Mainstream USA has gotten to be, come to think of it, a murky little run-off on a vast planet that still has clean rivers and pleasant lands and truly independent people. In fact, we still have pioneers here but they are no longer "typical" of America.
How about the world of freelancers and creative people and, as freelancer Sara Horowitz calls it, the "e-conomy"! Independent workers always been there but now, with the "e" giving them more latitude, their ranks and their economic and social importance are expanding.
We haven't seen a shift in the workforce this significant in almost 100 years when we transitioned from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Now, employees are leaving the traditional workplace and opting to piece together a professional life on their own. As of 2005, one-third of our workforce participated in this "freelance economy." Data show that number has only increased over the past six years. Entrepreneurial activity in 2009 was at its highest level in 14 years, online freelance job postings skyrocketed in 2010, and companies are increasingly outsourcing work. While the economy has unwillingly pushed some people into independent work, many have chosen it because of greater flexibility that lets them skip the dreary office environment and focus on more personally fulfilling projects.
Americans lean on an idea of an America that includes a house in the suburbs, dad and mom and the kids, a decent boss, job security, health insurance and all those things we like to think make up the lives of most Americans. Excuse me, but bullshit! Quite apart from those who have lost their homes, or a lower economic tier that can't make it across the barriers into an idealized middle-class life, there have always been bunches of us who don't want a life tied someone else's business, much less a corporation. We are artists and scientists and small business people of all kinds. We are not seduced by the wonders of employee health plans and those pre-death coffins -- the cubicle or the corporate corner office. We trade security for freedom. We should be able to attain both.
For the new workforce, the New Deal is irrelevant. When it was passed in the 1930s, the New Deal provided workers with important protections and benefits but those securities were built for a traditional employer-employee relationship. The New Deal has not evolved to include independent workers: no unemployment during lean times; no protections from age, race, and gender discrimination; no enforcement from the Department of Labor when employers don't pay; and the list goes on.
I look forward to Sara Horowitz's look into "freelance nation." And the notion that we might finally create the truly free country we want, one that encourages what Horowitz calls "mutualism."
"The solution will rest with our ability to form networks for exchange and to create political power," she writes, and, optimistically: "I believe that new mutualism will be at the core of the new social support system that we need to build for the new workforce."
Sooner, better.
