An increasing number of people work for several employers at once rather than holding a single permanent job.

Today many people do not have one permanent job. Instead they work for two or three different companies, or they take short projects from different clients. In my opinion, this change is more negative than positive.

It is true that this way of working has some advantages. A person can choose his own working hours and work from home, which is very useful for parents with small children. He is also not dependent on one boss: if he loses one client, he still has money from the others, so in this way the risk is smaller.

However, there are more disadvantages. The income is not stable, so it is very difficult to plan the family budget or to take a loan from a bank for a flat. In addition, these workers usually do not receive holiday payment, sick payment or a pension, because the companies say they are not real employees. If such a person becomes ill for two months, he receives nothing.

Another problem is training. A permanent company teaches its workers new skills, but nobody wants to pay for the training of a temporary worker, so these people must pay themselves or stay with old skills.

In conclusion, although working for several employers gives more freedom, I believe it is a negative development because it removes the security and the benefits that a permanent job provides.

An increasing number of people now work for several employers or clients simultaneously rather than holding one permanent position. Although this brings real freedoms, I regard the trend as negative overall, because of what disappears alongside the permanent contract.

The advantages are genuine and worth stating. Someone working across several clients controls their own hours and location, which can make employment possible for people with caring responsibilities or health conditions that a fixed office schedule excludes. There is also a form of security in diversification: losing one of five clients is a setback, whereas losing your only employer is a crisis. For skilled specialists in demand, this arrangement often means higher earnings and considerably less tolerance of a bad manager.

The difficulty is that a permanent job has never been only a source of income. Sick pay, paid holiday, pension contributions, parental leave and employer-funded training are all attached to employment status rather than to work itself, so unbundling the job unbundles all of them. An independent worker who falls ill simply stops earning, and nobody invests in their skills because no employer expects to retain them long enough to benefit. Income volatility compounds this: irregular earnings make renting, borrowing and planning substantially harder even when the annual total is respectable.

In conclusion, I consider this a negative development as it currently stands. The flexibility is real, but it has been obtained by transferring risks that were previously carried by employers onto individuals who are far less able to absorb them.

Working for several employers at once is described by its advocates as freedom and by its critics as precarity, and both are reporting accurately — they are simply describing different people. Whether the arrangement is good or bad depends almost entirely on whether it was chosen, and since most of the growth has come from people who could not obtain a permanent contract rather than from people declining one, I regard the development as negative on balance.

The positive case should not be dismissed, because for a particular group it is entirely real. A specialist whose skills are scarce gains genuine autonomy: control over hours, location and which clients to accept, together with the ability to leave a bad manager without the upheaval of changing jobs. Diversification also provides a kind of security that permanent employment does not — five clients is a more robust position than one employer, and losing one is an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe. For people whose health or caring responsibilities make a fixed schedule impossible, this way of working can be the difference between employment and none at all.

What makes the trend negative in aggregate is that the permanent job was never merely a way of receiving money. Over a century, societies attached their entire system of protection to the employment relationship: sick pay, holidays, pensions, parental leave, injury liability and training all hang off employee status rather than off the act of working. Dissolve the relationship and every one of those detaches with it. This is not an incidental side effect but the central consequence — a risk transfer from institutions that can pool and absorb shocks to individuals who cannot.

Training illustrates the problem most clearly. Employers invest in staff because they expect to keep them long enough to recoup it; nobody funds development for a worker they may not engage again next month. The individual must therefore self-fund their own obsolescence prevention precisely when their income is least predictable — and predictably, many do not, which slowly erodes the skill base the flexible model depends on.

My verdict, then, is negative, but the target of that judgement matters. The working pattern is not the problem; a person selling their time to several counterparties is doing nothing intrinsically worse than selling it to one. The problem is that our protections were built around a form of employment this pattern does not fit, so the sensible response is to make entitlements portable and attached to the person rather than to a contract type — not to insist that everyone return to an arrangement that is disappearing anyway.