Flexible workforce: A Growing Trend
IBM, which employs about 400,000 people around the globe, is considering converting three quarters of its permanent staff to contractors over the next seven years, according to Personnel Today. While an IBM spokesman denies that there are any such plans, it’s hard to imagine there have not been – at the very least – some serious conversations about the workforce inside IBM’s walls. The head of IBM’s Human Capital Management notes the distinct advantages for the company: “There would be no buildings costs, no pensions and no healthcare costs, making huge savings.”
For more than a year now, we’ve been watching companies of all stripes downsize or shift their staffing. If they need additional personnel to complete their projects, they’re turning to independent contractors.
Some Unintended Consequences
But when companies become lean, it tends to follow that their workers feel their own belts tightening—they find themselves with no pension, no health care, no protection. The implications are huge. Max, a freelancer in the film industry, wasn’t paid $6,000 a client owed him. He ran through his savings and had to take out a bank loan to make ends meet while he fought to get his check. Countless freelancers spend huge portions of their income on insurance, or go without and live in fear that they’ll get sick. During the recession, freelancers whose incoming work dried up had their applications for unemployment insurance denied.
Help Through Community
I began to notice that the workforce was shifting—and that flexible workers were going to be facing new challenges—over a decade ago. And since then, our 140,000 (and growing) community of freelancers has been innovating and building a system based on the old union principles of solidarity, cooperation, and mutual aid. We protect and support ourselves and each other with health insurance, a freelancer 401(k), and a political movement to establish new rules and protections for this emerging workforce.
In New York, we’ve won the right to group together for health insurance, just as IBM’s staff currently does. Nationwide, we offer freelancers dental, life, and disability benefits just like the ones IBM probably offers its employees. Recently, we’ve developed a 401(k) plan and a mental health directory. Our mission is to continue to innovate and build ways to make these basic fixtures of life stay with each person wherever he/she goes, rather than making them available only through a permanent employer.
It’s not that we’d encourage IBM to convert its staff to contractors; nor would we suggest that freelancers seek full-time jobs or that businesses be forced to offer standard benefits to everyone in their employ. The point is that both companies and workers are changing the meaning of jobs, careers, and building a life. All people, regardless of how they work, deserve financial security and peace of mind. If, in 2017, IBM’s project-based staff find themselves counted in our numbers, we hope they’ll still be able to enjoy all the security and rights they always had, but with the invaluable addition of freedom.
Sara Horowitz founded Working Today – Freelancers Union in 1995 to represent the needs and concerns of the growing independent workforce. Freelancers Union seeks to update the nation’s social safety net, developing systems so that all working people can access affordable benefits, regardless of their job arrangements. As executive director, Horowitz takes an entrepreneurial approach, pursuing creative, market-based solutions to pressing social problems. In recognition of her efforts to create a self-sustaining organization of flexible workers, Horowitz was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1999. Before founding Freelancers Union, Horowitz worked as a labor attorney, a union organizer, and a public defender in New York City.
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