OUTWORKER

A person who agrees to work for or to supply a certain quantity of goods or services to a particular company, by prior arrangement or contract, but whose place of work is not within any of the establishments which make up that company; the company does not assume responsibility for the conditions in which that work is carried out.

Outworker is a generic term that includes different types of workers that produce either home-based work (homeworker), itinerant work (itinerant worker) or telework (teleworker).

Flexibility and vulnerability

"Restructuring is shifting women who are already in the informal economy into lower and less secure segments of informal work: for instance, self-employed garment makers who lose their market niche are often forced to begin working under subcontracts as garment outworkers, while self-employed workers of various kinds may be forced to take up garbage recycling to earn a livelihood."
(Carr, M., and M., Chen, Globalization, Social Exclusion and Work: With Special Reference to Informal Employment and GInternational Labour Organization (ILO), 2004, visited 2010-08-27)

"Contrary to fears that employees slack off when they're out of a supervisor's sight, a new study finds that offsite workers usually put in more hours, are less stressed, and are at least as productive as or more so than their on-site counterparts."
(Wiscombe, J., Far From Unproductive, Workforce Magazine, 2002, visited 2011-08-27)