On the Daily Beast, Tina Brown (formerly of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair) writes about the “gig economy,” in which nobody has a day job and careers are a patchwork of freelance projects for a variety of paymasters.
Here’s how Brown defines the freelancer’s new gig:
Gigs: a bunch of free-floating projects, consultancies, and part-time bits and pieces they try and stitch together to make what they refer to wryly as “the Nut”—the sum that allows them to hang on to the apartment, the health-care policy, the baby sitter, and the school fees.
Edward Wasserman, a Knight Professor of Journalism Ethics at Washington and Lee University, writes about what this means for word-based freelancers. Of course, much of what he’s talking about — lower pay, murky areas of ethics, and the need for greater transparency — hold true for any independent contractor, designers included.
Here are some stats from a Daily Beast and Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates poll that highlights a typical, cribbed-together salary of $75K and explains that the top motivation for taking on extra work is the goal (or hope) of turning a hobby into a money-making operation (48%).
Five hundred employed U.S. citizens aged 18 and over were interviewed via the Internet on January 8 and 9. A full one-third of our respondents are now working either freelance or in two jobs. And nearly one in two of them report taking on additional positions during the last six months. Just as startling, these new alternative workers are not overwhelmingly low-income. They’re college-educated Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year.
Image from the Daily Beast.
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