You will find me referring to any employment other than self employment as a “real” job. This is a tongue-in-cheek figure of speech that I know will probably offend those who make their livings as their own boss. How do I know? Because it offends me! To this day I still tease my mother about how even after I claimed $100,000 in gross sales and paid out $25,000.00 in wages by my second year in business for myself, she was still going around telling people how I did “odd jobs”
Doing casual work or freelancing seems to be the wave of the future. Many companies are capitalizing on this by outsourcing more of the daily grind to subcontractors for a cut and dry rate, as opposed to hiring another employee with all the associated payroll taxes, insurances and that dreaded “commitment.” Sure sixteen employees can all take thirty minutes a day to clean their areas, but why not let them continue to run their CNC machines that bill out at $80.00 per hour while a cleaning contractor does that work instead for eight hours billed at $50.00 per hour.
Note -Cleaning Contractor: Great self employment opportunity!
One of my last real jobs before working for my self was at a soap factory, the same one that my Mom worked at for over twenty years. They gave me a pink slip 30 minutes before my shift was over, a week and a half before Christmas. I can’t say that I never punched a clock again. I’ve had some payroll and even commish jobs since then, but my mainstay has been self employment for the majority of my career. And I do see a 100% commision job as a type of self employment.
To me, going project to project is a great way to have job security. Not that every project goes off without a hitch and the money is there every other Friday. But, punching a clock every day comes with the anxiety of knowing that all of your eggs are in one basket. There are severance packages, and unemployment insurance checks and other safety nets that help save you from total devastation should you get shit-canned. But having the security of a project to go to before the one that you are on is complete, is the clearest vision of your own future that I think you can have. If work is drying up, you can see it well ahead of time when you are self employed, and adjust accordingly.
As a contractor, I used to hear way too often: “What do you do in the winter?” You get sick of hearing the same lines, so you come up with standard answers that stop the nonsense dead in its tracks. “I work with a coat and hat on” was the standard answer for that one. Construction work could be feast or famine, but it was never seasonal in my experience. It was easier to work in the snow than the heat of summer sometimes. Big companies have the same ups and downs. The big difference is: When work starts falling off, you will be the last to know, sometimes less than an hour before you are on the street, out of work.
