The Plight of the Freelancer

This article describes my life.

Venkatesh also asks people if they work for themselves. Over the years, he has observed the rise in the number of people who say yes. This year, he estimated, at least half of his coffee-shop sample was made up of the self-employed. Increasingly, they talk about their fading prospects. In 2005, 16 percent of the coffee-shop patrons Venkatesh talked to in Brooklyn and 34 percent in Manhattan said they were out of work, were looking or had recently given up looking. In April of this year, the figure rose to 37 percent in Brooklyn and spiked to 53 percent in Manhattan. Many of the coffee-shop patrons told Venkatesh that they had maxed out their credit cards and had no savings. He concluded that it wasn’t just many workers in the sex industry who were living at the edge of poverty — it could be anyone who had hung out their own shingle.

As Chris Jagers points out, a freelancer is not an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs build businesses that eventually function without them; freelancers just do a job. They do a job without a steady paycheck, sick leave, health insurance or unemployment insurance. When a freelancer doesn't work, she doesn't get paid.

The thing that you notice the most when working freelance is the number of systems that are set up to milk you, without any work actually getting done in exchange for the money extracted. Our landlord just jacked up our rent again; additionally, he tacked on a $300 addition to the security deposit. (We signed the new lease and pretended we didn't notice the security deposit increase, because there's no way we can pay it. We figure it will cost him a lot more to evict us than it's worth.) Everywhere you look, there's another fee--taxes, finance charges, ATM fees, bank fees, parking fees, tolls, utilities, maintenance, transportation. The most insidious thing is how amorphous and impersonal it is; it all just...gets....deducted. You're not paying a person for an object or a service that you are theoretically free to decline. You're drained simply by virtue of living in the system.

Of course, the system is what sustains us; I wouldn't want to do without my apartment, electricity, gas, Internet, phone etc. But in order for a system to survive, it has to keep its individual components alive. A system which takes far more than it delivers is ultimately unsustainable.