Then, They Noticed The Invisible Army
Jan 18th, 2010 | By Dawn R. Rivers | Category: Policy MattersI wonder if anybody in the White House reads the Boston Globe?
Yesterday, the Globe ran an article in its Ideas section entitled “The end of the office … and the future of work.”
(Okay, see if this sounds familiar.)
In the article (which you can read here), reporter Drake Bennett explores the way a growing army of freelance workers is causing many thinking people to wonder if perhaps the time has come to separate the concept of “work” from the concept of “a job.”
Already, those freelancers (which I have been calling nonemployers for the last ten years) make up a third of the workforce, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The growth in their numbers is being driven in part because many companies are noticing that it’s cheaper to hire them than to go with full-time employees.
And many freelancers (nonemployers) are figuring out that they can make more money as freelancers, because they are not confined to a single client or a single project at any one time.
(I don’t even have to say it, do I?)
Since freelancing is clearly a viable career choice for increasing numbers of folks, even if it is very different from the traditional job/career trajectory, some smart people are beginning to craft the infrastructure within which freelancers can operate while other people are beginning to notice the way all our social safety nets are tied to employers-with-employees.
According to this article, there are companies that help to connect freelancers with prospective clients. Some organizations are forming in order to offer freelancers an opportunity to socialize, to compensate for the sometimes crushing isolation many of them complain about.
There are even outfits that want to operate much like guilds of the Middle Ages, as organizations that can offer freelancers the sorts of protections and social safety nets they once got from unions-plus-employers.
In some ways, it’s probably a good thing that the government doesn’t seem to have noticed any of this yet. If they had, they would almost certainly have decided to regulate it in some way, under the mistaken notion that all those poor freelancers need to be protected … whether they want to be protected or not.
At the same time, this new labor market movement could use some support — especially in this economy.
Which brings me back to my original question: I wonder if anybody in the White House reads the Boston Globe?
I completely agree that microbusinesses need to receive more attention from the government, in the form of recognition and support, not regulation This is the second article I’ve read today on the topic of how freelancers are changing the way we work. If this kind of writing keeps up, the government will notice The other article is at http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2010/01/19/top-five-trends-in-the-future-of-work/. The writer is co-founder of SmartSheet, http://www.smartsheet.com, an online project management tool that has partnered with Amazon Mechanical Turk and Livework to provide freelancers for projects — an example of crafting the infrastructure, but is it good for freelancers? Global competition in the freelance market has already begun to force U.S. freelancers (depending on the type of work, of course) to lower their rates substantially in order to get work.
Thank you for continuing to provide meaningful information and superb writing about and for microbusiness.