebook and an email to a long-distance friend. 15,000+ readers love it. Maybe you will, too?

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Illustration: Léo Hamelin

Last summer, a contact of mine who describes himself as a “pioneer of the future of work” approached me about a job.

He'd set up an organisation in response to all the ways in which work is fundamentally broken. Its mission was to build a fair and prosperous future of work. He needed someone – a managing director, he said – to help him run it. And he thought I was the right person to do it.

I was the right person for it. Thinking about how messed up work is and doing something to try and make it better is my bread and butter. I’ve run grassroots campaigns for workers’ rights; I’ve written a guidebook on freelancing; I’ve co-founded the first media awards specifically for freelancers. If there ever was an ideal job for me, this was it!  

And so, I told him that yes I was very interested, indeed. 

He took me for a midweek lunch at an East London restaurant where the best way for me to describe the aesthetic is: plywood. He brought his executive assistant along and ordered a Negroni. I was lapping up the Mad Men vibe and wondering if this meant that I could finally say I'd been headhunted. 

Over an obscure root-vegetable risotto and assorted fermented side dishes, he told me more about the day-to-day of the job. It would involve lobbying policymakers, writing white papers, and building a network of stakeholders who were actually going to make change rather than sit just talking about doing it. He told me that he was fed up with going to roundtable discussions on e.g. solving late payments for freelancers, having a great conversation and then nothing coming of it. I agreed with him because I’ve been to those meetings and nothing does come from them. 

His energy was infectious; he really did seem to get it. 

He told me to “give him my figure” and he’d "make it work with the board". 

And yet, it quickly transpired that while he fancied himself as a Don Draper, he was, in fact, more David Brent. 

For starters, it should have been a red flag when I couldn't get a straight answer out of him about the structure of the business. What he was describing sounded like a think tank to me, but for a reason I couldn’t get out of him, he wasn't into calling it that. It also wasn’t clear to me how this project was being funded. 

And while I agreed with all the specific problems he’d identified – from the undervaluing of creative work and inaccessible employment opportunities to power imbalances and antiquated legal structures – I wasn’t convinced he knew how to tackle a problem as big as: work. 

I should’ve listened to what he was really saying when he was describing the role to me. It was a job that exclusively involved putting up with a lot of bullshit. In terms of the frustration of working against the status quo, but also putting up with his bullshit, too.

It's a big deal for me to actually consider a full-time job. I’ve been working for myself for nearly six years now; I’ve been my own boss for longer than I’ve been anyone else’s employee. I’m incredibly spoiled when it comes to work.  

And yet, I was keen enough on this job to do my due diligence and ask around about salaries. Turns out, people get paid a lot of money to be managing directors! They also get paid a lot more to do jobs that have the words “future of work” in them. The figure I eventually landed on was right – in terms of the market value as well as my own. I put it in an email and sent it to him. (Take out a subscription to this newsletter and I’ll give you the real figures 😮). 

While I waited to hear back, I tried on the job title while out walking my dogs with my boyfriend. "Hello, I'm the managing director of [Company Name]". He said I sounded like a dickhead, but that I also sounded like I enjoyed sounding like one.

The pioneer wrote back a day later. He said the starting salary he’d had in mind was less than half what I’d proposed. Money isn’t everything when it comes to jobs, but it’s kinda important when the job - sorry, the entire organisation!! - is all about better working conditions. Guess that the prosperous future of work didn't extend to the people creating it. 

My kindest take here is that he had big ambitions, but didn’t have the budget to match them and lacked the leadership skills to communicate that. What I’m more concerned about, however, is that he really didn't seem to see the problem with a man trying to underpay a woman to run an organisation tasked with fixing the problems with work. 

If this is the future of work, it looks a lot like an old-fashioned boys’ club to me. Solutions are being shaped by the same outdated dynamics of gender, power, and pay. Jobs are secured through closed networks, women are undervalued, and the day-to-day experience of work favours a select group of people. In sum: the future of work looks just as shit as work does right now. 

This is part of the essay where I'm supposed to include evidence to back up my point, but I even bore myself repeating the same stuff that we all already know, but ICYMI:

• Men are more likely than women to be employed in jobs that are considered to be "high-growth" and "high-wage." (Pew Research)

• Women are 25% less likely than men to be promoted to management positions. (World Economic Forum)

In all the discourse about the future of work, we seem to have forgotten that a crucial part of work is… getting paid! A fancy job title, a bullshit job and a joke of a salary isn’t the vision I’m into.

I replied, told him that the pay I'd asked for was commensurate with the role as it had been outlined to me, that I wasn’t prepared to take a pay cut and good luck to him.

I got an email from him recently – it was an invite to a roundtable.