The three growth areas in UK self employment are hairdressing, cleaning and management consultancy.
Across the pond in Britain, freelancers make up just 2 percent of the workforce, a figure that is largely unchanged in the last 15 years. It’s possible that the increase in the number of Britons declaring themselves self-employed may contain some gigsters but it could also be explained by more traditional forms of self-employment. The three growth areas in UK self employment are hairdressing, cleaning and management consultancy. Yes, it’s possible that some of these consultants are trading their services on HourlyNerd or one of its competitors but these sectors were growing before anyone said “gig”. Conversely numbers of self-employed taxi drivers are in decline. As Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute puts it: “evidence of an exploding gig economy is showing up everywhere but the data.”