I wonder if anybody in the White House reads the Boston Globe?

Yesterday, the Globe ran an article in its Ideas section entitled "The end of the office ... and the future of work."

(Okay, see if this sounds familiar.)

In the article (which you can read here), reporter Drake Bennett explores the way a growing army of freelance workers is causing many thinking people to wonder if perhaps the time has come to separate the concept of "work" from the concept of "a job."

Already, those freelancers (which I have been calling nonemployers for the last ten years) make up a third of the workforce, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The growth in their numbers is being driven in part because many companies are noticing that it's cheaper to hire them than to go with full-time employees.

And many freelancers (nonemployers) are figuring out that they can make more money as freelancers, because they are not confined to a single client or a single project at any one time.

(I don't even have to say it, do I?)

Since freelancing is clearly a viable career choice for increasing numbers of folks, even if it is very different from the traditional job/career trajectory, some smart people are beginning to craft the infrastructure within which freelancers can operate while other people are beginning to notice the way all our social safety nets are tied to employers-with-employeees.

According to this article, there are companies that help to connect freelancers with prospective clients. Some organizations are forming in order to offer freelancers an opportunity to socialize, to compensate for the sometimes crushing isolation many of them complain about.

There are even outfits that want to operate much like guilds of the Middle Ages, as organizations that can offer freelancers the sorts of protections and social safety nets they once got from unions-plus-employers.

In some ways, it's probably a good thing that the government doesn't seem to have noticed any of this yet. If they had, they would almost certainly have decided to regulate it in some way, under the mistaken notion that all those poor freelancers need to be protected ... whether they want to be protected or not.

At the same time, this new labor market movement could use some support — especially in this economy.

Which brings me back to my original question: I wonder if anybody in the White House reads the Boston Globe?