Feb 3, 2007

On being independent

Mike Gunderloy posts on the Web Worker Blog about free agents...

as of 2005, the US Census Bureau says there were 18.6 million businesses with no paid employees - that being their way of measuring self-employment. I’m one of them, and unless you’re living dangerously close to the edge of a lawsuit, you probably are too. Of course, so is the beauty salon down the block and the little cafe around the corner, so we need to be a bit cautious in how much we make of that number. But with hundreds of thousands of new people entering the self-employed ranks every year, it seems pretty clear that they’re not all working inside of storefronts. Some substantial chunk of those millions are carting laptops around with the rest of us.

Traditionally, India has always had more such freelancers than traditional employees. Only we call it the "organized sector" and it is populated more by unskilled workers. As the Alternative Perspective newsletter states:

The "unorganised/informal sector" contributes to
  • 60% of Net Domestic Product
  • 68% of income
  • 60% of savings
  • 31% of agricultural exports
  • 41% of manufactured exports
  • ...and 92-93% of employment (or, livelihood for the about 2/3rd the population)


  • JobCentral provides an article on Minnesota nursings jobs on its site.

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