Are High Fuel Costs Good for Web Workers?
June 15th, 2008 (8:03am) Mike Gunderloy 9 Comments
Last month, when US gasoline prices were edging towards $4 per gallon, we asked about the impact on your lives. Most of our respondents were already staying home more and traveling less. Now, with the prospect of $5 gas this year being increasingly discussed, we”re getting hit with plenty of other dismal transportation news. Airlines are raising prices and discontinuing service. And now, thanks to bad weather in the central US, ethanol fuel production is in trouble (as reported by our sister site Earth2Tech).
At first glance, it seems like this upheaval in the cost and difficulty of transportation might be good for web workers: the economic incentive to stay home instead of traveling to work just gets higher and higher. But while established web workers might be happier all the time about the money they’re not spending on the daily commute, I wonder whether the big picture is really so sunny for us.Even though we might do all or most of our work over the web, very few of us are complete stay-at-home types. In the past, I’ve had more than one job kick off with flying in to meet a new customer in a distant city - and possibly with periodic face time for followup meetings and presentations. If you’ve grown accustomed to landing work in person, rising travel costs are going to affect your ability to pitch and close new deals - especially if you’ve been in the habit of charging travel expenses back to the client.
Personal branding, too, gets more difficult in a world where travel is cost-prohibitive. Some of the best ways to get the word out about your skills are to speak at user groups and conferences. Even if you can still afford to fly in to a conference, will overall attendance start to go down?
Those increases in individual costs, though, are likely to pale in comparison to greater spillover from the overall economy. Those of us who are already web working are hardly the only workers to see the cost savings to less travel. Plenty of other people, and their employers, can run the numbers just as well as we can. We may soon see an overall increase in the number of people trying web work for the first time. That could mean more competition for the available work - and for the available bandwidth and wifi hot spots.
Finally, you have to think about the prospect of fuel costs tipping the economy over into recession. That, too, could be a mixed blessing for web workers, especially freelancers: corporations trying to cut costs may be more willing to farm work out than to hire full-time employees. The effect could be much worse for telecommuters, though, if “out of sight, out of mind” employees become harder to justify.
Overall, I don’t have any solid answers here - just a lot of questions. We’d love to get your input on how the changing economy is affecting your incentive and ability to work on the web - and what you’re doing to make that work more secure.
9 Comments Post your own comment
Partners in Grime says: June 15th, 2008 6:28pm
Riding around on my bike. Trying to keep new clients within a hundred miles of home base.
Tim Haughton says: June 15th, 2008 9:26pm
Obviously you’ll get no sympathy for your gas prices from us here in the UK. I think they’re at least double your prices :/ Over here, bio fuels are generally thought to be a bad idea, but one viable alternative is LPG. You guys have it over there?
I’m increasingly asking for contracts to be flexible in terms of working arrangements. I’ve just fired a client for (amongst other things) being too inflexible and requiring me to travel to their site too much.
Joel Falconer says: June 15th, 2008 10:44pm
Tim, I’m not sure if this is possible in your industry, but I don’t do on-site visits at all and that works fine for me and my clients. That may just be a benefit of freelance writing, though.
John Paul Mitchell says: June 16th, 2008 1:55am
I have inside information that gas prices in the U.S. will hit $6 and a source at the NYMEX that it’ll hit $7 if bad enough weather hits the Gulf this year.
That’s so much more than on the day President Bush entered the White House. I heard it was somewhere around $1.36 the day he entered office.
I’m looking to switch totally to a web worker position and drop my most reliable day job.
uniacid says: June 16th, 2008 9:26am
I think higher oil costs are a bad thing for web workers, remember it is not only our fuel costs that are soaring to new records but also the majority of our commodities (food) and also the cost of energy in general. The idea of working from home on the web sounds nice and while I believe it is possible there are still many employers who hate the idea and are just uncomfortable to rely on a remote position. If more and more employers finally do decide to switch to the web for work then it could help many, but it will still be an issue as it will cause an influx on people looking for work as I’ve already seen on many freelance job sites.
Jon Moss says: June 16th, 2008 9:55am
I’m with Tim here, zero sympathy with your prices, try $2.60 a litre!! So $10 / gallon ++!
I am starting to increase travel charges now, when I used to include these with some clients.
Jim - ki work says: June 17th, 2008 4:00am
just beginning to get a taste of what life without oil might be like (check out the fantastic WorldWithoutOil experiment) In the UK it now costs nearly $120 to fill up a small car with diesel. like it or not, anyone who can will be a web worker one day..
Jan - queenofkaos says: June 17th, 2008 9:59am
If your business is helping people get online and set up, it could be a good thing, but I question the effect on the percentage of sales in almost any niche.
I know that I give my purchases much more thought these days - online and off.
Roger says: June 17th, 2008 3:01pm
Jan, i don’t really get the hint. Why it would be a good thing if the business model is helping people get online and set up? Do you mind to explain further?