The gig economy, it seems, is here to stay. According to a study about financial well-being conducted by MBO Partners, 77% of independent workers or freelancers feel that they are living comfortably and can make ends meet.
HR Dive.com‘s Rila O’Donnell reported last week that this trend among gig workers is almost identical to that of workers with more traditional, permanent positions within their organizations. According to the MBO survey 78% of conventional workers said the same about their own current financial state.
Using a scale as outlined by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, workers rated their current financial circumstances from 100 to feeling financially secure to 40 for those who feel financially insecure. Those who scored 60 percent and over were considered to be financially secure. Workers who scored from somewhere in the middle with a score between 51 and 50 percent were considered to be financially stable while those with 42 to 50 percent consider themselves able to make ends meet. Workers who had a score of 40% or lower were considered to be financially insecure and likely to be facing significant financial worries as a result.
On average, the participants in the study who were considered to be independent or freelance workers scored 54 percent with a quarter of gig workers indicating that they thought themselves to be at 60 percent and above when it came to their financial circumstances.
This seems to come as good news for both independent workers and for organizations that are seeking to reduce labor costs by using freelance or gig workers. Society for Human Resource Management and SAP SuccessFactors found that one out of every five workers indicated that they preferred to work on their own and a third of those workers felt that they made more money as freelancers than they did while working in a more traditional job role.
MBO recommends that in a tight talent market, organizations utilizing the services of freelancers is to sweeten compensation for those workers by extending benefits usually reserved for traditional employees. Such benefits afforded to contract workers could give those companies offering them an edge over an increasingly competitive employment market.