Freelancer union asks for government tally of indie workers

How many people in the United States are independent workers?

A freelancers’ union says it’s 30 percent of the entire population and growing, while the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, which keeps track of unemployment and other data, put the number at 4 percent.

That’s some discrepancy, and it’s one reason why the Freelancers’ Union, a nonprofit advocacy group, is calling for the BLS to change how it classifies freelancers and other self-employed independent workers.

The BLS haven’t done a tally of contingent workers since 2005 due to lack of funding, according to a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article. That’s changing next year, promopting the union to ask the agency to change the language it uses to be more inclusive in order to do a better job of tabulating the growing ranks of permanent, full-time freelancers and other self-employed independent workers. According to the union, a more accurate number is 30 percent, the calculation the Government Accountability Office came up after counting self-employed workers, temps, contract workers and day laborers for a 2006 report on the U.S. workforce.

In the Bloomberg Businessweek article, Freelancers Union founder and founder and executive director Sara Horowitz argues in favor of tossing out the term “contingent” worker and categorizing people as independent based on their work, not whether they think of themselves as business owners.

What about you: do you think of yourself a contingent worker, working in temporary gigs? Or do you prefer to call yourself a business owner, freelancer, entrepreneurial journalist, self-employed or something else?

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