People weren't saying: "I can own the means of production. I can go do this myself." They weren't saying: "I can make more money because power has shifted to the individual." They were saying: "I'm miserable." "I don't like working for an idiot boss." "Office politics are getting me down." "I can't be my authentic self at work." "I have no freedom." "You know what? Money isn't everything. Promotions aren't everything." "I want to define success on my own terms." "I miss my family."

I thought that this was an economics class, but it turned out to be a kind of psychology and theology class.

What is the most common misperception among wage slaves about people who work for themselves?

That everyone is kind of kicking back and watching "Oprah" and wearing bunny slippers and not really doing any work, when in fact the bigger problem among a lot of free agents is overwork. One guy said to me: "The worst part about being a free agent is that you have to work 24 hours a day; the good part is you can pick which 24 hours."

Also, there is an incredible misperception that these people are miserable or have been forced into it. And that is just flatly not true. There are some hassles to working for yourself; there is a lack of security. But you know what? There are bigger hassles working for the Man, and there's no security there either. Working for yourself, you have to be the CFO and the accountant, and you empty the garbage. And that can be a drain. But again people ask themselves: "Compared to what?" You can have a terrible boss and earn less than what you're worth and have somebody empty the garbage, or you can work for yourself, earn your market value and empty the garbage yourself.

	Free Agent Nation: How America's New Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live By Daniel H. Pink Warner Books 356 pages Nonfiction Print story E-mail story

Some of your critics have suggested that this whole "free agency" thing is an elitist phenomenon that only benefits the cream-of-the-crop marketing managers, graphic designers, software stars and so on. What about the office temp slaves and perma-temp factory workers and outsourced janitors?

There are plenty of people who are free agents who are not college educated -- there are people who are plumbers and electricians. The construction industry operates on the free-agent model. Those are very skilled professions. Anybody with skills is rewarded in this kind of market, and anybody who isn't is punished. That has very little to do with free agency. Talented people have an enormous number of options in this kind of economy compared to previous economies, and people who are less skilled face far higher hurdles.

That's why a lot of the unionization efforts are taking place among low-wage free agents. One of the biggest labor-organizing successes in the last 10 years was of independent home healthcare workers in Southern California, who are low-wage free agents and who wanted that collective action to boost their standing in the workplace. One of the people in the book, Grandma Betty, was 68 years old, jobless and pensionless, and became a free agent.

If you look at the numbers, there are about 30 million or so free agents, and about 3 million or so are temps. And even if you stipulate that most of those temps are miserable, you're talking about [only] 10 percent of free agents. I would say that that is a better average than in corporate America. If you did a survey of corporate America and asked: "How many of you despise what you're doing and would like to get out?" I would say that you'd hit much higher numbers than if you took the same survey among independent workers. I'd bet the mortgage on that, actually.

Is this a youth phenomenon?

We're about to hit a massive labor shortage, and so we're going to have this large, experienced and incredibly healthy pool of older Americans who are going to be able to dictate the terms of their employment. They're not going to want to go back and work full time, but they might want to work part time as free agents. So our notions of old age and retirement might change.

People want some kind of challenge in their life, they want some kind of purpose in their lives, and it's hard to find that in total leisure. That said, I don't think that people are going to be working full time until they're 90. But I do think that you're going to see these part-time free agents among older Americans.

The other thing is just pure demographic and market forces. We are going to run out of "working age" people. Suddenly, we're going to look around and say, "We've got all this work to do, and we don't have young people to do it. Hey, wait a second, there are these aging boomers. They're remarkably healthy for older people, and they're willing to work part time. Sign them up!"

Corporate recruiters are going to be going to retirement homes, having career fairs at AARP meetings. At that point, Americans are going to have incredible bargaining power in the labor market.

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