Thomas Brock, our resident travelling English teacher shares some thoughts about a topic that he has been speaking to a lot of people about this week.

Read on to hear Thomas share his thoughts about gig work!

Vocabulary List

Am I a Gig Worker?

Hello again everyone,

I wasn’t too sure what I wanted to post about this week, but I knew I wasn’t going to miss my Wednesday slot so here we are. One thing that I’ve been talking a bit about this week is my occupational circumstances. With gig work and the gig economy being the topic of the Conversation Club for this week, I think it is only fitting that I share some details about my life as a freelancer.

First of all, I remember being asked this week about the similarities and differences between the many terms associated with the topic. Words such as freelance, contractor, remote work, consultant, self-employed, entrepreneur, gig work, and more, are all words that get thrown around in this context, so let’s go through some of them.

Let’s Explain These Words

Freelance means doing work for multiple organisations or companies without being officially employed by any of them specifically.

A contractor is someone who is contracted to work on a project but who is not an employee of the company running the project.

Remote work means working from any location that is not the office.

A consultant is someone who gives advice (or is consulted).

Someone who is self-employed does not work for a company but works for themselves, and does not necessarily own a registered company.

Entrepreneur is a fancy word for someone who starts a business.

Gig-work means working in short periods, on short contracts, or on single projects. It can also apply to anyone taking freelance work.

So, with all these terms explained in their most basic form, we can see that a lot of people who work in the gig economy fall into a lot of these terms. However, whilst they have similarities, they are not all synonymous.

Let’s take me as an example.

So, What About Myself?

I am a freelancer. I am not an employee of a company. I have signed a contract to produce work with at least one company, but I am not an employee. I produce work and I create invoices in order to get paid for the service that I provide. I also sell a product directly to customers, who pay me for my teaching service.

Whilst I do have a contract, I would not describe myself as a contractor, as this word is more often used on projects such as engineering, building, or events, where the company in charge of the project needs to bring in specialists to work alongside employees. In this case, the word contractor simply helps to distinguish them.

I am a remote worker because I work fully remotely. However, this can be confusing, because I don’t work in a different place to my company’s office, because I don’t work for a company, and there is no office.

The word consultant has become more and more common in recent times to describe roles that many people fill, where their day-to-day job involves doing many things, but their key role is to advise. Consultants are usually experts in a field who are hired on a short-term basis or freelance because it would be too expensive to hire them full-time.

I’m not much of an expert (at least not yet) and so I don’t consider myself a consultant.

I am self-employed. I do not own a company, because I don’t need to.

I would not claim to be an entrepreneur, but this is a syntactic choice.

I am a gig worker. Whilst my job is permanent and full-time – that of being a freelance English teacher and content writer, I only work if I have a ‘gig’. If no students book my lessons, or no business hires me to write, then I don’t work. In this sense, I am a gig worker.

Something I have noticed in looking at these terms is that they tend to be used in order to differentiate people who work in a different way from the people around them.

I won’t go into too much detail about why I chose to work like this, perhaps I will dive into it in a later post, but it is certainly something that I think about a lot, and this week I’ve had many conversations about my working situation. 

What I can say, however, is that I really enjoy how I work, and things are always getting better.

That’s it for this week.

Thomas

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