[2] Fields, professions, and industries where freelancing is predominant include: music, writing, acting, computer programming, web design, graphic design, translating and illustrating, film and video production, and other forms of piece work that some cultural theorists consider central to the cognitive-cultural economy.
Instead of a flat rate or fee, some freelancers have adopted a value-based pricing method based on the perceived value of the results to the client.
[8] A 2018 McKinsey study found that up to 162 million people in Europe and the United States engage in some form of independent work.
At that time, there were approximately 10.3 million United States workers (7.4% of the workforce) employed as independent contractors of all sorts.
[10] In 2011, Jeffrey Eisenach, an economist at George Mason University, estimated that number of freelancers had grown by one million.
81 million) of the United States population was a part of the contingent workforce, a category of casual labor that includes freelancing.
[14] The total number of freelancers in UK is also inexact; however, figures from the Office for National Statistics show that the proportion of remote workers rose from 9.2% in 2001 to 10.7% in 2011.
Demographic research on Amazon Mechanical Turk revealed that the majority of its North American workers are women.
[17] Catherine McKercher's research on journalism as a profession has showcased that while media organizations are still male-dominated, the reverse is true for freelance journalists and editors, whose ranks are mainly women.
[3] Websites, books, portals and organizations for freelancers often feature advice on getting and keeping a steady work stream.
[21] Beside the lack of job security, many freelancers also report the ongoing hassle of dealing with employers who don't pay on time and the possibility of long periods without work.
Feedback from members suggests that web portals such as Freelancer.com tend to attract low-paying clients that, although demanding very high standards, pay ~$10 per hour or less.
[24][25] For instance, three years of ethnographic research about teleworkers in Australia conducted by Melissa Gregg, a Principal Engineer and Researcher in Residence for the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing at UC Irvine, raises concerns over how both physical isolation and continuous access enabled with networked digital media puts pressure on homeworkers to demonstrate their commitments through continual responses by email and to conceal their family or home life.
[26] The Internet has opened up many freelance opportunities, expanded available markets, and has contributed to service sector growth in many economies.
[30] Freelance marketplaces have globalized competition for some jobs, allowing workers in high- and low-income countries to compete with one another.
However, the European Commission defines a self-employed person as someone: "pursuing a gainful activity for their own account, under the conditions laid down by national law".
This definition comes from Directive (2010/41/EU) on the application of the principle of equal treatment between men and women engaged in an activity in a self-employed capacity.
[35] The European Forum of Independent Professionals defines freelancers as: "a highly-skilled subset of self-employed workers, without employers nor employees, offering specialised services of an intellectual and knowledge-based nature".
Independent professionals work on a flexible basis in a range of creative, managerial, scientific and technical occupations; they are not a homogeneous group and as such, they cannot be considered or investigated as a whole.
In the U.S. in 2009, federal and state agencies began increasing their oversight of freelancers and other workers whom employers classify as independent contractors.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO)[36] recommended that the Secretary of Labor have its Wage and Hour Division "focus on misclassification of employees as independent contractors during targeted investigations."
For example, book publishing companies have traditionally outsourced certain tasks like indexing and proofreading to individuals working as independent contractors.
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service[37] offers some guidance on what constitutes self-employment, but states have enacted stricter laws to address how independent contractors should be defined.