Digital self-employment: The new path to entrepreneurship

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

The digital economy and social networks are making more and more workers to try their luck with entrepreneurship as self-employed, finding in the collaborative platforms of vacation rental and in the multimedia content an additional income, while they maintain a job as an employee.

At present, 121,652 workers are also registered in the self-employed regime, a figure that has increased by 43% since the economic recovery began, doubling in activities that are far from the traditional ones in the world of the pluriactivity.

In the last five years, the greatest increases in pluriactivity have been recorded in the real estate sector, in artistic and entertainment activities and in information and communications, according to the latest data provided by the federation of autonomous ATA regarding the end of 2018.

Since 2013, the pluriactivity of the self-employed in real estate activities has grown by 106.1% in the heat of digital platforms such as Airbnb, with which the figure of the self-employed man who manages the rents to several owners announced on the web has arisen.

The next activity that has grown the most since the crisis has been artistic and entertainment activities, a sector in which youtubers, instagramers and influencers in general, with an increase of 893%, as explained by the vice president of ATA, Celia Ferrero

These people publish on their social networks (Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest ...), make content for your website or blog, or videos for your YouTube channel and are sponsored by brands to promote their products or receive income based on the visits that they generate in their social networks.

In third position would be the activities related to information and communications, with an increase of 89.1%, in which there are also many professionals in this sector who have found an additional source of income in the creation of a blog or in the management of social networks.

Nonetheless, Ferrero considers that in this sector it has always been usual to supplement the salary for others with collaborations in other media as self-employed, although he has also detected a use of this pluriactivity as submerged employment, with the appearance of the "false partial self-employed".

These are employees who reduce their working hours and are forced to complete it as collaborators, either in the same medium (false self-employed) or in others.

Of the 121,652 people who are currently employed and self-employed, most of them are concentrated, however, in more traditional activities up to now in the world of pluriactivity, such as trade, professional, scientific and technical, and agriculture.

In the professional, scientific and technical activities, there are 17,635 freelancers in pluriactividad, something usual, for example, between salaried employees in a private university or business center that dedicate themselves in their free time to consulting work or writing books.

In the case of commerce (with 18,145 people), the profile responds more to that of a person who minimizes the risk of entrepreneurship, keeping their work in an office while setting up a small business.

The law states that for an employee it is compulsory to also quote in the regime for self-employed workers (RETA) if he regularly performs a lucrative economic activity.

The jurisprudence indicates that there is "habituality" if the income generated on its own account exceeds the annual interprofessional minimum salary (SMI) (12,600 euros), "but it is not the only criterion", says Ferrero, since the Labor Inspectorate considers that the There is if, for example, a person opens a small business every day.

For its part, the president of the union of Labor Inspectors, Ana Ercoreca, explains that it is very easy to detect if someone is making money with an activity on their own.

"The data is crossed with the Treasury and it is detected if someone has an income, where does that income come from (...) and a citation is sent to that person to do an inspection," he explains, since Social Security most likely has its data and, in any case, you will always have an email address.

"Internet and new technologies are not a hole that allows everything," Ercoreca makes clear, so "if you sell a product or service" you have to be registered as an independent, in addition to paying that income.

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

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