Why do more and more people want to work independently despite the crisis, Marc Clemens?

Marc Clemens

Marc Clemens in the Handelsblatt Rethink Work podcast.

War in Ukraine, corona crisis, impending recession: These events have drawn more and more people into public service in recent years. The motif? Security. On the other hand, if you are looking for permanent IT specialists or designers these days, you will often receive rejections: Freelance work is becoming more and more common in these industries.

Marc Clemens, founder of the freelance platforms “9am” and “Code Control”, offers support in dealing with bureaucracy and finding projects for the increasing number of self-employed people. In the Handelsblatt podcast Rethink Work he says: “I have the hypothesis that this is the first time we are seeing an economic crisis that will have a fairly small impact on the unemployment rate.”

He would also observe that since the beginning of the economic crisis, companies have initially stopped their freelance projects. But he also says: “The crisis will never succeed in destroying as many jobs as are currently vacant due to a lack of workers.”

Even if there is unclear data on the number of people who are actually self-employed in Germany, Clemens assumes that the figure has tripled over the past 30 years. He speaks of four and a half to five million self-employed people in Germany.

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Clemens sees a change in the needs of employees as the reason for the change from permanent employment to self-employment: Basic needs such as a roof over their heads, enough to eat and physical integrity are now fulfilled for many people in Germany. “And suddenly I’m taking care of social needs, individual needs like self-actualization.”

Fixed working and office hours often conflict with these needs. “But now we have a parallel situation in which most employers are not prepared at all. They didn’t manage to prepare for the fact that we have to focus on talent instead of organization.”

How companies can also become more attractive for the self-employed, why a dismissal should no longer be considered high treason and to what extent he himself has a love-hate relationship with Generation Z, the generation born after the late 1990s, is what Marc Clemens tells Charlotte Haunhorst, the Handelsblatt digital boss current episode of Rethink Work.

More: You can hear the previous episode of Handelsblatt Rethink Work here.

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