Kip portrait / Elance experiment (Photo credit: jrubinic)
The digital workforce is a curious beast. Sites like Elance, Adtriboo, and ODesk offer work up to bids from the freelance pool and, by and large, global competition drives price down.
At the same time these sites are a source of casual work or even a regular pipeline for people who can build business from prices where margin is always at risk.
Freelance work in general has helped replace permanent jobs. America added 1 million jobs in the freelance pool in 2012. But this is is sill shaky territory.
My colleague Eric Mack, over at crowdsourcing.org, took a look recently at the distribution of jobs on Elance. The results are surprising:
#1. Nations seeing the most growth in hiring include China, South Africa, India and a handful of European countries. That means these countries are hiring more people. They are the clients.
#2. The country with the most hires and the most growth in contractors is actually the USA. The US is also still the top hiring country.
"...the top hiring country and the country where the most freelancers are located is one and the same -- the United States. According to the most recent numbers, there are over 700,000 American freelancers on the platform, with more than 200,000 of those joining up in the last 12 months, a number that makes up more than a quarter of the total new freelancers added worldwide.
Elance says: "Hard-hit states with higher (un)employment rates saw record freelance earnings over the past year: Rhode Island (+89%), Mississippi (+67%), New Jersey (+58%), Michigan (+54%) and California (+41%)."
What's the conclusion? We are rapidly evolving different types of freelance work. There are contractors (that surveys like MBOPartners cover), casual global freelance pools on sites like Elance, and increasingly crowd-based labor sites, which gather around sites like Mechanical Turk and Crowdflower, where, once again, US workers predominate.
As French writer Jean-Pierre Gaudard put it recently, we are witnessing the end of the salariat and judging by the presence of US casual labor everywhere, the US is taking the hardest hit. Read more about this new "precariat" workforce here.
