14% of UK’s workforce is now self employed!
According to data published by the Daily Telegraph today 14% of UK’s workforce is now self-employed. And this excludes all those second jobbers and moonlighters which, as I mentioned in my recent interview on the BBC , is in fact the highest growing sector within PeoplePerHour’s community of 350,000 freelancers .
According to data published by the Office of National statistics there are now 367,000 more people who are self-employed than there were in 2008.
I commented both to the Telegraph and the Guardian today on what’s driving that growth. The recession is not the driver of change, it has been the catalyst. In a recent poll we conducted on PeoplePerHour, more than a third said the reason was to get a better work-life balance, and a quarter said it was to pursue a hobby or passion.
Freelancing is not a recessionary fad. It’s a structural change in the labour market. As in many step changes in the economy over the last century, recession has been a great catalyst and awakening call to accelerating that change.
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