Freelancing is the future, say tech firms

Now that he works for himself as a network technician, Robert Wooldridge is sometimes able to bring his eight-year-old daughter to work with him, as he hops to job sites all around the Washington area. She particularly enjoyed playing in a nearby mall, drawing pictures as he hooked up the monitors for an ecigarette kiosk.

She’s pretty impressed with her dad, who gets to be his own boss rather than working 9 to 5 in some corporate machine. “She keeps saying stuff like, she imagines that I’m going to grow this huge business, have a private jet,” Wooldridge says. “I’m falling a little short of that.”

Since losing his $102,000-a-year job at a large health-care association last summer, Wooldridge has been a oneman computer service band, running cable and troubleshooting problems for a handful of clients. Freelancing is now a lot easier than it used to be. Rather than pounding the pavement for business, Wooldridge made a profile for himself on a handful of skills-for-hire websites. He applied for a few assignments that companies had posted and found a gig on his first day of looking.

Soon, Wooldridge could be more the norm than the exception. More and more, companies are shifting portions of their work to independent contractors, managing large pools of people available as needed for anything from tech support to landscaping. This relieves them of having to pay employees a fixed amount every month — not to mention health insurance, Social Security taxes or workers’ compensation.

The number of selfemployed people as a percentage of the workforce has remained fairly constant for decades, at about 10 per cent; much of the contracting out that has occurred is to firms that have employees, rather than sole proprietors.

Regardless, a lot of money is going into startups that are competing to ease the transition — and profit from it. Take Work Market, a platform where Wooldridge finds most of his jobs. It just raised $20 million US more from leading investors, including Union Square Ventures principal Fred Wilson, who thinks it has the potential to “transform the way enterprises leverage the on-demand labour economy.” Translation: Businesses can save money by using freelancers, and Work Market takes a cut of that savings. Of course, if businesses are saving money on labour, it probably means workers are making less of it.