I’m Better Than You

I was just looking at some social media posts, and one struck me as almost impossibly naïve.  A little more than a year ago, I wouldn’t have put “almost” in that sentence, but back then, I lived in China, a country ruled by an authoritarian regime; a nanny state.  People there tend to be pragmatic. I was mostly unaware of the over-sensitive nature of younger generations.  

I have recently (well, in the past year) become familiar with the concept of “woke” culture.  When I was in China and Donald Trump got elected president, I read about university students who were so emotionally traumatized by this that they needed time off, to mourn and cry, and they needed their professors to bring them cookies and milk and to help them emotionally cope with the trauma.  I found this all amusing, and though I believed the reports, I didn’t actually believe that it was a widespread phenomenon.

I was wrong.

I could start a blog on this topic alone.  I’m not going to though.  I’m sure that there are several already.  Anyway, whenever I catch myself getting outraged about this or that human foible, I hear myself and I sound like one of those typically reactionary commenters railing about “what is this world/are the youth these days/whatever/etc. coming to???” 

THAT SAID, a lot of people these days seem to feel improbably entitled to a level of fairness, equality, and acceptance that is, let’s say, unrealistic.  More so than I remember being the case before voluntarily entering that gigantic gulag known as China 🇨🇳  (Note to self – maybe there’s a future blog post in that?).

In case you aren’t familiar with the gig economy, that expression refers to people who work from job to job, doing several per day, getting paid individually for each of those “gigs” and the sum total add up to their living income.  Because the term is relatively new, a lot of people assume, without giving it much thought, that it’s a recent phenomenon, referring to delivery drivers who, rather than working as an employee for a specific restaurant, instead go from one food provider to the next, doing deliveries for several providers per day.  Another example might be someone who works for Uber or the like, or someone like me, who gives lessons online, but not working for any particular company but rather getting paid class by class from each individual student, one lesson at a time.

While this sort of thing has boomed with modern technology and exacerbated by COVID (Somewhere on this website there is a photo of me in a bathrobe working from home, putting down drum tracks for various artists’ songs that they recorded during COVID lockdowns; my drumming is probably all over Spotify by now), when you think about it, you’ll realize that the phenomenon, if not the expression, has existed for a long time.  Think in terms of babysitting teenagers, or cleaners who would spend a couple hours at your house cleaning, a couple hours at someone else’s house cooking dinner and cleaning the kitchen, etc.

Many of these people, desperate to get clients but without the funds to market themselves, would sign up with an agency.  If you need a cleaner, or a cook, or whatever, you’d contact this agency and they’d send someone to do the job for you.  You’d pay the cleaner (or whomever) and the person doing the work would give a cut of their take to the agency.

These days, those agencies are now largely online, they are called platforms, but it’s basically the same thing.  It looks to the clients and casual onlookers as though the workers work for the agency, but such is not the case.  The workers pay the agencies/platforms, not the other way around.

I digress, but we’ll come back ‘round.  Stay with me.

I work with one of these platforms, in addition to this website (see the Study English page.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.)  And here’s the brilliant part of the business model – I don’t work FOR them.  I set my own price, students sign up with the website and pay them, and the platform pays me minus their commission.  See, the teachers (well, tutors, technically) pay the website; the students don’t.  Why does the students’ money go to the website instead of the teacher? Because the website does all the advertising.  I got the students through the website.  I couldn’t have gotten them on my own, and bless them for that.  I know how snarky I’m sounding, but I’m being serious. I don’t know what I’d be doing, or where I’d be, without the platform I’m currently still working with.

I work WITH them, not FOR them.  I’m considered (and, frankly,  behave like) an independent contractor. However, they have a reputation to maintain, and thus have rules we tutors have to follow, and that’s fair enough.  

I hear a lot of grumbling from some of the tutors on this site, though.  One that recently prompted this post was this:

A tutor who claimed that he was extremely reliable for a long period of time missed a lesson for some reason (which wasn’t his fault, naturally)(whether or not it was his fault has nothing to do with it; it was, in any case, his responsibility) and as a result, his profile on the platform was severely lowered.

He found this grossly unfair.

But was it? 

This tutor felt entitled, due to his long history with the platform, to be treated differently from the rest of us.  I’d like to submit that this is not reasonable.

You do what you agree to do, and failing that, you take the consequences.  

It’s like any other job.  OK, if I had a regular job, I’d lose said job for not showing up for work, or continually showing up late, and so on.

Well, I’m self-employed now.  Does that make me special?  Am I my own boss?  I don’t see it that way.  I have six to nine different bosses every day, whether I’m doing classes from my platform or from my website.  If I don’t do a good job, I am very easily replaced.  That’s all there is to it.  If I do a poor job for the platform, I have their consequences to pay as well.

That’s all there is to it.  I’m not entitled, and neither are you.

Thank you for reading.