Paid by the piece again

A woman in Banha sews collars onto shirts at a table by her window and is paid for each one. Nobody asks what time she started. Nobody minds if she took the afternoon off. The bag of finished collars is the whole conversation.

For most of the last century, office work escaped that arrangement. It was hard to count what a clerk or an analyst actually produced, so employers bought hours instead, and then filled the hours with forms, signatures and rules about being seen at your desk. The routine stood in for the output because the output could not be weighed.

That gap is closing. A designer can be hired for one logo and paid for that logo. A translator is paid by the word, a driver by the trip, a writer by the post. Once work can be cut into pieces and each piece counted, someone starts counting, because counting is cheaper than trusting.

Being good at the ritual of a job, arriving on time and filling in the right sheet, will matter less every year. It was only ever a substitute.

There is another road, and it is harder. Some work refuses to be tallied: calming a furious customer, holding a nervous group together, trying what nobody has tried and returning with something worth keeping. Nobody can put a number on it, which is why it is hard to win and hard to hold, and why it is where the big jumps in value come from. People are trusted with that work only once they have shown they can go somewhere uncomfortable and come back with something rare.

Those are the two choices left. The comfortable middle, where someone pays for your day without ever weighing what came out of it, is shrinking. Anything that can be counted eventually is.