Changing employment, the freelance way
Reading the newspapers these days is no longer a pleasant task, what with a string of bad news about job losses, economic restructuring, etc, staring out of the pages and painting an overall grim scenario. So it came as a big relief when I got to read a recent article about the advent of the gig economy and how it was transforming the lives of millions of job aspirants and companies.
But the biggest takeaway from the report was that technology is no longer a disrupter, but a creator of jobs. That was not just a revelation but a demolition of my belief that temporary jobs have no big economic role to play.
When I first read New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s The World is
Flat many years ago, in which he discussed how the convergence of technological and political forces has created a global and web-enabled platform for collaboration, little did I expect that geography, distance and language would no longer be barriers for work.
Enter the gig economy. Friedman’s hypothesis has been more than proved right with the rising popularity of freelance jobs, especially after the success of businesses such as Uber, Airbnb, and Freelancer.com and Chinese companies like DouMi.
Though Uber and Airbnb are relatively well-known, others like Freelancer have also played a significant role in keeping the gig economy afloat, industry experts said. DouMi, a Beijing startup focusing on part-time positions, has already got backing from Web giants like Baidu and Tencent Holdings. Its monthly active users have doubled to 20 million in just six months as more young people in China are showing interest in temp jobs.
Helma Kusuma, communications manager for Asia at Freelancer tells me that her company has become the largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace in terms of users and jobs posted worldwide.
“Back in 2012, we used to have 6 million users; in 2015 we hit 15 million users and we currently have almost 27 million users and over 13 million jobs posted. The growth has been tremendous,” she said.
Explaining the rationale behind the success of such firms, especially in countries like China, she said that the digital economy has empowered people to earn a living, even if they are otherwise excluded from the traditional labor markets such as stay-at-home women, college students and people with disabilities.
The key benefit of the digital economy is that it allows and encourages remote working, where gender, location, and age may not matter as much as in the physical economy. It opens up a vista of opportunities for more people, opined Helma.
But what really interested me was the statistics about China which Helma offered. Out of Freelancer’s 250,000 registered users in China, around 230,000 are freelancers and the rest are businesses that have posted freelance projects on the platform. Cities like Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, Guangdong province, have been the most active in China, while projects in mobile app development, PHP, Android and HTML were the most sought-after from China.
By 2027, freelancers are expected to become the workforce majority, due to factors such as automation, freedom, flexibility and the ability to earn extra money, Helma said.
DouMi’s chief executive officer Zhao Shiyong told Bloomberg recently that his site puts up “300,000 to 400,000 jobs” every month.