Free Agent Nation

For this session, Rodgers -- sitting cross-legged on Krasno's couch -- begins. She reports on her month, which has been a bit up-and-down. She likes some of the work she's doing, dislikes some of the rest. Midway through a sentence, Baker's black pocket timer screeches to signal the end of this period. "Struggles and Dilemmas," Baker says. "Let's go."

Rodgers's main difficulty is that a contract she's working on looks as if it will take significantly longer than she expected. She feels she's not getting paid a fair amount. "I have no idea whether it's appropriate to go back to my client and say that I'm uncomfortable with this," she says.

"Did you give the client a written proposal?" Krasno asks, peering from behind her birdlike glasses.

Rodgers, head turned down, says, "No."

"That's the problem," says Sirull. "You've got nothing to fall back on, nothing to point to."

Rodgers also thinks she might want to work full-time for an operation for which she's now a contractor. Her group debates the merits of such a move. "If you can get health insurance, it might be worth it," Sirull offers.

The rapid-fire squeal of Baker's timer sounds again: now it's Krasno's turn. Then comes Sirull.

Baker goes last, and she has a lot going on. She's secured office space because new business has flooded in. And she's landed even more work. But her report quickly turns personal: "I'm going to start teaching yoga soon." Later she adds, "I haven't had an actual date since last time we met."

Her first struggle: for one large project, she's had to spend a lot of time in a cubicle inside a large company. "I remembered all those things I'd forgotten -- pantyhose being stupid, commuting being stupid, not seeing light during the day. I want not to work there so badly I can taste it."

Another struggle: her schedule is so packed that she's having a tough time doing things like shopping for groceries and sustaining a social life.

The group helps her decide which time commitments to honor and which to discard. They also validate her decision to secure new office space, and they help her navigate an ethical dilemma that she faces with one client. All in all, they provide useful and compassionate advice.

Baker's commitments for next time run the gamut -- from having lunch with a new business contact to cleaning her house.

Unprovoked, Sirull offers a prediction: "I think you'll have a date in the next month too."

In a spartan eighth-floor office of a mangy building in the Union Square section of Manhattan, Sara Horowitz is busy writing the new rules of labor. Horowitz, 34, is executive director of Working Today, a two-year-old organization made up of nine professional groups and comprising 35,000 people -- including 2,500 individuals who have signed up on their own. By joining Working Today, free agents can secure some of the economies of scale enjoyed by traditional workers. Working Today's $10 membership fee buys access to health insurance, office supplies, computer software, and airline tickets, all at group discounts.

What makes this idea so innovative is that it leads to the exact opposite of a labor union. Traditionally, labor unions have derived their strength from seeking to establish a monopoly on the sale of labor in a certain industry or region. In this radically new economy, Horowitz is establishing more or less a monopoly of buyers -- in short, a consumer union. It's practically impossible for free agents to bargain for wages as a group. But it's relatively easy for them to bargain together for better prices on the things they all must buy. Free agents represented by Working Today can say, "Sell us health insurance and office supplies at a reasonable price, or we'll take our business -- and there's a lot of it -- elsewhere."

Her work unsettles many in the labor establishment, because it abandons many of the movement's core strategies, revises its central vocabulary, and calls for a new architecture of laws and regulations. Horowitz thinks she has the standing to reinvent the game. Her grandfather was vice president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. Her father was a labor lawyer. So is her husband. And so is she. When she graduated from Cornell University, she went to work as a union organizer at a nursing home.

At a Manhattan coffee shop, Horowitz reaches across our table, grabs my notebook, and begins scribbling. "This is the structure of work," she says, drawing an enormous box. "The big building, the office." She then draws a stick figure. "This is an employee. An employee goes and works on a job. From that base, because they're called employees, they can unionize. They have labor rights, administrative benefits. This notion that you are working on your job -- all these things flow from that. You get your health insurance, your pension, your unemployment insurance."