Prior to the last eight-and-a-half years, I spent 30 years self-employed. When I wasn’t working on my own projects, I contracted for project work with entities from solo practitioners to small businesses to the Fortune 100. Truth be told, I actually preferred contracting as opposed to full-time employment. There were meetings, of course, but not the soul-crushing ones that are part of full-time organizational life. The big trade-off is benefits: As an employee, it’s nice to have employer-paid insurance—health, life, disability—vacations, paid sick time, retirement, and half of the Social Security and Medicare tax bills. As a freelancer, it’s nice to have the freedom.
According to Motoko Rich, writing for the New York Times, we’re all contractors now. “We’re in a period where uncertainty seems to be going on forever,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Autor tells Rich. “So this period of temporary employment seems to be going on forever.” In November 2010, US Labor Department records indicate a full 80 percent of the 50,000 jobs added by the private sector were temporary jobs. For all of 2010, 26.2 percent of the 1.17 million private sector jobs, or 307,000, were temporary, contract, or freelance work. This is more than double the percentage of temporary positions as the comparable period after the 1990s recession (10.9 percent).
Rich writes that “the economy could be moving toward a higher reliance on temporary workers over the long term.” With 15 million people currently unemployed in the US, competition for those 307,000 temporary positions is as intense as that for permanent jobs.
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