Flexible Work Is the Trend. So Why Did It Reach Me as 'No Payroll Slot'?

This year one number keeps coming up: China has roughly 200 million people in flexible employment, more than a quarter of the total workforce. In cities the share is higher, closer to four in every ten.

Some call it a good thing: work has become more flexible. Others call it no choice at all, "flexible" only because the payroll slot is gone.

For a technical person still holding a full-time job and taking the odd side gig, it is worth pulling this apart.

Flexible employment, official term "new forms of employment", basically means work without a fixed labor contract, paid by project, by order, or by the hour.

Delivery riders and ride-hail drivers are the picture most people have. But it also covers programmers taking private contracts, being hired per project, or sitting long-term on an outsourcing firm's books.

By the National Bureau of Statistics, at the end of 2023 this group was around 200 million: 27% of all employed people, 43% of urban employed people. In the All-China Federation of Trade Unions' ninth workforce survey, workers in new employment forms numbered 84 million, 21% of the total.

This is not a niche corner. It is close to two out of every four urban workers.

Why the fast growth? It does not start with the workers. Look at the company's ledger.

Keeping a full-time employee, salary is only one line. Social insurance and housing fund, a desk, management overhead, base pay in the slow season when there is no work, severance when you let them go. These are fixed costs, and once you have hired someone you cannot shake them off.

Break the role into an outsourced project and those fixed costs turn variable in one move. Work comes, you pay; work stops, you stop. Social insurance is their problem. Slow season is not your concern. Do not want to continue, no severance.

The money the company saves on that ledger did not vanish. It moved onto the person taking the work.

"Flexible" describes the company's staffing flexibility, not your freedom at work.

When the economy trends down, the incentive only gets stronger. AI has also knocked down the going rate for "just patch in a small feature" or "turn around one more design draft", so companies would rather buy on demand than keep someone around waiting to be useful.

Spelling out the cost is not the same as telling people not to take the work. When a trend cannot be reversed, cursing it does nothing.

The people who hold their ground and the people who do not often differ on one thing: are you only able to be a cog inside one company's process, or can you deliver a complete thing on your own.

From scoping the requirement, quoting a price, building it, to delivery and getting paid. The whole chain, walked end to end by yourself at least once.

If you can only do the first, then once the company breaks up the role, your value gets broken up with it, and at the negotiating table you have no complete result to show.

When the trend cannot be reversed, whether you can deliver once on your own is one of the few chips left between you and the company.

One concrete step, if you are still in a full-time role: use spare time, pick a requirement small enough to finish alone, and walk the whole chain once. Not for how much it pays, but for making the sentence "I have delivered something start to finish, by myself" actually true.

The cost is a few weekends. The stop signal: if in three months you cannot even scrape together one small job like this, your skills are not at the level where you can deliver independently yet, so shore up the skills first and do not rush to treat this as your fallback.

I am only halfway there on this myself.

For the past half year or so I have been at my computer most weekend nights tweaking that auto-writing script. It is a piece of off-the-books work I built for myself. But as for "delivered a complete project to an outside client on my own", I have not done it once in all these years. Writing this, I will own that.

Those 200 million did not appear overnight. They piled up year by year, as "add a headcount" turned into "find someone to settle by project". Starting to train whether you can deliver independently only when it is your turn is already several years behind that curve.

Start now, and you can still close some of the gap.