What if Salaried Employment Is the Next Economic Model to Disappear?

What if salaried employment is not the future of work — but the last great economic model of the industrial age?

The social contract that made salaried employment successful

For decades, the equation was remarkably simple: more productivity → more growth → higher wages → more purchasing power → better living standards. Work hard. Earn more. Buy a home. Raise children. Give them a better life. This was more than economics. It was a social contract.

But what happens when productivity grows faster than purchasing power? When housing becomes less affordable? When social mobility weakens? When the promise that "your children will live better than you" becomes less certain?

Can the same model continue indefinitely?

Global GDP is around $120 trillion a year. Broad money is around $145 trillion. Global OTC derivatives reached approximately $846 trillion in notional value in June 2025 — around seven times annual GDP. Experts say it may be much more. At first glance, it seems that "You shall earn your bread by the sweat of your brow" has never been more wrong. Never before has so much money been created out of thin air.

Meanwhile, the OECD has documented a long-term divergence between productivity and workers' compensation in many economies. The issue is not that workers' share of GDP falls every year. It doesn't. The deeper issue is this: productivity can increase faster than the real remuneration of labour. So when additional value is created:

Who captures it?

When inflation makes the problem personal

The issue becomes even more tangible when we look at purchasing power. In France, inflation reached 5.2% in 2022, 4.9% in 2023 and 2.0% in 2024. Wages eventually followed — but with a lag. The purchasing power of wages remained 1.7% below its 2019 level in 2024. And across the OECD, real wages were still below their early-2021 level in a significant number of countries in 2026. So a salary can rise in euros while purchasing power falls.

Work more. Produce more. Earn more nominally. And still feel poorer.

That is a very different social contract. In France, median private-sector net pay is around €2,190 per month, while the labour tax wedge is around 47%, compared with roughly 35% for the OECD average. So are companies really buying people's time? Or are they buying their competence, judgement, creativity, networks and ability to deliver results?

Why should someone capable of creating €100,000 of value have to sell 100% of their working time to one organization?

We are not mono-talented

There is another assumption we rarely question. The system starts at school: specialize → graduate → choose a profession → specialize again → remain in the same function or industry.

The more experience we acquire, the more narrowly defined our professional identity can become. But are human beings really designed to spend 40 years perfecting essentially the same function?

We are not mono-talented. We have multiple abilities, interests, experiences and networks. Why couldn't someone be a specialist at 30, a business developer at 40, an entrepreneur at 50 and a mentor at 60?

Why should professional experience become a cage rather than a platform?

Perhaps the future is not a career. Perhaps it is a portfolio of capabilities. And there is another paradox in the traditional hierarchy.

Laurence J. Peter famously formulated the Peter Principle:

"In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."

We promote people because they perform well in their current position. But being an excellent specialist doesn't necessarily make someone an excellent manager. So we can promote someone out of the position where they were competent and into one where they are not.

What if people could create value horizontally — across several missions, companies, industries and roles — rather than only climbing vertically?

The search for autonomy has already begun

The rise of entrepreneurship is one signal. In France, micro-enterprise creation rose from roughly 360,000 in 2010 to 758,600 in 2025. Not every new micro-enterprise represents someone leaving salaried employment. But the direction is revealing. More people are creating their own activity, combining several activities, selling expertise directly and seeking independence.

Why?

Perhaps because they increasingly value something the traditional employment contract does not always provide: autonomy.

COVID accelerated this transformation. Millions discovered that productive work did not necessarily require an office. Companies discovered that many activities did not require permanent physical presence. Workers discovered that time is both an economic asset and a personal asset. The office did not disappear. But one assumption did: productive work does not necessarily require permanent physical presence.

So: if I don't need to be in your office, do I necessarily need to be your employee?

The human cost of the model

There is another warning sign. The WHO estimates that depression and anxiety cause around 12 billion lost working days every year, with an estimated $1 trillion productivity cost. Gallup's latest global data show only around 20% of employees are engaged at work. This doesn't mean that 80% hate their jobs. But it does raise a question: if employment is supposed to unlock human productivity, why is genuine engagement such a minority experience?

Employment needs hierarchy, procedures and accountability. That has a legitimate organizational function. But pushed too far, subordination can suppress initiative, freedom and creative energy. The employee is rewarded for performing within the organization. The entrepreneur is rewarded for creating value.

How much talent is lost when an organization buys compliance instead of freeing initiative?

Perhaps we have confused job, work and value

This may be the fundamental mistake. A job is a position defined by an organization. Work is an activity that produces something. Value is the economic, social or human result produced. They are not the same.

A person can have a job and create little value. An entrepreneur can create enormous value without a traditional job. A parent can create enormous social value without a salary. A mentor can transform a career without being employed. A partner can create value for five companies without being employed by any of them. And AI can allow one person to create more value in less time. Perhaps we have confused economic activity with employment. And much of the work we do isn't even a job.

The ILO estimates that 748 million people were outside the labour force in 2023 because of unpaid care responsibilities, including 708 million women. Raising children. Caring for parents. Mentoring. Learning. Building networks. Creating a business before it generates revenue. All can create value without appearing as employment.

Why should something be considered productive only when an employer pays for it?

And then there are the children

This brings us back to the original social contract: work → income → home → children → better future. But housing costs, education and economic uncertainty have changed that equation in many advanced economies. Having children is obviously not simply an economic decision. But economic security is part of the environment in which people make family decisions.

And here lies the paradox: the system designed to deliver prosperity to successive generations may itself be contributing to conditions in which fewer people have children. Fewer children today means fewer workers tomorrow. Which means greater pressure to automate and increase productivity.

Global fertility has fallen from around 3.3 children per woman in 1960 to around 1.5 today. South Korea is around 0.7. Many economies are entering a period of stagnating or declining working-age populations. At the same time, demand for expertise does not disappear. So what happens when companies need more skills but there are fewer people available to employ?

Perhaps companies will increasingly prefer access to talent over ownership of talent.

Then comes AI

AI is already transforming analysis, administration, marketing, programming, design, research and decision-making. And the occupations most exposed are not only repetitive jobs. The OECD identifies significant exposure among IT professionals, business professionals, managers, executives, engineers and scientists.

The paradox is striking: the very expertise people spent 20 years perfecting can increasingly be augmented or replicated by machines. What becomes more valuable? Perhaps the ability to combine: expertise + judgement + relationships + creativity + entrepreneurship + adaptability.

And robotics is accelerating the same process. In March 2026, AGIBOT announced its 10,000th humanoid robot, only three months after reaching 5,000. The point is not that robots will replace everyone. They won't. The point is that the cost of intelligence and execution is falling. AI may not replace the worker. It may replace the need for the worker to spend all their time working. If one AI-augmented person can produce what previously required five people, why organize every company around five full-time positions?

Perhaps the future is not mass unemployment. Perhaps it is: fewer employees + more value per individual.

Productivity itself is at a crossroads

Here is another paradox. We are entering an extraordinary technological revolution. Yet macroeconomic productivity growth remains weak in many advanced economies. What happens if AI finally unlocks the productivity gains we've been waiting for? If one person can produce substantially more output, perhaps the answer isn't to give that person more work. Perhaps it is to give that person more freedom over how much work they need to do. And this may fundamentally change the nature of the job itself.

The usual narrative is: AI → job destruction → unemployment. But another scenario is possible:

AI → tasks change → jobs change → careers fragment → several sources of income.

The World Economic Forum estimates that structural transformation could affect around 22% of today's formal jobs by 2030, through both job creation and destruction. The exact forecast will undoubtedly evolve. But the direction matters: the job may become less stable than the capability behind it.

The philosophers and economists saw the question coming

This debate is not new. Paul Lafargue challenged the glorification of work. Bertrand Russell argued for radically shorter working time. John Maynard Keynes, in 1930, imagined that productivity could eventually reduce necessary work to around 15 hours a week. Hannah Arendt questioned what would happen to human identity when machines liberated us from the necessity of labour. And André Gorz theorized the end of the labour society and a post-hired-labour society in which income, activity and employment could become disconnected. More recently, Daniel Susskind has brought the question into the age of AI.

Different thinkers. Different centuries. Same fundamental question:

What happens when humans no longer need to sell so much of their time to produce economic value?

This is also why Universal Basic Income keeps resurfacing. Its intellectual roots go back at least to the 18th century, with thinkers such as Thomas Spence and later Thomas Paine. If society needs less human labour, should income remain entirely dependent on employment?

Perhaps we should stop assuming that the answer must always be: find a job.

Maybe we are asking the wrong question

For decades we have asked: "How do we create more jobs?" Perhaps tomorrow we will ask: "Why do we need so many jobs?" And then: "Why must economic participation mean being an employee?"

I don't believe in a world without work. I believe we may be moving towards a world where:

WORK ≠ EMPLOYMENT

People will still create, advise, sell, design, manufacture, negotiate, manage, invent and solve problems. But increasingly through multiple relationships rather than one permanent employer.

Perhaps the future isn't:

ONE PERSON = ONE JOB = ONE EMPLOYER = ONE SALARY

But:

ONE PERSON = MULTIPLE TALENTS → MULTIPLE MISSIONS → MULTIPLE SOURCES OF VALUE

Not for everyone. Not for every activity. Not for every company. But perhaps increasingly for many.

Provigood: an experiment in the post-salaried economy

This is the model we are testing at Provigood. We have no employees. Not because we don't believe in work. At first because we could not afford it and now because we rather believe in people, expertise and entrepreneurship.

Our model is an ecosystem of partners bringing: competence, experience, networks, availability, trust, responsibility.

A partner chooses the missions he or she wants to engage in. Works when there is time, desire, confidence and mutual trust. And is remunerated for the value created and results delivered — not simply for being present. The company doesn't permanently carry the fixed cost of a full-time employee. The partner doesn't permanently sell his or her time to one company. Both retain something increasingly valuable: freedom. But freedom comes with responsibility. The partner is personally accountable toward us and we commit to the client, the mission and the result.

Could performance actually improve when responsibility becomes personal? I don't claim that this model is the answer. It is a model we are testing and we may soon add employees to in order to figure out if it works any better.

The real question

Perhaps the future of work will not be: EMPLOYED → UNEMPLOYED. Perhaps it will be:

EMPLOYEE → ENTREPRENEUR → PARTNER → ECOSYSTEM

Maybe the future is not a world without work. Maybe it is a world where we finally stop confusing work with employment. And perhaps the most important question is no longer:

"What salary can I get?" but: "What value can I create?"