By: John Case

But people who work on their own for a while might welcome a chance to off-load the hassles of independence in return for more time to spend on income-producing work.

As it happens, you can already see such organizations in a kind of embryonic form…Then there are businesses such as Boston-based Aquent, once known as MacTemps Inc. (and in that incarnation an Inc 500 company). Aquent "hires" independent professionals in a broad range of fields related to marketing communications and then hooks them up with clients on a project basis. The professional gets nearly all of the benefits of regular employment: a W-2, health and dental insurance, a 401(k) with a match, and so on - yet he or she is never required to take any particular assignment. Aquent handles billing, collections, lining up the next job, and other such hassles.

Are such outfits - few and far between today - likely to expand and proliferate? Maybe, but there's a chicken-or-egg problem: they need enough solo entrepreneurs in any given area or profession to make the enterprise viable, but they may not get enough as long as all the barriers are in place. One way around that problem may be legislation analogous to the safety-net legislation that helped stabilize Employee Nation several decades ago. Right now, for instance, national associations can't offer health insurance because they can't handle the widely disparate state regulations that govern the field. Congress could eliminate that problem with a stroke of the pen. A national health-insurance system that guaranteed coverage for all, regardless of where (or whether) people worked, would do still more.

Granted, all this is no more than suggestive. And one thing it suggests is that we're talking decades, not years. But that's exactly the conclusion you have to draw about Free Agent Nation: not that it can't happen someday, or that it won't, only that it hasn't happened yet. How people work is a social construct, the result of a hundred different laws, policies, customs, incentives, and practices. Here in America, things have been organized for decades to give people a big incentive to work for companies. But if we created a new set of institutions designed for free agents, the last barriers to entry might begin to crumble - and that stubborn self-employment rate might begin to creep upward.

As for the pace of change, well, as Aquent CEO John Chuang puts it, "it's more the tortoise than the hare." We know it was the tortoise who won the race. We just don't know how long the whole thing took.