I’m a freelance writer, and I have been for the last 8 years. Yep, I managed to get fired from my sweet job as the assistant manager of a Blockbusters just before the Great Recession hit, and I was at the end of my unemployment when the news hit that there was no such thing as a “job” anymore. I realized I was going to have to make my money without relying on a boss or a steady job, and the one thing I had going for me was a passion for words and a degree in Writing and English Language from one of the leading liberal arts colleges in the country.
Not a bad start, really. And I’ve done OK — my family of 3 has survived on my income, plus occasional food stamps and ETIC returns, for 8 years now. I’ve worked myself a niche in the market where I have five regular clients that take up the majority of my time, and I rarely end up with nothing to do. But I’m one of the exceptions; I got started before the “gig economy” (a.k.a. “shared economy,” “Uber economy,” or “1099 economy”) became literally more than a third of the US total economy. I had a foot in the door and got myself set up before 40% of the workforce became my competition.
But on behalf the rest of the freelancers, temps, hustlers, “contingent workers,” or whatever ya’ll decide to call us, I’d like to share something with those of you who are still in a cubicle farm, those of you who have retired and don’t have to worry about a job, and those of you who are in the top X% and think that Americans are making less money because they’re lazy. The reality is that the gig economy sucks balls. Big, sweaty Bantha nuts. And it sucks on every level, for every freelancer — the only winner in the gig economy is Conservative America. Here’s why:
1) Gigs Often Pay Less Than Minimum Wage
When you work gigs, you inherently work for people who expect to pay next to nothing for what they’re getting — people don’t hire freelancers when they’re willing to pay for high quality. You will end up making $4-$5/hour on some jobs — and the jobs that pay $20+/hour don’t come nearly often enough to make up the difference. But that’s not even half of the problem, because…
2) Freelancers Have To Work Their Asses Off Just To Find Their Next Job
When you finish with the gig you’re currently working, and you don’t already have another gig lined up (this situation being the norm), you have to go out and look for another gig — and it’s absurdly easy to blow through an entire day just applying for gigs and not getting any answers, even if you’re established in your market and have solid credentials. So if you spend half your time looking for a gig, and the time you do spend working, you barely make minimum wage, you have to spend twice as many hours as an entry-level high-school kid to make the same amount of money. So the next time you daydream about what it would like to “be your own boss” and “escape the rat race,” let me assure you that the grass out here ain’t all that green. And that’s not even counting the fact that…
3) 1099 Workers Pay More in Taxes, But Get Less Benefits
You have to pay 100% of your payroll tax when you live the 1099 life — unlike all the W-2 employees who have half of their payroll tax paid by their employer. And we freelancers also don’t get any form of benefits from our employers — not health care, not insurance, not sick days or leave days or holidays off. According to a new report by the Bureau of Labor Services, benefits make up more than 30% of an employee’s total compensation (on average), meaning that the 50% less per-hour-worked that we freelancers are already making due to the time spent searching for jobs is down by another 30% — so we’re actually looking at making about 35% of minimum wage, all things considered.
Let’s not even get into the fact that there’s no such thing as “overtime.”
Oh, and all that’s still not counting government benefits like unemployment insurance, which isn’t offered to freelancers because even though we make up a 40% of the workforce, the laws haven’t caught up with reality enough to even acknowledge most of us as employed. We still pay in to Social Security by law, but until we retire, we’re completely without any form of economic safety net except food stamps — not even the ‘right’ to the ridiculously humble TANF is at our disposal, because TANF requires you to have a job or prove that you’re looking for employment — and they don’t count freelance work.
You right-wingers want to go off about how important it is to be self-sufficient? Guess what — freelancers are the most self-sufficient people on Earth. Guess what else? It sucks balls. Knowing that if I cut my finger cooking, my ability to provide for my family (meaning, in my case, my words-typed-per-minute) plummets — and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it except stay awake longer so that I have more minutes to type in — sucks giant sweaty balls.
The last time I was hospitalized for any significant length of time, I had sepsis from a systemic infection and was literally told that I was “an hour from dropping dead” — and I had to bring a crappy five-year-old laptop with no battery with me to the hospital so I could keep typing even though I felt like I was going to die. I wanted nothing more than to sleep for a few days. Instead, I typed, because my family was depending on me and there was nothing except my typing keeping them fed and housed. And the worst part about that kind of existential dread is knowing that…
4) The People Who Profit From The Gig Economy Are Already Rich
What happens when a 40% of the American workforce suddenly starts working freelance? Simple: the businesses that would hire them as employees start hiring freelancers instead — and they love it. Freelancers work for less money and don’t have to be paid benefits, so the business suddenly gets a big ol’ bump to its bottom line. This is why Microsoft was sued for having more than eight thousand “perma-temp” 1099 employees: we’re cheap and easy, so screw us.
And do they use that money to increase wages, or hire W-2 employees to replace the freelancers, or to offer better benefits? Nope — it’s either stashed in the Cayman Islands so that the company doesn’t have to pay taxes on it, or (more likely) it goes directly to profits, which means it goes directly into the hands of shareholders who don’t give a rat’s hindquarters about the people working at the company.
They’re simply too many steps removed to even be aware of what goes on at the company they own stock in; they just take their dividends and move forward with their lives, pleased at the unexpected windfall and able to tell themselves that the money came from their company “doing well.” No shareholder asks what the company did to make them an extra wad, because that would mean they might have to find out just how bullshit the economy actually is.
The Right Won When The Economy Collapsed
In the end, being a freelancer means being exactly what the Libertarian/Tea Party/Extremist Republican crazies want you to be: “independent” so that they don’t have to give you a goddamn thing, “hard-working” so that you’ll contribute to the wealth of the owner class by producing value far, far beyond what you’re getting paid for, and “responsible” enough to get up and do it again the next day because you know there are people counting on you. (It also means not being exactly what they don’t want you to be, which is “valued,” “socially connected,” and “able to get up the energy to participate in the effort to turn this country around.”)
The right wing won the economy when everything collapsed — 40% of the American workforce working for peanuts while the almighty owner class pockets the extra dollars is, after all, exactly what every conservative economic policy ever is designed to accomplish. And conservatives have the unmitigated gall to keep bitching even though they got exactly what every single one of the ideas they support was aimed at achieving. “Be careful what you wish for” never had such a potent real-life application.
And the people who lost when the right wing won? Yeah, that’s us — the freelancers. So the next time you think about how crappy your day job is, try on some gratitude instead — just by being fully employed, you’re already in the top 60% of the American workforce. Pat yourself on the back and enjoy your mandated break time and limited work week. The rest of us will be trying to figure out who is going to pay us tomorrow.
(Featured Image courtesy of Senator Mark Warner via Flickr, shared using a Creative Commons 2.0 license.)
