The influencer economy exposes a 70-year problem for women

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The holidays are upon us, and more than ever the burgeoning influencer economy is having an impact on what consumers buy. Few reliable statistics can be found concerning the influencer profession, but several studies suggest the industry is dominated by women in their homes selling products related to the personal brand each has cultivated. Think of the home baker who hocks cookware between recipe videos or the amateur gardener pushing products as she weeds.

Look beyond the slick production and you'll notice see a 70-year-old hole in the labor market. That influencer selling skin cream is just another in a long line of women revealing the depth and breadth of policy failure when it comes to fostering high quality, part-time work. As a result, women and their families are hurt financially, having few opportunities to earn an income from traditional sources of employment. Which is why many try to give influencing a go. And although some will find success, the vast majority won't.

If the U.S. wants more workers, higher incomes and more tax revenue, this failure in policy needs to be rectified. And it is a failure. In 1990, the U.S. was a global leader in female labor force participation, just behind the Scandinavian countries but on par with Canada and ahead of the UK and France. Two decades later, the U.S. had fallen behind those countries and 10 others. It has been a laggard since, with the labor force participation rate for women between the ages of 25 and 54 at less than 80%.

Economists conducted a sort of forensic accounting of the economy and policy to understand what happened in the U.S. in that 20-year period and the answer was... nothing! (Well, nothing unless you count ending cash welfare for poor mothers, which they didn't). America's peers, on the other hand, enacted a suite of policies to support working parents that proved a boon to women, like paid family leave and child-care subsidies.

But the key was the elevation and protection of part-time work through right-to-work policies and greater protection against discrimination for part-time workers in pay, promotions and firings. The economists did find that a similar part-time policy in the U.S. would lead to an increase of working women — more than free child care or paid family leave would — perhaps numbering in the millions. As they point out, just 13% of women in the U.S. work part time, compared with 25% in other countries.

Part-time work can be found in the U.S., but it is dominated by low-wage shift work in the service sector, where hours are not guaranteed or regular, most workers are not offered health or retirement benefits or paid sick days and paid holidays are uncommon while wage theft is more common than in other industries.

Little wonder making videos for platforms that garner remuneration through views, sponsored product placements, and affiliate commissions sounds attractive. In reality, the sales aspect of an influencer's job today is not much different than yesterday's multi-level marketers. Tupperware parties had their heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, as homemakers spawned side businesses selling food storage to friends. Mary Kay came along in 1963. Dozens have come and gone since, some more notorious than others. Women's apparel company LuLaRoe once boasted 80,000 sellers before crashing, a saga chronicled by the Amazon docuseries “LuLaRich.”

It could be that multi-level marketing sellers and their influencer cousins are genuinely motivated by the brands they are hawking, but many of them also want to earn income for their families and have few alternatives that meet their needs. For the most part, being an influencer doesn't involve a commute, an office nor the need to clock in at specific times of the day or night. These women are in control, they have dignity and autonomy, and they can earn money and parent without conflict. It's a damning statement that those are things the traditional labor market lacks.

There's certainly a temptation to consider influencing, or multi-level marketing, a solution. The labor market lacks high quality part-time work. Women find it in creative ways. This is capitalism at work. Move along.

That's fantasy. The reality is that women who want to hold regular jobs — are trained or educated for them — may struggle with full-time hours. Many women want part-time work while their children are young or while their parents are at the end of their lives but the flexibility to return to full-time work when they can. What they need is a “bridge.” Selling face cream is not a bridge, at least not for every nurse, teacher, lawyer, accountant, auditor, manager or whatever worker who didn't choose selling as their first career option.

The right to work part-time is such a bridge. Let workers who have been employed with a specific employer for a period of time, say one year, request a drop in hours down to as few as 20 per week with a commensurate cut to wages. The law would require employers to comply or show why they can't comply, and workers to meet a timeline for return to full-time, say within five years. It's not without challenges. Part-time work, as many women who have individually negotiated part-time status could likely attest, can be difficult to keep as part-time responsibilities or expectations and easily become doing a full-time job on less pay. The policy, and its implementation, would need support and guidance of how to avoid that scenario as well as how to redress it.

Yet, for a simple policy, the right to work part-time would have a lot of interpretations - an investment in the human capital of workers that need to dial down hours for a period, a retention model to keep millions in the labor force, a means of preserving earned income flowing to families. There will always be influencers, multi-level marketers, brand ambassadors, partners, or whatever, but they shouldn't be the band-aid on failed policy when policy can solve the problem.

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Kathryn Anne Edwards, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, is a labor economist and independent policy consultant.

Previously:
• 09/25/24: America blew almost $2 trillion. Make it stop