The word ‘moonlight’ has several alleged origins. The American version is from Cora Steward’s literacy classes for poor Kentucky coal miners, but only at night with enough moonlight so that they can find their way there. The Australian version is of cattle thieves who steal cattle at night in the light of the moon, while the Irish version dates from the 1880s, with gangs of ‘moonlighters’ stealing at night. I suspect that Wipro Chairman Rishad Premji would fully agree with the latter two versions. Calling Chandni “cheating-and-simple” at work, her company fired 300 people for doing so. Infosys immediately sent an email to employees with a “no two-times, no moonlighting” warning, though recent reports suggest a change of heart (bit.ly/3TwD7E6). The COO of TCS made an apoplectic assessment, saying that “the IT industry could be different”. The CEO of Tech Mahindra was more optimistic, saying that “it was necessary to change with the times”. Swiggy carried forward the moonlight policy by taking it forward.
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Let me go out on a limb and give my clear view: Moonlight is here, and here to stay, as it is an integral part of the future of work the pandemic has brought forth in the present. ‘Future work’ is an often misused term, but some of the principles in the literature remain the same. The first, and most famous, is work-from-home, which I have expanded to decentralized work or ‘work-from-anywhere’, be it home, office, coffee shop or any other country. But often, there’s a thin line between working from anywhere and working for someone, and it seems that both of them have technical majors. As fellow columnist TN Hari wrote, “The pandemic and the forced WFH allowed WFH to experiment with freelancing opportunities, in addition to their 9-to-5 jobs. Freedom from commuting and confinement within the confines of their homes gave them the time, energy, and possibility to do extra work in the office, but there has been a tendency to decentralize, with it working for anyone.
The second future of work theory is the rise of the gig-economy, which in its nature involves many employers, as it trades the freedom of nature and secure lifelong employment with no work time commitments. Hari refers to the Gig Economy Index, which shows a startling figure that nearly 40% of the American workforce earns at least 40% of their income through gig work. In India, Ola, Zomato and others mainstreamed gig work among urban blue-collar workers, and “the pandemic has brought it to white-collars.” The future of work has expanded space for the gig economy, with the one-employer-many-employer pyramid being inverted to one-employer-many-employers. Moonlighting shows this. In some sense, there is also the well-known Google work ethic, whereby its employees can do something else with 20% of their time. The third aspect of the future of work is not a job for life. Both employers and employees are moving away from this expectation, and it is perhaps appropriate for employees to de-risk themselves by following a job portfolio approach. Fourth, and perhaps most important, is the inevitable rise of the creative or passion economy. The ‘personality monetization’ enabled by the Internet, micropayments, NFTs and the metaverse will mean that individuals can more effectively monetize their talents, rather than doing so as part of a company. Fifth, bad K-From-Anywhere sometimes translates to work-all-time, as does always-on work upsets our work-life balance. While employers are, sometimes justifiably, concerned about employees working for others, there is loud silence on the number of hours they are given to work. The general employment contract calls for employees to pay a certain number of hours of their time in exchange for pay, but often remains silent on additional hours worked without being paid for it. For many, the woes of low wages and cost of living make moonlighting a necessity rather than an option.
I leave the last word in support of my contention to India’s Minister of Information Technology, Rajiv Chandrashekhar, who tweeted to the effect that today is the era of employee entrepreneurs and employers expect captive models to fail, and the future of work one The community is product creators who will work on multiple projects.
Perhaps the world’s most famous entrepreneur-turned-employee Elon Musk would agree, as he ‘works’ for half a dozen companies at once and wants to buy more of them to run.
Jaspreet Bindra is the founder of Tech Whisperer Limited, a digital transformation and technology advisory practice.
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