Worker Voices Special Brief: Self-Employment, Dreams Versus Reality

The Worker Voices Project is a Federal Reserve System research effort to understand the experiences of workers in low-wage roles and nondegree job seekers at the start of the pandemic and the onset of its recovery. This research seeks to further explore how these workers were impacted by the strong labor market, barriers to employment, and their changing expectations of employment. Focus groups took place May 2022 to September 2022, and participants were identified and recruited through community-based workforce development partners. Participants between the ages of 20 and 55 discussed these topics with researchers from the Federal Reserve in virtual focus groups across the country.[1]

A topic that came up repeatedly was participants’ desire to work for themselves. Their comments ranged from entrepreneurial aspirations to start their own business to identifying key factors on why they pursued self-employment. Some conversations around the topic of self-employment were generated from the questions posed to workers, including inquiries about platform-based gig work, starting their own ventures, and their aspirations for the future. These conversations contributed to the overall sense of how the push to self-employment and independent work occurred as a result of their experiences in the labor market. Roughly one-third of Worker Voices participants commented on the topic of self-employment or independent work in some form. These comments and discussions led the authors to further examine the self-employment aspirations and experiences of these workers.

This brief seeks to both investigate the motivation for participants’ interest in self-employment and describe the collective sentiment around and experiences with independent work, gig work, the informal economy, “side hustles,” and other income-generating pursuits not formally attached to an employer. Unique to this study, the participants in Worker Voices had less than a bachelor’s degree and had a high representation of unemployed individuals, women, people of color, and individuals in low-wage roles. This brief contributes to the literature by providing a worker-centered understanding and framework of self-employment specific to workers and job seekers in these focus groups.

Leave a Comment