“I remember a day when I was baby sitting. The mother had left her 10 years old kid with an adult war game and his young 9 years old friend was playing with him. She game me a list of things to do, and one of them was to bring the kids to the pool in the morning. I left them playing for one hour following instructions then I asked them to stop. They were pretending to be a team calling each other “buddy” to avoid any of my request. At some point, they made a team to kill their adversity and in the real world, they identified me as their adversity to try to bring them to the pool. They played all day with killing me”.
– An anonymous employee –

This is unfortunately what team spirit does. It cements spirits with adversities, “them” against “us”, to trigger the competition that inherits from team spirit. It works for games. It works in many businesses but this does not mean that it works so well in the society. The society does not work like a team. The society works more likely like an ocean of clouds where fishes decide to swim together. They are bond by their resemblances, the way one can crawl into the cloud to become invisible. “Invisibility” and “mimicry” are a security to survive.

Workers who are classified or misclassified as “self-employed” are those kind of fishes that do not fade in the crowd. They are unlikely to become invisible and they are unlikely to become part of a team. Both unlikeliness create a kind of exclusion that can be solved over the years or it can be increased because additional to being self-employed, they become old.

At The Pink Jackalope, we are more like a coral. We take individuals and we help to grow them in a secure environment where the “customers’ reef” is like home. And if it takes time to grow coral, it takes time also to grow people. But time is our money.