What is Freelancer?

What is Freelancer

By: Bilal Kamal      Topic:Freelancer    More Post About:  Freelancing,Blogging,SEO,

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As a counter to the wave of unionization that’s shaking the media industry right now, “Freelancers,” or long-term freelancers that don’t have employee benefits, have been working alongside full-time staffers, often doing the same amount of work as their counterparts without being recognized as employees. For the latest in our Confessions series, in which we exchange anonymity for insights into work experiences, a former contributing writer for a recently shuttered digital media company explains why they think the media industry is abusing this loophole in the labor law system.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.

What are some of the issues you see with Freelancing?The problem with contracted work is that it’s all the same across the industry. At a place like [my company], which has strong beliefs in workers’ rights and has a strong union, the corporate ownership still does contract hiring in the same way that any other media company does. If you have anyone employed by your organization who works regular hours for a set manager and completes tasks for that manager, in the eyes of what labor laws should be, that should be a part-time worker. But media companies employ them as independent contractors. The situation I was in and in the industry at large, I had the job responsibilities of an employee but I was not classified as one. 

What did your role look like as a Freelancer?I was there for about a year, but I started filling in for the night editor, and in October 2018, I moved over to day shifts. I was working 30 hours per week, with full 10-hour shifts three days per week from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. I was expected to write three to five posts per day, and on a good day, I did three to four posts. I wrote features as well, but I felt weird about writing them on Tuesdays and Thursdays, my off days, but I got compensated additionally for my feature work. 

What were you paid?While my pay as a contractor was comparable to a daily salary, it didn’t come with any of the benefits of full-time employment. I submitted an invoice for $4,500 once a month, so the equivalent salary on paper looks pretty good — something like $54,000 a year for 30 hour work weeks. But what that doesn’t take into account is that taxes and benefits are not covered by the employer. What I would’ve had to pay for a comparable way of life to full-time employees, I’d be paying hundreds of dollars per month for health care premiums. Contractors are paid pre-tax as well, so I have to guess as to what I’m going to owe the government every year and save that up independently.

 

Did you find you were typically working more than the 30 hours per week you were allotted?Yes and no. My managers and editors were good at making sure you were out the door at 6 p.m. It got complicated when I was working on features because I was working on those on my own time and was paid an additional freelance rate. What happened to me though: It doesn’t matter if you’re three days per week or five days per week — it’s an arbitrary number — if you’re over 25 to 30 hours a week, that becomes your full-time job. That many hours per week spent at one place makes it difficult to focus on anything besides the work that you’re doing there. 

Did you want to be full-time? Had you been asking for that for a while?I wanted a full-time job, so I was pushing for that. But the reason I wasn’t hired wasn’t being made by my immediate editors and bosses — they were supportive of me becoming full-time. [The company] was not a great environment to try and be hired at while I was there. I expected my job to become a full-time job, but it never did. 

Would you be a Freelancer again?No, but I’ll do anything to pay my rent next month. Most of the people that fall into these roles know or very quickly realize that the system is fucked up and rigged. The system is not set up to get the best deal for the person creating the content. It’s cheaper to employ someone you don’t have to give benefits to. I know that contracting is a scam, [and] the people who are running media companies are exploiting the loophole and it isn’t enforced in any way. I hope not but yes, of course, I would.

We wouldn’t exactly call it an unbiased source. 99designs is a huge freelance design portal, with a core business model that generates roughly $60 million a year through designers logging in and taking jobs through the site. Even still, a new report from the company offers what looks to be an unprecedented view of a large swath of the freelance design industry. It surveyed 10,000 designers across 42 countries, 84% of whom have an account on at least one online freelance platform (the survey was hosted primarily on 99designs).

We looked through an advance copy of the report to spot the trends. What we found paints a picture of freelance designers as a potentially overeducated group that treats freelance as a full-time job, just worked during odd hours.

Most freelance designers are dudes . . . but not in the U.S.

Sixty-eight percent of freelancers surveyed worldwide identify as male. That’s a clear majority, which is perhaps not all that surprising. Then again, attempts to quantify gender in design can be opaque. If you look at the data for North America, however, women actually represent a slight majority, of 51.33%.

Designers are educated, but perhaps too educated

Forty percent of freelance designers have a college degree in a design-oriented field. Nine percent have an advanced degree. But here’s the big catch: Only 15% of respondents said that a formal design education was necessary to their career. Fifteen percent! That’s nothing! Most thought education was either unimportant, or didn’t have an opinion one way or the other (though if you’re saying you don’t know if college matters to a job or not, that seems like an opinion unto itself).

A vast majority of freelancers hone their craft on YouTube

99designs believes one reason there is so much ambivalence toward higher education is that 42% of designers reported being self-taught in some way or another. A vast majority—74% of all respondents—said they’d learned skills by watching YouTube. It makes sense, since YouTube offers so many clear demonstrations on how to pull off tricks in Photoshop and other popular software. A third take online classes. And a mere 18% of people do ongoing in-person training.

A lot of freelance designers are working parents

Thirty-one percent of designers are parents with a dependent under the age of 18. More than half of those designers, or roughly 15-20% overall, are the primary caregiver in their household. That means nearly one in five or six freelance designers is staying home with their kids while designing on the side. Also related: twenty-one percent of the designers polled work with a spouse or domestic partner.

Most freelance designers are treating it as a job

The most surprising finding is that only 17% of freelance designers report doing it to earn more income on top of their day job in design. Most are working a ton of hours outside the normal 9-5 working hours, as if it’s a second job. But in fact, it appears to be their main job. I say that because nearly 40% of respondents report freelancing 41 or more hours a week. Another 35% of people were freelancing between 20 and 40 hours a week. That means only about a quarter of people are really all that casual about freelance design, putting in less than 20 hours a week. Freelance design does not appear to be a side hustle—just one done at off hours.

In any case, 42% of all respondents still report that they freelance for the flexibility and freedom, while 17% do it for the creative freedom. That sounds nice, but something tells me it also adds up to a whole lot of creative people who could use a 401(k) and health insurance.