Self-employment is a good thing

Rico says he's been self-employed, on and off, for years, and highly recommends it; Emily Bazelon has an article in The New York Times about the trend:

On a rainy morning in April, Lisa Feuer took the subway to the Brooklyn Dojo, a martial-arts studio where she was scheduled to teach a mommy-baby yoga class. Outside, streams of water poured from awnings into the collars of passers-by. When she got to the studio, Feuer shook out her umbrella and picked out music from her iPhone to play for the class. But, in the next twenty minutes, no one else showed up. Feuer called Karma Kids Yoga, which rents out the dojo and pays her $40 to teach the hour-long class. If no students come, teachers get paid half their fee as long as they stand outside for fifteen minutes and hand out postcards advertising Karma Kids. Feuer asked to postpone the postcarding because of the rain. On the wet walk to the subway, she tried to reassure herself that her students would be back next week, even though attendance had been sliding for a while.
When Feuer started teaching yoga four and a half years ago, when she was 38, it seemed like the perfect entree to a life of free agency. Feuer spent most of her 30s working for her husband’s goth record label doing publicity and promotion. When they divorced in 2005, she wanted a job that gave her some of the same independence that he had. “I’d watched my husband go into business for himself, and I felt like I could do it, too,” she said.
Yoga gave her the same pure, elated feeling as dance, which she had done professionally in her 20s. She spent $4,000 on a 200-hour yoga training course— paid for with a home-equity loan— and then more to specialize in prenatal, mommy-baby, and kids classes. Many of her prenatal students came back to thank her after giving birth. She could pick up classes from a half-dozen studios, gyms and schools, and she could arrange her schedule around the needs of her son, Sasha, who is almost seven. Since Feuer did not work full time for any employer, no one gave her health insurance or other benefits. But she earned between $35 and $65 a class, and students paid more for private sessions.
Freelancing still has its advantages. Feuer works in the evenings when Sasha is with his father, and she is able to pick him up from school on the days he spends with her. On the day I met her at the dojo in Brooklyn Heights, we took the subway to her next class at the Greene Hill School, a tiny preschool and kindergarten in a two-room apartment in Clinton Hill. With Feuer leading, the kids chanted, “Tick tock, little yoga clock, wind your feet!” and then took turns shouting out other body parts that they would wind.
From Greene Hill, Feuer went to teach a prenatal class elsewhere in Brooklyn; she teaches in Manhattan too, and sometimes she crosses back and forth between the boroughs two or three times a day to get to her web of workplaces. “I spend a lot of time on the train,” she said on the subway to Greene Hill, “and it makes you wonder: if you had a regular job and you didn’t have all that travel time, would you make better money in the end?” She gave a small laugh. “But I love what I do. So I try not to think about that.”
The thought is increasingly hard to push away, however. Last summer, the gym that paid Feuer best closed. In January, the two weekly after-school classes she offered at a Brooklyn public school failed to fill and were canceled. Feuer’s prenatal and mommy-baby students tend to move on, and the new mothers were no longer asking for one-on-one sessions. Feuer’s ex-husband pays one-third of her rent, and she had been counting on the money from the after-school classes to pay her share for July and August. “I don’t know how I will make it through the summer,” she said in an e-mail message. The bottom of the note read, “Sent from my iPhone.” The call of semidesperation via a high-tech status symbol is an emblem of the gap between the past and the present for many of urban America’s self-employed. Freelancers still have the trappings of middle-class entrepreneurship. But the downturn is eating away at their livelihoods and the identity they thought they chose when they decided to work for themselves.
Especially in personal services, the freelance economy of New York and other big cities is stumbling along with the national economy. Yoga teachers, private tutors, gym trainers, massage therapists, drivers, personal chefs— they all count on high hourly earnings, private sessions, and tips from wealthy clients. When cities were flush, the clients rolled in and the perks of self-employment— freedom, flexibility, entrepreneurship— seemed to outweigh more traditional benefits like job security and health insurance.
“The main chance is becoming a free agent in an economy of free agents,” the business guru Tom Peters wrote in the magazine Fast Company in 1997. Liberate yourself from the confines of an office. Be your own boss. Be your own brand. “You create a message and a strategy to promote the brand called You,” Peters wrote.

Rico says there's a lot more; click the post title to read the rest.