I recently felt impelled to sign up to an online freelance website in the hope of gaining some real world experience and earning a modicum of cash along the way. The process has been most informative.
The whole “setting yourself up on a freelancing site” is pretty straightforward and, mainly, without incident. The concept is simple. You put your details on a website and then you either bid for work or hope that someone offers you work. Although I suspect that the likelihood of someone just offering you some work maybe a little farfetched considering the fierce competition out there.
What has struck me is that the world of a freelancing, whether it is for writing blogs or giving HR advice, has become dominated by globalisation and commoditisation.
Firstly, globalisation. Now I don’t have an issue with the idea of a global free market, a place where we are all able to compete for work. But the simple fact is that we’re all starting at different levels of expectation and need. Here’s an example. A UK training company wants a virtual administrator to carry out such functions as student enrolment, typing letters and maintaining a student database. All pretty much bread and butter administration tasks. But instead of employing either a temp or a fulltime employee they’ve called for a freelance to fill the post. A fair number of people applied to fulfil this role on a freelance basis. The two shortlisted, one from Romania and another from the Philippines, both offered to do the work for £4 an hour, much less than the UK minimum wage. I don’t doubt that the two selected applicants can do the job in question. I also don’t doubt that a UK applicant would find it very difficult to survive on an income (before tax AND before roughly 10% is hived off by the freelancing site) of £4 per hour worked. That’s a gross salary of £120 for a 30 hour week.
Secondly, commoditisation. Commoditisation is “A commodity is a product that is completely undifferentiated. If a product becomes less differentiated, so that buyers care less about who they buy from, this change is called commoditisation. The key effect of commoditisation is that it reduces the pricing power of the producer: if products become more alike from a buyer's point of view they will tend to buy the cheapest.” People, especially those who once might have felt that they offered skills and experience that were unique and hard won, are now being savagely commoditised. Journalists, administrators, software developers, HR experts, image processors, video editors etc etc are all having to face the fact that they are now competing with people from across the globe. That their skill sets no longer offer them anything unique with which to sell themselves. This means that commoditisation is forcing down the fees that they can charge for any job that can be done via the net.
It hasn’t been too difficult to foresee this situation. Businesses have been taking advantage of it for sometime, hence the rise of off-shore outsourcing. The real question is “what’s going to happen to those who live and (hopefully) work in the west?” The answer is, I believe, that we’re going to have to accept a much lower standard of living. That our nations, and specifically the governments and economies, are going to have to readjust to a world where salaries are going to be a lot lower than they have been. That prices and taxation levels are going to have to drop and the prices of such sacred cows as property are not just going to fall a bit but come crashing down like out of control aircraft.
We appear to be destined to live through interesting times.
