23rd January 2013, 04:08 PM
redexile Wrote:Might have been an idea to think about this BEFORE you released the survey? Freelancers are by definition, self-employed. We work for lots of different clients, on a single-job-contract basis. Just like bigger units, in fact. ultimately, this survey is just going to gather data for the units. The way its structured means you won't actually know how many people are freelancers, so it won't be a profile of the profession. What's the point of it?
Fair, I can see from your point of view that we don't cover you well, I will take that jab
. However, it is the whole profession we are after so we also have to deal with people who work part time for a commercial unit then part time freelance. Now it gets even more tricky when you have the one man unit- some register as self-employed some as their own business. Same with freelancers, many I know have companies but really it is a one man shop that you would call a freenlancer expect that they do all their work under 'one-man-co. ltd'. David would be a good example of that- he has connelly heritage consultants but for the most part he does 90% (feel free to correct me david). Now, would we count the person who works 50% at a unit and 50% self-employed as a freelancer? Would the person who owns their own company by a freelancer or an owner, even though they did exactly the same job, just maybe taxed differently. We don't really care to much about titles as we do how people work.
We thought of all of that BEFORE we sent out the survey but it is hard to make a one size fits all survey. However, as you keep :face-stir: the issue that individuals, be they calling themselves freelancers, owners, etc, might not be filling out the survey. I can say that this is of concern to us. So far we have got a fairly decent return from individuals and still getting more. So hopefully we do profile of the profession
. You can read the report and tell us how we did :face-approve: or not xx(.