Freelancers in US – 53 million or 34% of the population

According to a survey released this week by the Freelancers Union together with freelance platform Elance-oDesk, 53 million Americans, or 34% of the population, qualify as freelancers.

Not all of them make their living exclusively as freelancers. The number includes 14.3 million workers who would be called “moonlighters”—people who have a primary, traditional job that pays benefits, and supplement their income with extra work, like a full-time tech support worker at a corporation who also does consulting with private clients on the side or a web developer who takes on projects for non-profits in the evening.

Of the remaining 38.7 million, 21.1 million are what the survey calls “traditional” freelancers who do  temporary work on a project basis. Some 9.3 million have multiple sources of income which can include a part-time job like working 20 hours a week at a dentist’s office. Another 5.5 million are temporary staffers who work for a single employer but not on a permanent basis that comes with benefits, like a business strategy consultant working for a startup on a contract that can include months of employment. Then there are the 2.8 million business owners who have between one and five employees, like my friend Cynthia Cross who does boutique market research through her Hagen/Sinclair Research Recruiting, which puts together focus groups and interviews for clients including Samsung, Wellpoint, Google and AT&T.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at More Than A Third Of U.S. Workers Are Freelancers Now, But Is That Good For Them?.

From the Source:

More than 53 million Americans are doing freelance work, according to a new, landmark survey conducted by the independent research firm Edelman Berland and commissioned by Freelancers Union and Elance-oDesk.

That’s 34 percent of the entire workforce.

The old way of working isn’t working, More than 53 million workers are showing a new way — and tens of millions more will likely follow.

The new economy is already here — and it’s driven by freelancers.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at 53 million Americans are freelancing, new survey finds – Freelancers Union.