Around 170,000 freelancers in Croatia are working under such conditions, resulting in yet another alarming statistic for the country.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 17th of October, 2018, when compared to the rest of Europe, self-employed professionals in Croatia find getting work much more difficult, they generally work on projects for a shorter amount of time, and to a greater extent, they are over burdened with paying for a variety of things. They don’t even have regulated rights from pension or from health insurance.
The number of freelancers and other independent professionals is growing steadily throughout the world. In the United States, it is expected that by about 2030, approximately half of the country’s workforce will be employed under that status. In Europe there are about 11 million, located mostly in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany. How many there exactly are located in the Republic of Croatia, remains currently unknown. It is estimated, however, that approximately 172,000 people working in Croatia are classed as self-employed, the as the Prvi plan (First plan) portal writes.
The picture of just who these freelancers are, the problems they encounter, and just what the current state of freelancing is had light shed on it by the preliminary results of a piece of pan-European research on freelancers, brought about by the European Forum of Independent Professionals. The Republic of Croatia was included.
Most commonly, freelancer status in Croatia is applied to those involved in the arts (31 percent), IT (21 percent) and in marketing and communications (18 percent). It seems that women especially start to work independently out of necessity, while men are more likely to say that it is a choice to do so.
“In addition to their unregulated legal status and the temporary and casual nature of their work, they don’t even really know how to earn a pension,” Marija Raos of the Croatian Independent Professionals Society (HDNP) warned.
