To monitor trends in alternative work arrangements, the authors conducted a version of the Contingent Worker Survey as part of the RAND American Life Panel in late 2015. Their findings point to a ...rise in the incidence of alternative work arrangements in the US economy from 1995 to 2015. The percentage of workers engaged in alternative work arrangements—defined as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers—rose from 10.7% in February 2005 to possibly as high as 15.8% in late 2015. Workers who provide services through online intermediaries, such as Uber or TaskRabbit, accounted for 0.5% of all workers in 2015. Of the workers selling goods or services directly to customers, approximately twice as many reported finding customers through off-line intermediaries than through online intermediaries.
Due to economic instability and technological change in digital media industries, media organizations and educators have encouraged freelance media workers to see themselves as individual businesses ...rather than a class of workers that should collectively protect their rights and fair pay. This article examines how freelance media workers negotiate individualism and collectivism, producing a contradictory freelance class ideology. It is grounded in an exploratory critical political economy of communication and sociology of work approach. It is based on interviews with 21 freelance journalists and professional writers, considering how they discursively construct their work practices and coping strategies vis-à-vis their uses of digital technology and the structural factors that shape media industries. Through discourse, these workers produce a contradictory “e-lance” class ideology as both entrepreneurs who temporarily sell goods and services and activists who temporarily resist demands from clients that they give up their rights and pay.
On online labour platforms, algorithmic scores are used as indicators of freelancers' work quality and future performance. Recent studies underscore that, to achieve good scores and secure their ...presence on platforms, freelancers respond to algorithmic control in different ways. However, we argue, to fully understand how freelancers deal with algorithmic scores, we first need to investigate how they interpret scores and, more specifically, what scores can do for them, i.e., perceived algorithmic affordances and constraints. Our interviews and other qualitative data collected with knowledge intensive gig workers on a major platform allow us to explain how the perceived affordances of algorithms (i.e., barrier, individual visibility, self‐extension, rule of the game) act as mechanisms that explain different behavioural and emotional responses over time. Our work contributes to the current debate on the positive and negative consequences of algorithmic work by portraying the fundamental role paid by the individual interpretation of algorithmic scores and by integrating the affordance perspective into our understanding of algorithmic work.
With the emergence of the COVID-19 virus pandemic, a new type of work engagement is coming to the fore, which implies remote work, i.e. work from home. This type of employment is known as ...freelancing. This document will present the taxation of freelancers in the Republic of Serbia, the Republic of Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina before and during the COVID-19 virus pandemic. The document will present all taxation models in detail, as well as their shortcomings and recommendations for improvement. From the analysis, we can see how the Republic of Croatia, as a member of the European Union, defined the legal status of these workers, and how it was done by the Republic of Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which are not members of the European Union, but which are gradually adapting their legislation to the European Union. The assumption is that during the analyzed period, the number of freelancers in these countries increased significantly, primarily due to the measures adopted to prevent the spread of the COVID19 virus pandemic. This paper should also point out the importance that freelancers have for all countries in terms of generating income based on their taxation.
This article presents our analysis of the nature of informality of media freelancers and its implications to creative workers. Employing a series of 15 interviews, we offer an interpretive ...understanding through the subjective experience of the Indonesian media freelancers. Accordingly, we analyse the participants’ responses in four dimensions of informality: personal, professional, technological and social. This analysis brings up a discussion about the flexibility, challenges and opportunities of working as a media freelancer. Specifically, three themes emerged from our discussion: motivations of doing freelance, managing ‘uncertainty’ through creativity and self-management, and the importance of social–technological infrastructure. Considering the demographic bonus in Indonesia, we suggest a future research agenda towards the potentials of informality of media freelancers. This future direction would shed light on whether the informality, on the one hand, can lead to the casualization of work, or, on the other hand, can lead to the idea of flexibility and self-management of media freelancers.
The combination of accelerated digitalization and the recent COVID-19 crisis has increased the number of remote workers worldwide to unimaginable proportions. Among the large number of remote workers ...that execute their projects from home, there is a significant number of permanently self-employed remote workers, usually referred to as freelancers. Despite the importance of this kind of business activity for modern project management society, perceived drivers of freelancing are still unknown. The goal of this paper was to shed some light on the general subjective well-being of freelancing activity and investigate differences concerning gender, age, and education. The study was performed in late 2020 and included 471 freelancers from Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro that participated in an online questionnaire evaluating their subjective well-being while participating in the "gig" economy. Factor analysis was used as a primary statistical method and two major groups were identified: (1) Impact of working from home on a freelancer's personal life and health and (2) Fulfillment of expectations in the economic and professional sense. Gender was found not to be significant for overall work satisfaction. However, older freelancers proved to be more satisfied with the fulfillment of economic and professional expectations, which correlate with years of professional experience. Another conclusion is that more educated freelancers are generally less satisfied with both groups of drivers - fulfillment of personal life and professional expectations. Understanding how the combination of occupations, technological infrastructure, and demographic characteristics in the region has affected the well-being of freelancers may help policymakers and organization owners, as well as future entrepreneurs, better prepare for this model of work in the future. It also increases the possibility of exploring individual dimensions of wellbeing useful for targeting interventions at the level of each country separately. In line with this, the present study contributes to the existing body of knowledge and the impact of hybrid models of work on the subjective well-being of workers in the "gig" economy.
In recent years, there has been a steady increase in the number of own-account workers (the self-employed without employees), including freelancers, in many developed economies. Despite the ...importance of the group of freelancers for modern economies, little is known about the perceived benefits of freelancing. We use six waves of the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study (“Understanding Society”, 2009–2015) to investigate subjective well-being levels of freelancers in terms of satisfaction with life, work, leisure time, income and health. Although freelancing jobs are uncertain and temporary, our cross-sectional (pooled ordinary least squares (OLS)) and longitudinal (fixed-effects) analyses reveal that freelancers are on par regarding life satisfaction with other own-account workers, employers (self-employed workers with employees) and wage workers. The most striking result is that freelancers are significantly more satisfied with their leisure time than other own-account workers, employers and wage workers. Also, freelancers score significantly higher in terms of work satisfaction than wage workers, but do not exceed other own-account workers and employers in terms of work satisfaction. Freelancers are equally satisfied with their health as other own-account workers and employers. In sum, the analysis of several subdomains of life reveals much how different groups of self-employed workers score regarding their overall subjective well-being.
We investigate whether or not the level of entrepreneurial activity in an economy is determined by the availability of freelance independent contractors in the workforce. We develop hypotheses and ...test them through an analysis of 75 countries from 2002 to 2012 using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) database. We find freelance independent contractors promote entrepreneurial activity where typically a 10% rise in the freelance workforce causes about a 1 % increase in entrepreneurial activity. The significance of this positive effect is robust for both necessity and opportunity-driven entrepreneurial types and across innovation-driven and efficiency-driven economies—but it is stronger in innovation-driven economies and also for necessity entrepreneurship. It implies that having a flexible workforce is a key ingredient to having an entrepreneurial economy. Furthermore, it indicates that orthodox research and public policy perspectives which overlook the importance of freelance independent contractors for entrepreneurship activity require a re-appraisal.
Despite the growing recognition that freelancers or temporary contract workers are increasingly being used by organisations to enable them to become more dynamic and innovative, there is a lack of ...research exploring the extent and manner in which freelancers create value-added and affect net job change for employees. Most analyses view freelancers as substitutes for employees who compete for the same work and so add little or no value-added over that already provided by employees. More recent perspectives portray freelancers as non-competing complementary providers of differentiated labour who help create jobs for employees by enabling businesses to become more agile and entrepreneurial. We explore this empirical agenda and find that freelancers are associated with sales growth in businesses and net job creation for core employees. In the process, we also discover that in order to establish these effects, firms must achieve a critical mass of freelancers in their workforce of a scale around 11% before a positive association emerges. This finding has central relevance for managers seeking to use freelance workforce intensity to enhance business performance. Moreover, while it has some intuitive appeal, this discovery requires further research to fully understand its cause and the process generating this outcome.
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