Not every freelancer is bubbling over with entrepreneurial zeal. Some do it because their industry has steadily shaved off staffers and outsourced tasks in order to save money. For others, child care or similar work-life considerations are at the root of the decision to freelance—blurring the line over whether freelancing, with its sporadic pay and other associated brutalities, is a matter of choice or necessity.
Businessman and politico Leo Hindery, who heads the Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation, suspects the answer is the latter more often than not, even in places like NextSpace and The Satellite that are buzzing with can-do attitude. While he concedes that some people genuinely prefer the freelance lifestyle, Hindery thinks many freelancers are making lemonade from the sour fruits of a damaged economy.
“I promise you that if I walk in and say, ‘On the left side, I want all the people who are doing this because they have to, and I will find you a very entrepreneurial environment at Google if they hire you full-time,’ they will say yes in a heartbeat. It’s the question: are you here by choice, or are you here because your economic foundation has collapsed?”
Freelancers generally make less money than their employed counterparts, Hindery says, and they are likely to be among either the nation’s 50 million uninsured or the 50 million underinsured, meaning they’re gambling on their health. If they lose, we pay. That puts them squarely at the center of the health care debate.
Finally, he says, many freelancers land in a category of worker classified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as “part-time of necessity.” This group, 9 million strong, includes people who have part-time work but want a full-time position and—the health care issue again—the attendant benefits.
But this group is not counted among the nation’s 15 million unemployed. If they were—and if several other categories like unemployed youth were counted as well—the country’s unemployment figures would double. “It’s a very dark side of the unemployment issue right now,” he says.
