What’s In A Trade?

On corporate, capitalism and the going rate for your humanity.

In one of my big girl corporate jobs, I used to joke that I was a handmaiden to the patriarchy.

It was a decent bit and it landed in the right rooms, mostly because everyone in those rooms knew exactly what I meant. Then at some point the joke stopped landing, not for the audience, but for me.

A bit only works while it is still a bit.

The rules I followed

I am an elder millennial who did everything by the book. Study hard(ish), get the marks(ish), get the degree, get the grad role, say yes to the work nobody else wanted, bill honestly, work the Saturdays without being asked, take the promotion, take the next one.

The “good girls guide to corporate law” said that this was the deal and I took the deal in good faith, because I was shown one path and I was good at it and being good at it kept paying.

I want to be precise about what I traded, because "corporate" and "capitalism" sometimes get thrown around like slurs and I don't think that's honest or useful.

Work has always been the same transaction. You trade your labour for capital. Your time, skill and judgement go in one direction and money (usually) comes back the other way. That trade is not the scandal.

It's how humans have fed themselves for most of history and pretending otherwise is a luxury position I have not been afforded.

Capitalism, for our current purposes, is just the market where that trade gets priced. Neither word is doing the ethical work here. The ethical work sits in the terms of your specific trade, which is exactly the kind of fine print we are professionally trained to read for everyone except ourselves.

Because the terms of the trade vary wildly.

Every job you’ve had since Macca’s drive through (or Boost Juice if you were that girl) takes your hours. That's the base transaction and it's an honest one.

Plenty of jobs also want a slice of your identity, your title as your personality and your inbox as your pulse. That costs more but you can usually see it coming.

Then there's a third category of ask, the one that never appears in the position description. Some jobs, at some altitudes, may ask for the part of you that actually flinches.

What the higher floors cost

Nobody asked me for that part in my first years.

Junior lawyers are asked for hours and accuracy, which is why so many juniors genuinely cannot see what their seniors are tired of. The flinch gets requested later, quietly, once you have enough influence to be useful in a different way.

The higher I went, the better the rooms got but the more the rooms wanted from me as a part of the trade.

I was in-house by then, senior, trusted, in the meetings that mattered, which is precisely the point at which "can you help us facilitate this" starts to carry serious weight. My job was to make things legally sound. Increasingly, some of those things made me feel sick and my job was to formalise them anyway, competently, with my name in the file.

I am not an innocent in that story and I won't write it as if I were. I wasn't tricked, for the most part.

I evolved the way most corporate workers do, from unconscious to conscious. The inconvenient thing about consciousness is that it's a one-way ratchet. You can't unsee what the rooms are for once you've seen it. What you can do, what I did for longer than I like to admit, is keep cashing the cheques while you work out what the knowledge means.

Waking up is free and mostly involuntary. Leaving is expensive and entirely optional.

The gap between the two is where most conscious professionals live and it's why I have no interest in judging anyone standing in it.

I should say the quiet part about my own exit too. I got out because the system had paid me well for fifteen years and because my money was managed with unglamorous discipline, which means my choices were rooted in privilege as much as principle.

Plenty of people see everything I saw and cannot afford to act on it.

Now, Dear Reader, not every workplace runs this trade. There are firms, legal teams and whole companies that will only ever ask you for your hours and your competence, where the work is honest, the people are decent and nobody ever slides the third ask across the table.

If that's your workplace, you are not naive and you are not asleep. You have a good contract.

The point of this piece is not that corporate is a moral failure. The point is that the terms differ, the terms drift and you are the only person who will ever review them on your own behalf.

Same trade, different seasons

The trade I made in my twenties was correct for what I knew about myself and the world at the time.

I needed skills, credibility and a financial base and the system offered all three at above market rates. If I could go back I would make it again, probably faster. The trade I was still making at the end was not correct, not because the system changed but because I had. My values had moved, my tolerance for the third ask had collapsed and the things I was buying with the trade, security, status, stuff, a seat at the table, had stopped being worth what they cost me

That's the sum of my actual insight and it's smaller and more useful than "capitalism bad".

A trade can be right for one season of your life and wrong for the next without anyone being a villain. The failure mode isn't making the trade. The failure mode is never rereading it, reexamining it and allowing yourself to change your mind.

We are lawyers. We review everyone's terms for a living and let our own roll over on auto-renewal for a decade at a time if we aren’t careful.

Review your own contract

Name this season's price. Not the hours, you already know the hours.

Write down the moments in the last three months where something in you flinched and you proceeded anyway. If the list is empty, genuinely empty, you have a good trade. Keep it. If the list is growing, that's not a character flaw, that's a term and terms can be renegotiated.

Write your own terms sheet. Three columns. What's for sale (your hours, your skill, your judgement). What's for lease with conditions (your evenings in a genuine crunch, your weekend twice a year). What is never on the table. Most people have never written the third column down, which is exactly why it gets taken in instalments.

Put a number on your options. Renegotiation and exit are both financial positions before they are moral ones. Work out what three months of freedom costs, then six, then twelve. Fund it even if you never intend to use it. Ungovernable is a savings rate long before it's a personality.

Diarise the review. Once a year, same as your insurance. What is this trade costing me this season, what is it buying me this season and are those still the same size. Ten minutes of honesty annually will save you the years I spent finding out the hard way.

You would never let a client sign terms they hadn't read. Extend yourself the same service.

If you want the longer version of how my own renegotiation ended, it's in My Own Kind Of Independence Day. If you're clear the trade is wrong but running on empty, read Knowing Where You're Going Is Only Half Of It before you do anything dramatic. If this piece reads like I hate the profession, I promise I don't, the receipts are in ILY, Legal Profession. I Mean It.

If you want help reading your own fine print, that's literally what a 1:1 session is for. If your team or firm wants this conversation in a room, that's a workshop.

Mel x