Are High Fuel Costs Good for Web Workers?

Last month, when US gasoline prices were edging towards $4 per gallon, we asked about the impact on your lives. Most of our respondents were already staying home more and traveling less. Now, with the prospect of $5 gas this year being increasingly discussed, we”re getting hit with plenty of other dismal transportation news. Airlines are raising prices and discontinuing service. And now, thanks to bad weather in the central US, ethanol fuel production is in trouble (as reported by our sister site Earth2Tech).

At first glance, it seems like this upheaval in the cost and difficulty of transportation might be good for web workers: the economic incentive to stay home instead of traveling to work just gets higher and higher. But while established web workers might be happier all the time about the money they’re not spending on the daily commute, I wonder whether the big picture is really so sunny for us.Even though we might do all or most of our work over the web, very few of us are complete stay-at-home types. In the past, I’ve had more than one job kick off with flying in to meet a new customer in a distant city – and possibly with periodic face time for followup meetings and presentations. If you’ve grown accustomed to landing work in person, rising travel costs are going to affect your ability to pitch and close new deals – especially if you’ve been in the habit of charging travel expenses back to the client.

Personal branding, too, gets more difficult in a world where travel is cost-prohibitive. Some of the best ways to get the word out about your skills are to speak at user groups and conferences. Even if you can still afford to fly in to a conference, will overall attendance start to go down?

Those increases in individual costs, though, are likely to pale in comparison to greater spillover from the overall economy. Those of us who are already web working are hardly the only workers to see the cost savings to less travel. Plenty of other people, and their employers, can run the numbers just as well as we can. We may soon see an overall increase in the number of people trying web work for the first time. That could mean more competition for the available work – and for the available bandwidth and wifi hot spots.

Finally, you have to think about the prospect of fuel costs tipping the economy over into recession. That, too, could be a mixed blessing for web workers, especially freelancers: corporations trying to cut costs may be more willing to farm work out than to hire full-time employees. The effect could be much worse for telecommuters, though, if “out of sight, out of mind” employees become harder to justify.

Overall, I don’t have any solid answers here – just a lot of questions. We’d love to get your input on how the changing economy is affecting your incentive and ability to work on the web – and what you’re doing to make that work more secure.

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