The one-man band show: self-employment and good jobs

Alas, this revolution – the prioritisation of leisure and family, instead of work – just is not going to happen. The ‘rat race’ ceaselessly recruits. Ambitions augment. Or, with rising inequality and expectations, needs must.

The evidence on the impact of longer working hours is mixed and inconclusive. It suggests that very long working hours and overtime will lead to more economic output The one-man band show… generally, but there are also studies showing that it leads to a reduction in output per hour per employee. But for household finances, at least, longer working hours is often positive.

Despair not about individual happiness: though some studies suggest overtime in some specific industries is associated with poorer health outcomes, long working hours have not led to increased misery across the population generally.9 In fact, because of other transformations to the labour market, work is becoming a happier environment for many people, despite the longer hours.

Work today need not be in tension with leisure and family. Increasingly, people are finding ways of combining them. In recent decades, we have witnessed the growth of flexible working practices, the increased generosity of paid maternity and paternity leave, and more flexible and affordable childcare. They are allowing us to integrate our home and work lives better.

Though women are spending more hours in the labour market than they once did, they are also managing to find time to spend longer with their children, happily: time use surveys – tracking the daily activities of 66,000 people – show a typical working woman in 2000-2004 spent triple the amount of time each day devoted to caring for a child under the age of five than a working woman.

The decision to take the risk, to take the plunge and set up your own business, generally pays off: not necessarily with higher wages, or a significant expansion in their company, but certainly in wellbeing. The self-employed tend to have considerably higher life satisfaction than employees. More of those in self-employment cite their work as meaningful compared to those in employment, and a majority report that being their own boss means they have greater control over their lives.

Most of those who are self-employed or microbusiness owners say they do not want to return to typical employment in the future, and indeed the evidence shows they remain outside the conventional labour market. Even those who do not succeed tend not to give up: a US study shows that of small business owners who closed their company, 60 per cent went on to launch a new venture.

The one-man band show is only going to get bigger. Several trends – technological, economic and demographic – suggest so. First, the internet has made it a lot easier to start a business, reducing start-up costs and making it easier to market your product to a wider range of customers. A third 43 of microbusiness owners say they would have not been able to start a business without the internet; a further third said it would have been very difficult without it.

Source:

https://www.demos.co.uk/files/GoodJobs_essaycollection.pdf?1418312724