The term freelance made its debut alongside Robin Hood, “king of outlaws, prince of good fellows,” in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Set in 12th century England, this 1819 novel dubbed a medieval mercenary—someone who would carry his lance into battle for a price—a freelance.

Today, the country’s 10.3 million freelancers represent about seven percent of the U.S. workforce. They joust for work in a variety of fields such as writing, programming, graphic design, Web development, marketing, sales, law, accounting, engineering and art. The trend toward freelancing has grown steadily since the millennium. Career Builder’s 2008 Job Forecast indicates the momentum will continue. “In the midst of economic uncertainties, employers are turning to freelance or contract workers to help support business initiatives,” says the report. Almost a third of surveyed employers expect to work with freelancers in the coming year.

Daniel Pink, author of Free Agent Nation cites four factors that have fueled the growth of the freelance industry:

The Social Contract of work—in which employees traded loyalty for security—crumbled.” In other words, when employers stopped being loyal to employees, no longer offering job security that would carry their workers from their first paycheck to their gold watch, employees stopped being loyal to employers.

“Individuals needed a large company less, because the means of production—that is, the tools necessary to create wealth—went from expensive, huge, and difficult for one person to operate to cheap, houseable, and easy for one person to operate . . . I call it Digital Marxism,” writes Pink, “In an age of inexpensive computers, wireless handheld devices, and ubiquitous low-cost connections to a global communications network, workers can now own the means to production.

Widespread, long-term prosperity allowed people to think of work as a way not only to make money, but also to make meaning.

The half-life of organizations began shrinking, assuring that the individuals will outlive any organization for which they work.

Merger mania, now-you-see-‘em-now-you-don’t startups, and spectacular implosions at companies such as Enron, Bear Stearns, and Arthur Anderson demonstrate the tenuous nature of employment today.
Pink also points out that we now live in a society where eighty-five percent of people were not around during the Great Depression. “The Great Depression profoundly and permanently affected the attitudes of the people who lived through it . . . that haunting economic fear—and the public attitudes it engendered—is no longer seared in the American consciousness,” writes Pink.

Fueling the demand side of the equation, companies both small and large turn to freelancers to:

• Lower costs by saving on benefits, employer share of taxes, offices and other organizational overhead;
• Reduce their operating leverage—by trading the fixed cost of an employee for the variable cost of a freelancer;
• Increase their access to skilled workers and slow the Baby Boomer brain drain;
• Keep pace in an environment of accelerated change;
• Gain access to new ideas and perspectives;
• Increase accountability (freelancers being the ultimate pay for performance workers);
• Quickly ramp up or down in times of growth or decline.

A trend with many names—outsourcing, offshoring, homeshoring, subcontracting, on-demand working, whatever you want to call it—is a trend that’s good news if you’re a prospective freelancer.