English Listening - Self Employment
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Welcome to the Listening Time Podcast. I'm Connor from polyglossa.com and you're listening to episode 29 of the Listening Time Podcast. If this is your first time here, welcome. I'm glad you found this resource that will help you improve your listening comprehension in English.

I hope you're all doing well. It's currently the end of August, around that time. That's when I'm recording this podcast. I usually record each episode about a week or a week and a half in advance, so there isn't too much time between the recording and the airing of each episode.

In English, when we use the word air as a verb, to air, we're saying that something is broadcast or published or made public. So if I say the episode aired in March, I'm saying that this episode was published in March. This is when people actually were able to listen to it.

So I record each episode close to the time when it airs. And I've been able to maintain this pace for a while now at one episode per week. Hopefully that's good enough for all of you. As I've mentioned in previous episodes, or maybe just one episode, I think one podcast episode per week is

is about my limit right now. I'm not able to do more than that. But in the future, if the podcast gets more popular and I get a bigger audience, I might be able to dedicate some of my work time to recording more podcast episodes and maybe preparing them a little bit more before I record them.

As you've probably heard, I don't do too much preparation before each episode. I just have a couple notes and I just speak as the words come to my mind. Of course, this means that each episode has natural English in it. I'm just talking as I think, right? I'm not reading anything.

but I know that sometimes it can seem a little bit disorganized or I might not have my ideas fully fleshed out before I record. In English, we use the phrase fleshed out to mean that some idea or thought is fully explained or fully explored. If something isn't fully fleshed out,

That means that that idea might not be 100% organized or explored or explained. So my ideas in these episodes aren't always fully fleshed out, but hopefully it's good practice for your listening and it's still interesting for you regardless.

But hopefully, down the line in the future, I'll be able to dedicate more time and more energy to recording and preparing these episodes. I used the phrase down the line in English. When we say down the line, we're saying at some point in the future. For example, I want to start my own business at some point down the line.

This means that I want to start my own business at some point in the future. Okay, so the subject of today's episode is self-employment. So for me, this is a very important subject because I'm self-employed. Maybe you are too, or maybe you're not, but regardless, I think this is an important topic to talk about.

Before we start, remember to sign up for our $1 listening practice seminars at polyglossa.com if you want more in-depth practice for your listening. And of course, share this podcast with anyone who might find it useful and help this podcast grow so that in the future I can dedicate more time to it.

And also, don't forget that you can access the transcript for each episode in the episode notes. So if you need the transcript for this episode, just go down to the notes and you'll find it there. All right, let's get started. Are your ears ready? You know what time it is. It's listening time. So what does it mean to be self-employed?

This simply means that you don't have an employer. You don't have a boss, right? You don't work for a company that offered you a contract to work for their company, right? If you are in that position, then you're not self-employed.

But being self-employed means that you don't work for a company. You don't work for another person who is employing you.

And legally speaking, someone who is self-employed doesn't have the same rights or benefits under the law that someone who is employed has. So there are a few factors that are different when it comes to someone who is self-employed and a normal employee. So what are some types of self-employment?

Well, first of all, you might own your own business, right? If you maybe start your own online business just by yourself, you're self-employed because you don't have a boss or a company over you who gave you that job. You are creating your own wealth, right? You are your own boss.

So this is one type of self-employment. Another type of self-employment is freelancing. A freelancer is someone who doesn't have just one contract with one company. They don't work for a company, but certain companies or certain individuals might hire that freelancer to do a project for them.

But once that project is over, normally the freelancer moves on. This means that they don't stay with that company or that individual. They just go to a different project. So freelancers might work for multiple people and multiple projects at the same time. They're not limited to just one company.

And they don't have a fixed contract with a company with benefits and a bunch of rules and things like that. So they're free of that contract. So another type of self-employment is the gig economy.

You might not know this phrase. This is a relatively new term, but the gig economy refers to companies such as Uber, right? So you don't necessarily have an employer if you work for Uber. You just use their platform, their app, right?

And then you can work when you want and where you want. Right. This is different from having a company or a boss that assigns you certain hours and certain type of task at a certain time.

When we use the verb to assign in English, we're saying that someone gives you some task or responsibility to do. For example, my boss assigns me many boring tasks. This means that my boss gives me many boring things to do.

So if you work for the gig economy, if you have a job like this, you get to decide when you work and maybe even how you work. So that's another type of self-employment. One other type is if you do e-commerce. So if you do e-commerce, this means that you sell things online.

A lot of people do this nowadays. It's a good way to make some extra money. Or some people might do this full-time. In English, we use the phrase full-time when we're talking about jobs that are the only job that you have or the main job that you have. And you work normally at least 35 hours or 40 hours or more.

So some people sell things online as a part-time job. A part-time job is the opposite of a full-time job. It just means that you work some of the week doing this, but it's not the whole week. It's not a 40-hour job. So some people work part-time selling things online, and some people do this for a living.

When we say that someone does something for a living, this means that it's their main source of income. So, for example, I can ask someone, "What do you do for a living?" This just means, "What is your job?" "What do you do to earn enough money to live?"

So one last type of self-employment that I want to mention is online teaching. This is what I do. I'm an online teacher. So I don't have a boss and I don't have a company that employs me. So I have the freedom of being self-employed. I can set my hours and set my price and I can work how I want.

So, these are some different types of self-employment. Now let's talk about some of the disadvantages and some of the advantages of self-employment. So, let's start with the bad, the disadvantages. So, the first thing that could be considered a disadvantage is that if you're self-employed, you don't have a fixed income.

When we say a fixed income, this means that you don't have the same amount of money coming in every month or every year. It's completely different depending on how much you work, right? So if you're an employee at a company, you have a fixed income or a fixed salary, right?

you already know how much money you're going to make this year because it's in your contract. But if you're self-employed, you really don't know how much money you're going to make. You can estimate this, but really, an estimate is just a guess. You don't really know. So that's one disadvantage.

Another disadvantage is that you don't have fixed hours. Again, I use the word fixed here. When we use fixed in this way, we just mean that you don't have something established. It means that this thing is constantly changing. So you don't have fixed hours and you don't have guaranteed hours. This means that maybe you want to work

40 hours a week, but that's not a given if you're self-employed. So you might not be able to work all of those hours because you don't have enough clients or you just don't have enough work in order to do the job full-time or complete the hours you want to complete.

So that could be another disadvantage because maybe you don't work enough hours to make a living, for example. And another disadvantage, this is one of the biggest ones, is that you don't have benefits that other employees have. So in English, when we talk about benefits in the context of jobs, we're talking about things like insurance,

paid holiday days or retirement plans, things like that, right? If you're an employee at a company, usually you have these types of benefits if you work full time. For example, you probably get your health insurance subsidized. When something is subsidized, this just means that someone else helps pay for it.

So for example, in the U.S., if you have a full-time job, this means that your employer has to pay a large percentage of your health insurance. So this is a big advantage in the U.S. because health insurance is very expensive. So that's one benefit that you miss out on if you're self-employed.

When you miss out on something, this just means that you don't get it or you don't experience it, for example. And another benefit that you don't get is paid time off. We sometimes call this PTO. So other employees might have some paid time off during the year, but

They might be able to take some vacation days and they'll be paid for these days, even though they don't work. If you're self-employed, you obviously don't get this benefit, right? If you don't work, you don't get paid. So you don't really have any paid vacation. You can take a vacation because you make your own schedule, but it will be an unpaid vacation.

And of course, there are no retirement plans or things like that connected to your job if you work as a self-employed individual. So you have to take care of all that on your own. So you miss out on those benefits. So one more disadvantage of being self-employed, at least in the U.S., is that you have to pay more tax.

So, in the U.S., normally, employees have to pay a certain percentage of their income as payroll tax. Payroll tax includes Social Security and Medicaid. These are government programs that are funded with our tax money.

So employees have to pay, I think, about seven or seven and a half percent of their paycheck. And what happens is that the employer pays another seven percent or so to cover this tax. Those aren't the exact numbers. I'm just estimating, but it's around there.

So the employer and the employee both pay about half of this amount that is owed to the government, this payroll tax. But if you're self-employed, you don't have an employer to pay the other half of this money. So you have to pay the full amount. So you have to pay almost double of what other taxpayers pay.

So that's one last disadvantage. Now let's talk about some advantages. Number one, you're your own boss. You don't have any boss. You don't have anyone who's telling you what to do.

You can work however you want. You can create your own style, your own environment, and really you get to set the rules. This is really cool. Most people really like this. It's a great advantage of being self-employed. Another advantage is that you get to set your own schedule.

So in a normal job, if you're an employee at a company, they create your schedule. They tell you you're going to start at 9 a.m. and you're going to end at 6 p.m., for example. If you're self-employed, you don't have these same restraints. The word restraint just means some type of limit, something that limits you.

So if you're self-employed, you get to decide what hours you work and what hours you don't work. For example, in the past, I used to start my work at around 9 a.m. every day.

But then after a while, I realized that I wanted to start earlier so that I could finish earlier. So I started working from 7.30 a.m. After that, I just made that change and it was that easy. No one could tell me that I couldn't do that.

I decided to change my hours. And so that's what happened. So that's also a great advantage. For example, if you want to take some time off and just not work for a month, you can do that. You can decide that you don't want to work for a month.

Of course, you're not going to get paid for this time because you don't have an employer who pays you for these days. But if you want, you can take all of these days off. You don't have to work. So I've done this several times. Like, for example, the first time I went to Europe...

I took many days off. I worked very little throughout that time, and it was okay. I didn't have a boss who could tell me that I couldn't go on that trip. I just went and changed my own schedule. So that's a huge advantage in my opinion.

Another thing that could be an advantage is that many people who are self-employed can set their own price depending on what they do. Maybe they sell something and they can set the price that they want. Or like me, you might give classes, you might teach something, and you can also set the price of your classes.

So if you want to increase your income, you can simply raise your price. Customers might not buy your product or your classes or whatever if you raise the price, but you have that right. You're able to do that if you want. And that's really cool.

Another advantage is that you don't need any type of degree to do many types of self-employment jobs. So in many traditional jobs, the employer who is interviewing you or the recruiter or

will look at your CV and see what degrees you have. If you have a bachelor's degree or a master's degree or a PhD, etc. And if you don't have one of these degrees, this could hurt your chances of getting the job.

We use the phrase hurt your chances of to say that something can decrease the possibility of something else. So if you don't have a degree, this might hurt your chances of getting a traditional job at a traditional company.

But if you're self-employed, you obviously don't need to fulfill any of these requirements in terms of education. Obviously, some jobs will require education, but a formal degree usually isn't necessary for many of these types of jobs.

So you can just start working when you're 18 after high school and you don't have to go to college and you can just start working on your own and earning money from that young age. That's another big advantage. And lastly, one other big advantage is that you have a lot of room for growth. When we say room for growth...

We're saying that you have the chance to move up, to get better, to make more money, for example. So if you are your own boss and you are creating your own product, for example, you can succeed and you can grow your clientele faster.

Your clientele just means the people that you have as clients, the total amount of clients that you have. So you can increase your clientele, you can increase your price, you can increase your production and maybe hire more people to work for you or something like that.

In many jobs that are self-employment type jobs, there's a lot of room for growth. And if you work for a traditional company, it might be harder to grow fast, to move up fast in your field. So those are some of the advantages of being self-employed.

I am self-employed, obviously, and I really like it. And I definitely recommend it to anyone that's thinking about the idea. But of course, it's good to know what the advantages are, but also what the disadvantages are. All right, why don't we stop there for today? Hopefully this episode was interesting for you, and hopefully it was good practice for your listening.

Of course, remember that you have access to the transcript in the episode notes. So you can go down and click on that link if you need the transcript.

And of course, sign up for our $1 listening practice seminars at polyglossa.com. And remember to share this podcast with anyone else who might find it useful. Thank you for listening to this episode. And I hope you'll come back for episode 30 of the Listening Time podcast.

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