Changing employment, the freelance way

Reading the newspapers these days is no longer a pleasant task, what with a string of bad news about job losses, economic restructuring, etc, staring out of the pages and painting an overall grim scenario. So it came as a big relief when I got to read a recent article about the advent of the gig economy and how it was transforming the lives of millions of job aspirants and companies.

But the biggest takeaway from the report was that technology is no longer a disrupter, but a creator of jobs. That was not just a revelation but a demolition of my belief that temporary jobs have no big economic role to play.

When I first read New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat many years ago, in which he discussed how the convergence of technological and political forces has created a global and web-enabled platform for collaboration, little did I expect that geography, distance and language would no longer be barriers for work.