by Dish Staff
In the wake of Dish editor Jonah Shepp’s appreciation of freelance war reporters and Steven Greenhouse’s reporting on the temp economy comes Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s analysis of the news (pdf) that a third of US workers are freelance:
When it comes to millennials, we see an even more freelance-heavy generation. About 38 percent of those under age 35 are freelancing, compared to 32 percent of those 35 and older. Millennial freelancers are also more likely to look for job with a “positive impact on the world”—62 percent of the younger group said this was important, versus 54 percent of older freelancers. Finding freelance work that’s “exciting” is also more important (62 percent versus 47 percent).
I’m happy to say that this all squares up with what I wrote about millennial workers for Reason’s latest (and millennial-themed) issue. And I’m also glad someone’s dug a bit deeper into the demographics of freelance workers (with all due respect to the 2004 report, a few little things may have changed since then).
Justin Fox also weighs in:
Back in February, in an exhaustive (and maybe exhausting) look at the numbers on self-employment, I tried to square the grand claims with the pretty inconclusive data by arguing that long declines in old-style independent work in agriculture and small-scale retail and services were probably masking a rise in white-collar independent work. But while there’s some evidence to back this up, such as the Census Bureau’s annual tally of “nonemployer businesses,” which shows a 29% rise from 2002 to 2012, government data on the phenomenon is pretty spotty.
This new survey of 5,052 U.S. adults, conducted by the research firm Edelman Berland in July for the Freelancers Union and Elance-oDesk, is a welcome attempt to fill in the picture. To really get a sense of where we’re going, though, they will need to keep paying for identical surveys for years to come (the back-office firm MBO Partners has been doing this for a narrower population of “independent workers” for three years now). When I asked Freelancers Union founder and executive director Sara Horowitz if that’s the plan, she said yes. “Having real longitudinal data would be very helpful for everyone.”
The Dish 