"It was that simple: Some people like to make things, other people like to buy things that others have made, and now, thanks to the internet, these people could be brought seamlessly together, to the benefit of all parties, including the host. It was, in its way, a very Web 1.0, bubble-era dream: disintermediation...
Etsy has always wanted to do a whole lot more than sell pot holders: It wants to rewrite the idea of what it is to be corporate, all the while erasing the line between making money and doing good — going so far as to suggest that these two things are essentially the same...
Etsy’s 819 employees — not the sellers but the people keeping the Etsy servers up and running and everything else — work in something like an extremely cozy private welfare state. There is free lunch, there is on-site continuing education, there is someone with pink hair to reinflate the tires of the bike you were sweetly encouraged to ride to work. Every Etsy employee is given 40 paid hours off annually to devote to volunteer work; the company covers 100 percent of health-care premiums and for years made a point of paying American salaries at least 40 percent above the local living wage. Just last month, Etsy announced a near-unprecedented paid-parental-leave policy—26 weeks for men and women, applicable to birth, adoption, or surrogacy. Cynics say that tech companies swaddle their employees in order to tighten their claims on them, but it’s very hard to find an Etsy worker complaining about the free pottery workshops going on downstairs...
Eighty-six percent of Etsy’s sellers are women. Among other things, it promises the opportunity to earn an income with a flexible work schedule. That can look appealing to new mothers with some free time and perhaps a bit nefarious to those a little more worried about the collapse of the middle-class professional culture and the rise of a gigified economy populated by part-time workers without benefits.'
http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/04/etsy-capitalism-c-v-r.html
No comments:
Post a Comment