Not only is this the year of the Tiger, but it’s also finally the year of the Freelancer, at least in the press. You can’t open up the paper these days without seeing something on the changing workforce, and that’s a good thing in our eyes. Today’s New York Times included the article “Recession Adds to Appeal of Short-Term Jobs” which threw out this interesting factoid: “the number of people who describe themselves as self-employed but working less than 35 hours a week because they cannot find full-time work has more than doubled since the recession began, reaching 1.2 million in December 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.” Hopefully, from press like this, the government will finally start to comprehensively track the independent workforce on a consistent basis, to account for all the self-employed, part-timers, temps, and day laborers out there (something we’ve discussed in our recent survey report).