"What are we building here? Is it a company? Or are we building a new country with no national boundaries? A new democracy for the consumer. A new democracy with a new electorate."
-Malcolm McDowell, In Good Company

In Good Company, the Weitz Brothers' follow-up to About a Boy, is a perfectly nice Father-Daughter movie which proves surprisingly sentimental about Business. Mr. McDowell's character, the synergy-loving tycoon, is ultimately dismissed as inhuman by a filmmaker financed by Vivendi-Universal, a monstrously large media company much like the one in the film.

In Good Company raises the questions of what workers are to do in the new global order but it finds those questions too unsavory to even answer. Two weeks ago, when we spoke of the rise of the Corporate-State, we looked at some of these questions ourselves. Today we have a new, more personal batch.

What will the Corporate-State look like? Will shareholders be the new electorate? Will there be flags? Well, to the last I say, What are logos? and to the others, about the specifics, I say we cannot possibly know. But we can, and must, begin to discuss what we want it to look like, for the Corporate-State is still young and open to suggestions.

The maudlin pap of In Good Company need be avoided if we are to continue to gather more rights and responsibilities with each new global organizing structure. Let us be well prepared, then, as we sit down to hammer out the collective bargaining agreement for the 22nd century. Let us delve.

The Freedom of Decaying Political Structures
The old man, the Nation-State, was cagey. The first nationals allowed the drive for national unity, the need for the creation of this new animal, Patriotism, to make them forget what they were about. They left the bargaining table a few compromises short of empowerment. We must do better than our fathers did. The Corporate-State will need Employees as dearly as the Nation-State needed Citizens and the Religious-State needed Believers. Besides, we will need the wages of the Corporate-State. Few of us are prepared to go off the grid and return to a state of nature.

From where do we start? During the give and take to come over the next hundred years, what should our negotiating team ask for? Let us start with the obvious. Let us start with what we are not going to get. Let us seek out the advice of a lawyer.

Luckily for us I found just such insight at a party: a quickly blurring-around-the-edges affair of the Holiday variety. Everyone in attendance was subject to lots of haven't-seen-you-in-ages and those of us without obvious career paths had plenty of opportunities to spin our various stints for Team Unemployment.

A lawyer nestling down into his 50s, a man I have known for years and never exchanged more than the least meaningful pleasantries with, decided not to settle for banalities and led me into an actual discussion of the job market. Not how I might find work, but what work is and what work will be. Frankly, it was the sort of earnest accounting I was hoping to put off until I was wrapped warmly in a unique career of my own breathtaking construction.

Thankfully, there is some consolation to be had in The Lawyer's assessment of the world. He talked revolution and, as we have already discussed, a revolution is already on. A way to catch up sounds good to me.

The Lawyer says: The 30 year gig is over. Pensions are done. United Airlines is in the middle of defaulting on over $5 billion dollars in pensions, the biggest corporate pension towel ever to be thrown in. Loyalty, top down and bottom up, has become senseless sentimentality. The Lawyer knows as well as I that when his daughters and I deride the lack of jobs and silently dream of our next one, we're not imagining a golden position with a company that will care for us into our dotage. We're thinking something we can try, an experience we can get. If it's a lap in a career track, it is one we will customize into our own personal race.

Where The Lawyer's lesson gets interesting, however, is where he antes up, family and mortgage and all, and embraces the death of job security. He himself has become a freelancer, a rogue operator, if you feel up to calling a balding man with a Saab a rogue. Lawyers are the sort of beasts that can roam from client to client, not unusual. But my Lawyer has only one client. And they want to bring him in-house and keep him, make him their pet lawyer. He'll have none of it. As he's said, the long term job is dead and dying. He'll stay with his firm, stay on retainer, keep the apartment his client provides him, steer them through their blistering growth and keep one foot out the door.

The Lawyer makes a solid margarita, too, and he hands me one as he assures me it would be rash to chain himself to one employer. They pay the bills for now but he has no intention of going down with them should things change.

"To rogue operators," I toast. He ignores me, off on his next point.

He has his points to make, I mine. Essentially, my friends, myself, and our studied ennui have been embarrassed by this man. He has out-younged us, rolling with the punches before we even realized we were being hit. To catch up, we had best start pitching and selling; find our skill, our tertiary, post-agricultural, post-labor skill, and farm it around; spread the consulting agreements and the work orders as far and as wide as possible. Maybe one of them is our cash cow, but, like the creepy milk maid who you don't leave alone with your children, we best keep our hands on lots of udders.

When I leave Lawyer and his blender, proof of his theory is as present as a newly learned word. My job -- part-time (of course) at a computer school -- has surrounded me with people who also have skipped out of the single employer rubric and into something more flexible. The teachers are professionals and freelancers who make extra money teaching. The students are studying to become freelancers or consultants. No one is looking for GE or IBM, no one has any intention of riding one corporation's largess into retirement.

Setting High Goals for Ourselves
This is our great lesson. To paraphrase the American military ad campaign that never made any sense: We must all be Companies of One. To our one employee we must provide a salary, benefits, childcare, and a pension. We must be driven in meeting our company's needs. We must handle all aspects of our business except payroll. Payroll we farm out to whatever Corporate-State we happen to be Citizen-Employees of for the moment.

So, this future job market of ours will be located at the crossroads of two unique situations. First, increasing numbers of us will wield the business cards of the self employed, the temporarily employed, the independent contractors. Second, our employers are reshaping the world. It puts us in an interesting position. A position fraught with possibility. Utopian and Orwellian possibility, depending on your mood.

Yes, entitlement programs might get folded into the creases of history and forgotten. Or, we can put in our bid to take the health care and the pensions with us -- our half of the Nation-State divorce -- and nurture them into a partner in our Companies of One. "You can hire me, surely, but you'll also have to pay my friend, Benefits."

We cannot allow the recent waves of privitization of utilities to make these things bonuses or benefits. That is a decent job cannot have a salary and, if you work full time, you get your electric bill paid. Corporate-States ought to be large enough to underwrite our utilities, from sewage to health care. Just as the Corporate-State is slowly getting the Nation-State to set it free, we must slowly take up our pensions and benefits and carry them with us from job to job. They are taking their profits and sovereignty to heart, we must take our livings and autonomy to heart. We must start now before the only political entity left to help us is the Corporate-State.

What No Borders Look Like
Listen: If Lawyer and I are right and his trends continue to play themselves out, then it will be neither unusual nor stigmatizing to skip ship after a few months work -- at the conclusion of a project, a season, a whim -- and find a new corporate home. And, for its part, the Corporate-State will be freed of the tiresome chore of dealing with pesky social albatrosses: the sick, the hurt, slowing productivity, insurance. Finally, employees will be subjected to the same immediate market forces as employers. Everyone competing, hirings coming as quickly as new product launches, the best talent always for sale, the worst being culled from the shelves. Even as one's employer becomes less defining of ones life plan, the role of the Corporate-State grows.

Nations were easier to change than tribes or religions. It's easy to embrace a national identity that can co-exist alongside religious or cultural belief systems, but it is still a big change. Even with planes making the travel a day's affair, it is expensive and hard and not the sort of thing you undertake but once or twice in a lifetime even if it never would have been considered in a more tribal world.

Yet again, the Corporate-State, waiting in the wings, does its forebear one better. During the previous presidential administration great swaths of the country felt alienated and grumbled about leaving the country or "taking it back." Under this administration, a whole new batch of folks feel that way. The things that keep them from actually breaking for Canada and Germany are geographic, linguistic, possibly cultural. Families and friends, lifestyles and neighborhoods are hard things to give up just for your ideals. The only belief system that will need to be embraced to join a new Corporate-State is a Mission Statement and a salary offer.

If one could change political entities without leaving, if one could throw up his arms, resign from the United States, join Canada and never leave Austin, wouldn't the numbers of expats jolt upward? Put more directly, if changing countries was as easy as changing jobs wouldn't it be easier to act on one's principles? Wouldn't it make sense to always have one foot out the door, like Lawyer refusing to settle for one client?

The Corporate-State, as its influence spreads, and it continues to shake off the geographical boundaries that have stymied nations for centuries, will be a malleable beast indeed. Citizenship in the Corporate-State will be a selective affair. You won't be born into an organizing body, one will hire you. You'll apply to the ones doing the work you like. Unless absolutely necessary, let us avoid the compounds of Margaret Atwood's latest, Oryx and Crake. Let us demand instead that we stay home and make phone calls and send emails, the newest Citizen-Employees of our Corporate-States. We can align ourselves in two (finally) distinct ways: geographically and politically. Alienation, the persistent modern sense of not fitting in, could be eradicated with the increased tele-mobility of living in a world without physical borders.

The Future is Now
The Corporate-State is concerned with profits, not loyalty. It is loyal not even to the piece of earth on which it is incorporated. And in the rush of reorganization that is to unfold over the next hundred years, the Citizen-Employee will be able to chart an equally unfettered, free, loyal-only-to-things-that-matter-to-them lifestyle. That is, if we start working for it now. If we lay the groundwork for independent contractors who make a decent wage and have IRAs they can tote with them for life. Some new form of patriotism that asks newly flexible workers to cede some rights for the greater good of a corporation that would never do the same for us needs to be a deal breaker as we hammer out

There are those who are forging ahead in their own awkward way. PT Club is an online forum that advises and directs those individuals who are looking to make themselves into miniature off shore corporations. PT stands for permanent traveler and the goal of the PT's of the world is to shake off permanent residency in any nation, to become Permanent Travelers, even if they never leave Akron. As the PT faithful themselves say, "In a nutshell, a PT merely arranges his or her paperwork in such a way that all governments consider him a tourist." The individual, as well as the corporation, is going supranational, pledging allegiance only to herself. In a world of corporate sovereignty, where the only line in the sand is the bottom line, the goose and the gander are after the same things. The goose, it seems, has already started making his play. That leaves the rest of us to get a plan together.

Lawyer would advise me, no doubt, to temper my enthusiasm for the possibilities with a stiff draught of the likelihood of reality. Egalitarianism does not do well under strict capitalist systems. As Citizen-Employees rise to the top of the Corporate-State they will do so based on their ability to earn the fatherland profits. Those who do not earn and those who have not been given the resources to take advantage of the flexibility and responsibility of independent employment will sink to the bottom. The underprivileged will have to settle for what those more powerful within the new ruling class think is best. It's reassuring, I suppose, to know some things won't change.

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