by Jo Gibson

Years ago, I was serving jury duty and an attorney asked during voir dire what I did for a living. “I free-lance,” I replied. The judge, brooking no euphemistic nonsense, boomed down from the bench: “You’re unemployed, isn’t that correct?”

The classic paradigm, wherein an employee toils for one company for 40 hours a week over the course of a working lifetime, has changed since then. Consider that in 1997, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that one in ten workers were not traditional employees, but instead were classified into one of four “alternative work arrangements,” with 8.5 million designated “independent contractors.” More recent BLS data (published May 2001) shows no significant decline in those numbers.

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