Over 1 Million Slack Freelancers

It's 3:20 in the afternoon and I'm sitting in my apartment in jeans and a t-shirt reading about underemployment among freelancers.  Gee, I wonder why this article resonates?

As the economy collapses, it's maiming the legions of service employees - so many of us freelancers - that provided landscaping, tutoring, fitness, fashion, design, childcare, cleaning and chauffering services to the finance, insurance and real estate wealthy.  Yes, the economic security of yoga instructors and nannies have never been that divergent.  It's just that the former, as illustrated in the NYT link above, worries via iPhone about paying her rent.

When I was working in post-9/11 recovery, there were some sectoral economic programs to help specific workers deal with the subsequent economic recession and/or loss of their former clients in the WTC: livery drivers, restaurant workers, and garment workers.  The garment factories in Chinatown were relatively notable among the layoffs and dislocations, as they tended to reduce all workers' hours rather than lay off specific workers.  When I was last in New Orleans in November, I remember my car rental shuttle driver wondering why her company couldn't do the same thing.

Some freelancers - a.k.a. independent contractors - are formally hired by companies, but kept in long-term temporary positions to reduce the cost to the employers, who save on benefits.  This is often justified by such employees not being full-time workers.

And for many freelancers, it's cool - especially during boom times.  They get their benefits elsewhere, or don't mind the risk of going without, and prefer the sometimes hire wages and/or greater flexibility that come with such an arrangement.

But one freelancer in the linked article questions the recent self-employment boom as a rage of the 1990s; with the current crisis, federal statistics show that in the past year the # of underemployed freelancers has almost doubled from 622k to more than 1 million.  Cue the "new" stories about rising middle-class economic anxiety and insecurity.  Turns out, the legions of full-time workers have been on the decline since the 1980s.

What I want to know is, with over a million of us with all this time on our hands, when's the Freelancers Zombie March?

(Image of Zombie March Chicago 2008 by Eric Ingrum)