He thinks it will result in fewer jobs. Politicians may be wrangling over various approaches to job creation, but the right and left seem to agree that with nine percent unemployment, America needs more jobs. Not Godin. He thinks we need to get over the idea.

Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created….

The industrial age, the one that started with the industrial revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy and it seems absurd to imagine that great pay for replaceable work is on the horizon.

Godin seems pretty gloomy about Americans’ employment prospects, but he claims that, in fact, he’s an optimist. We may not soon see the return of many jobs, but work is forever, according to Godin.

I’m not a pessimist, though, because the new revolution, the revolution of connection, creates all sorts of new productivity and new opportunities. Not for repetitive factory work, though, not for the sort of thing ADP measures. Most of the wealth created by this revolution doesn’t look like a job, not a full time one anyway.

When everyone has a laptop and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory. Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.

Stressful? Of course it is. No one is trained in how to do this, in how to initiate, to visualize, to solve interesting problems and then deliver. Some see the new work as a hodgepodge of little projects, a pale imitation of a ‘real’ job. Others realize that this is a platform for a kind of art, a far more level in which owning a factory isn’t a birthright for a tiny minority but something that hundreds of millions of people have the chance to do.

There are a couple of points worth making about Godin’s vision of the new job-less way of work. First off, Godin’s idea of earning money through “earning attention” doesn’t sound that far off from the ideas of You Are Not a Gadget author Jaron Lanier who argues in this very long, very interesting interview that the only way the Internet won’t destroy the middle class is if we find ways to monetize the products of our “hearts and brains.”

It’s worth pointing out that, level-playing field or no, making something non-replaceable with your heart or brain that will stand out in a crowded marketplace and that others will pay for is a really tall order, as anyone who has ever tried to create a viral video, design a logo or write a story can tell you. Captivating people is far harder than powering through paperwork in accounts payable or repeatedly fabricating the same metal widget. Are enough people capable of doing this to maintain a middle class? Can we train more people for the new economy by altering our education system?

Reservations aside, the fact that lots of steady, location-based, routine jobs are disappearing seems indisputable. Project-based, location-independent, creative work appears to be the way of the future.

Is Godin right that jobs as we once understood them aren’t coming back? Are we ready for this reality?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Hugo90.

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Freelancers typically have difficulty securing access to a comparable range of benefits to what they’d have in an employment situation. This is especially true of health benefits, as I’ve written previously.

How is oDesk trying to fix this? oDesk Staffing extends its existing 1099 system by letting you elect to have a W-2 employed relationship status with the company.

Workers who opt for a W-2 status and who complete 30 hours per week of billable work through the oDesk system are eligible for benefits from oDesk Staffing. The benefits include group health benefits with no pre-existing condition limitations, retirement benefits and even unemployment benefits. oDesk also guarantees payment from clients for work, but the trade-off for that guarantee is that the oDesk system requires that you use monitoring software during work hours that some freelancers might consider intrusive (including the use of webcam shots).

Eligibility for benefits relies on an hourly calculation, so workers who get paid using other measures, such as writers getting paid by the piece, won’t be eligible for the oDesk Staffing benefits system. Workers become eligible for benefits on the first day of the month following a month where they they have worked 30 hours a week. This means workers have to wait between 31-61 days to become eligible for benefits under the oDesk Staffing system.

What will all of this cost? For existing oDesk users, oDesk Staffing’s examples say that after taxes and their fees, the take-home pay of the producer will be the same under a W-2 relationship as under the existing oDesk 1099 system. Freelancers considering porting their existing client relationships to oDesk to take advantage of the benefits should know that oDesk Staffing charges a 20 percent fee for their services that includes the worker’s tax withholding. For a worker who can’t secure insurance any other way, that may be a necessary premium to pay.

oDesk Staffing isn’t publishing information on the cost of the health insurance premium buy-in itself. It is available via email from getbenefits@odesk.com, though. There are nine different plans. On the web site, sample rates are quoted for the Basic PPO plan at $135 per month for an individual 35-year-old, or $400 per month for a family.

Would you bill all your clients through a service in order to get health insurance?

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Photo by _e.t.

I left my corporate job in June to strike out on my own as a freelance consultant working out of my home office and coffee shops. I had been preparing to make the move for a while, and it was something that I knew I wanted to try. The technology industry was growing and there were plenty of job openings in my field of expertise: online communities and social media. I left confident that I had plenty of time to test the waters as a freelance web worker knowing that I could always go back to the corporate world if freelance consulting didn’t work out for me.

I’m happy to say that consulting is working well for me right now, because I’m no longer confident that I could find a new corporate job as quickly or easily as I might have been able to get one a year ago.

The job market is getting tougher each month as unemployment continues to rise. At this point, I should emphasize that I am not an economist, employment guru or other expert qualified to analyze this data, so consider this just one web worker’s summary of the current economic conditions.

Let’s start with the recent employment data. Grim and depressing are the best ways I could come up with to describe the employment data that was released on Friday by the U.S. Department of Labor. Here are a few “highlights” from the report:

• Unemployment rose from 6.8 percent in November to 7.2 percent in December.
• The number of unemployed people in the U.S. is now 11.1 million up by 632,000 in December
• From the beginning of the recession in December 2007, unemployment has increased by 2.3 percent with 3.6 million additional people becoming unemployed.

However, this may not tell the whole story for those of us in various web working professions. In an article by Brett Philbin, of Dow Jones Newswires, John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, predicted that the economic downturn could have an interesting impact on web working:

“Challenger said that the economic downturn could lead to a surge in some workplace trends such as telecommuting as companies look for alternative ways to cut costs. In addition, job seekers may look for creative ways to find employment, including the use of social networking sites and posting video resumes on Google Inc.’s (GOOG) YouTube.”

Telecommuting and web working are growing trends that have been covered recently on WebWorkerDaily with posts about The State of Telecommuting and Trends in Teleworking, so I won’t revisit those trends in detail here.

I did decide that it would be good to get the perspective of a couple of job sites focused on freelancers, consultants, and other web workers, so I contacted oDesk and Elance to get their take on the recent news and learn more about how the economic downturn was impacting their job postings.

oDesk provided me with this data:

• They had 4,100 working providers in December compared to 4,000 in November (growth of 2 percent) despite the fact that December is typically a slow month for starting work on new web projects.
• The number of providers working in Q4 was up 13 percent over the number working in Q3.
• They’ve seen a large increase in provider signups (registrations of people that may not have found a job yet): Q3 signups of 36,000 and Q4 signups of 52,000 (47 percent growth).

Elance sent me these numbers:

• 60,000 new jobs were posted in Q4 of 2008 (up 39 percent compared to same period in 2007). The number of new jobs posted in December was up 48 percent from December 2007 and November was up 35 percent from December 2007.
• Over $14 million in payments made to service providers in Q4 of 2008 (up over 40 percent from Q4 2007)
• More than 55,000 unique businesses in working engagements with service providers in the past 6 months (up 44 percent from same time a year ago).

Keep in mind that these numbers are self-reported by companies with a vested interest in the telecommuting and web working industry, and these numbers include jobs outside of the U.S., so they can’t be directly compared to the earlier data from the U.S. Department of Labor. However, they do highlight an interesting trend showing an increase in freelance and web worker activity.

Now comes the hard part: making sense of all of this data. We have several sets of numbers that may or may not be related in any way showing different perspectives and different conclusions, so here is where you come into the picture. In the best tradition of the lazy blogger, I outsource the analysis (the hard part) to you.

Are web worker jobs increasing in spite of the economic downturn or is the increasing unemployment rate pushing more people into freelancing positions while they look for other work? What other data have you found recently that might shed some light on this question? Have you noticed any relevant anecdotal trends as part of your day to day web working?

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