The Gig Economy — Our New Reality?

On the Daily Beast, Tina Brown (formerly of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair) writes about the “gig economy,” in which nobody has a day job and careers are a patchwork of freelance projects for a variety of paymasters.

Here’s how Brown defines the freelancer’s new gig:

Gigs: a bunch of free-floating projects, consultancies, and part-time bits and pieces they try and stitch together to make what they refer to wryly as “the Nut”—the sum that allows them to hang on to the apartment, the health-care policy, the baby sitter, and the school fees.

Edward Wasserman, a Knight Professor of Journalism Ethics at Washington and Lee University, writes about what this means for word-based freelancers. Of course, much of what he’s talking about — lower pay, murky areas of ethics, and the need for greater transparency — hold true for any independent contractor, designers included.

Here are some stats from a Daily Beast and Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates poll that highlights a typical, cribbed-together salary of $75K and explains that the top motivation for taking on extra work is the goal (or hope) of turning a hobby into a money-making operation (48%).

Five hundred employed U.S. citizens aged 18 and over were interviewed via the Internet on January 8 and 9. A full one-third of our respondents are now working either freelance or in two jobs. And nearly one in two of them report taking on additional positions during the last six months. Just as startling, these new alternative workers are not overwhelmingly low-income. They’re college-educated Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year.

Image from the Daily Beast.

What One Holiday Card Led to....

The artist known for the vintage-looking Mad Men illustrations on Flickr talks with editors at AMC TV about how she got her start and what makes her images popular. As far as the “start” goes, Dyna Moe got her first commission from actor Rich Sommer of Mad Men fame after doing his Christmas card for free.

Photo from Dyna Moe’s Flickr page.

How to Handle the Homework of Health Insurance

Gee, doesn't the preamble to this New York Times article about dealing with health insurance as a freelancer sound familiar?

OH, the glory of being your own boss: the freedom, the creativity, the jeans-only dress code. And then there’s the dreary stuff — like finding and paying for your own health insurance.

The article raises the issue of geography for independent contractors. As one expert in the story puts its, “When you’re self-employed, you’re straddling two distinct markets: the individual and the group market.” Those two markets, according to the article, vary depending on where you live. If you're self-employed and in the market for a new or upgraded health plan, you should learn about the rules in your state. (You can find a link to your state’s insurance department at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners site.)

When Will You Retire?

This article by a local financial adviser considers when most people will retire — either by choice or by default (say, firing or layoff). Essentially, even retirement at 65 is proving difficult — and an impossibility — for more and more people. For many of us, our retirement could easily last thirty years. What are the chances we’ll stay at the same job? In some respects, freelancers will be well-off, as they often move from job to job with a lot of fluidity.

Below are some interesting statistics. From the freelancer’s perspective, this article shows how important it is to think early and often about one’s retirement. Even if you are working full-time in a salaried position, there are clearly no promises about retirement. Long gone are the world’s pensions. I also find the Bay Area very agist, and wonder how the job market will be for the 60-plus demographic. A freelancer might be well suited for such a market, assuming he or she has her health care (er, insurance) sorted out.

A recent study looked at the percentage of men between the ages of 58 and 62 who were working for the same employer they had at age 50. In 1983, 75% of full-time male workers worked at the same employer, compared to only 50% in 2006 (Source: Center for Retirement Research, September 2008). These results were consistent across all educational levels. If workers are leaving voluntarily, they are probably moving to better jobs with better pay, which should mean they will stay employed longer. If workers are laid off or forced out of their jobs in their 50s or 60s, they are likely to take inferior jobs at lower pay, which may mean they are less likely to stay employed into their late 60s.

On the plus side of working well into our 60s and 70s, the BBC reports that we’ll (hopefully) "avoid dementia."

New Design Site for Freelancers Trolling for Work

I'm not too sold on the logo or GraphicDesignFreelanceJobs.com’s look and feel; however, it claims to, on average, list between 75 and 150 new freelance graphic design jobs each day. In regard to pay, hte jobs range from one-day assignments to month-long projects that pay from $100 to $3,000 each.

Apparently, the site is part of a “how-to freelance” online network run and maintained by working freelancers. The other parts of the network include http://www.GraphicDesignBids.com, http://www.FreelancePhotoJobs.com, and http://www.FreelancePortfolios.com .

Welcome to ‘Freelance Survival’

With tough economic times comes the opportunity to go solo — either as an independent contractor needing to wait out the slump or as someone wanting to build a career that steers clear of office politics and allows for lots of flexibility and variety. Either way, this course walks you through the basics of independent contracting: from setting up shop to finding work and setting your rates, to dealing with contracts and taxes.

• 3 meetings
• Tuesdays, May. 5-May. 19, 6:30 PM-9:30om
• SF State Downtown Campus, 835 Market St., San Francisco

Email the instructor, Laura Moorhead, any questions you might have about the class.

Print Templates for Upload or Download

Inkd lets users either upload their own designs as a money-making venture or pay to download very affordable templates for public use. As I mentioned earlier in class, Moo.com operates in a similar fashion.

Photo image courtesy of Inkd.

The Life of a Contractor Spelled Out 140 Characters at a Time

MediaBistro is a good resource for tracking the publishing industry. The site — really a collection of blogs — covers the general happenings of the print and online world. Both designers and writers may find it of interest. Today, the staff wrote about one freelance writers tweets about losing his job.

@DanielsBaum's contract at the New Yorker was terminated in 2007. Now, almost two years later, he's Tweeting about the experience.

@DanielsBaum, or Dan Baum, was a staff writer for the New Yorker from 2003 until 2007 (the final year he wrote a daily column about New Orleans, not for the print edition).

Here's his Twitter feed thus far (too many to take a screengrab, so just read backwards):

# Loved it. More later.
# It gets away with it, because writing for the New Yorker is the ne plus ultra of journalism gigs. Like everybody, I
# Just the way the New Yorker chooses to behave. It shows no loyalty to its writers, yet expects full fealty in return.
# Year. Every September, I was up for review. Turns out, all New Yorker writers work this way, even the bigfeet. It's
# My gig was a straight dollars-for-words arrangement: 30,000 words a year for $90,000. And the contract was year-to-
# But rather a contractor. So there's no health insurance, no 401K, and most of all, no guarantee of a job beyond one year.
# First, a little about the job of New Yorker staff writer. "Staff writer" is a bit of a misnomer, as you're not an employee,
# Character chunks.
# Nobody leaves a New Yorker job voluntarily. I was fired. And over the next few days, I'll tell that story here, in 140
# People often ask why I left the New Yorker. After all, I had a staff writer job. Isn't that the best job in journalism? Yes.

This isnt' a 100% new story: Gawker talked to Baum back in 2007 when he first learned his contract wouldn't be renewed.
"[David] Remnick [, editor of the New Yorker] was not happy with my work," he told Gawker. "But I would like to go back there."

"It's the best gig in journalism," he said. "I miss it. I really liked it."

‘Negotiating the Freelance Economy’

The Wall Street Journal has an article about riding the waves of the freelance world. The article does a nice job of pointing to specific sites and offering real-world data about rates, payment, and numbers of freelance jobs.

The article also reminds readers that freelance workers are often cheaper and more flexible than temp workers, whose jobs, though short-term, tend to be full-time, subject to temp-agency fees, and bound by agency restrictions. Still, it’s a hopeful article — businesses are really using these sites to hire contractors.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Freelance-job sites say membership among individuals, which is free in many cases, has risen sharply. For example, Guru.com has nearly 878,000 freelance members today, up from around 760,000 a year ago.

• Sites like Odesk, Guru.com and Elance guarantee payment after jobs are completed in return for commissions of about 6% to 10% of freelancers' fees. But many other sites hold individuals fully responsible for billing clients and collecting payments.

• Between January and March, employers posted 70,500 of these work-for-hire positions on Elance.com and 43,000 on Odesk.com, which represents increases of 35% and 105%, respectively, from the same period in 2008. Sologig.com, which lists remote and on-site freelance jobs, says its average monthly postings have more than doubled to around 13,500 per month in the past year. In March, there were 750 jobs listed on VirtualAssistants.com, versus 400 in March 2008.

• At the same time, the number of U.S. workers employed by temporary-help-services firms in March fell 27% to 1.8 million from the same month in 2008, according to the Labor Department.

Lesson learned:

• Despite her successes, Ms. Welch, who is 40 and lives in a Washington, D.C., suburb, says she still deals with some of the pitfalls that come with contract work. For example, she says she once spent several hours researching and explaining how she'd handle a potential project, but didn't get the gig. "Some [employers] want to pick your brain and have no intention of paying you," she says. Now Ms. Welch is more cautious about sharing information with employers before a contract is signed. "If they're asking for a lot of details, that's a warning sign," she says.

Unemployment Hazardous to Your Health?

As if losing your job wouldn’t be bad enough — The New York Times reports that being out of work may make you sick (and this comes on the heels of the U.S. Labor Department released figures showing that the economy lost more than half a million jobs in April).

A researcher at the Harvard School of Public analyzed detailed employment and health data from 8,125 individuals surveyed in 1999, 2001 and 2003 by the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

Workers who lost a job through no fault of their own, she found, were twice as likely to report developing a new ailment like high blood pressure, diabetes or heart disease over the next year and a half, compared to people who were continuously employed.

Interestingly, the risk was just as high for those who found new jobs quickly as it was for those who remained unemployed.

Though it’s long been known that poor health and unemployment often go together, questions have lingered about whether unemployment triggers illness, or whether people in ill health are more likely to leave a job, be fired or laid off.

Moonlighting Pays, But...

On Sunday, The New York Times looked at the pros and cons of moonlighting while trying to hold down a day job during a tough economy.

The article offers readers one basic question to consider before signing up for more work:

“Ask yourself what tradeoff you are willing to make for that second income in terms of lost personal time, performance at your primary job and your stress level,” said Eileen Blumenthal, a coach and managing partner of Rocket Science Coaching and Consulting in San Francisco.

It also considers whether a second job could pose ethical or legal conflicts with a primary job and whether you should tell your boss that you’re planning to work on the side.
Image courtesy of The New York Times.

CNN: ‘Freelance the New Full-Tme’

We’ll talk about this article from CNN tonight. But here’s the link if you’d like to click through to the complete article.

The headline says it all, but the article does include an interesting stat:

Freelance professionals now make up more than a quarter of the U.S. working population, or 26%, according to a survey by human resources consulting firm Kelly Services, Inc, up from 19% in 2006.

The Purple List

PSFK, an informative marketing and culture blog, announces:

With an ever-growing number of our friends around the world finding themselves in the freelance market, we decided to dust off The Purple List of experts we had trialled last year and give it another try. The aim of The Purple List is to connect experts like you with clients who need to know. The aim is for a client to be able to find an expert on any subject, any where, for any time. Experts can be hired just for a telephone call or for a longer projects.

The site is still in beta, and may be a place for freelancers to become or show off their expertise.

News: ‘Job-Search Networks, in All Shapes and Sizes’

The New York Times talks about job-search alternatives to the usual online resources:

While people have flocked to social networking Web sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, growing numbers of job seekers are building grass-roots offline communities, too, and sometimes use the Internet to arrange to meet people face-to-face.

In many cases, these meetings are regular gatherings that attract no more than a dozen people at a time. In other cases, the get-togethers are much larger, and travel to different cities.

The article even highlights the first LaidOffCamp event in San Francisco last March, which brought together self-employed workers and job seekers to share their entrepreneurial energy.

The San Francisco LaidOffCamp website lists upcoming gatherings such as the following:

• Tuesday: March 3rd from 9:00am - 5:45pm (schedule)
• Temple Night Club SF: 540 Howard St, San Francisco, CA

Freelancer Rights?

According to Canada’s National Post, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice will consider a proposed settlement in a class action lawsuit involving breach of copyright claims by freelance writers who objected to the defendants publishing works written for print media in electronic databases without paying the writers for the electronic rights.

This is similar to a US case in 1993. In that case, cited below, the freelancers lost:

BETH J. HARPAZ, Associated Press Writer
AP Online
09-28-1999
Court Rules on Freelance Writers

NEW YORK (AP) -- A new court ruling is raising questions about compensation for freelance writers whose work appeared in electronic databases without their permission.

Copyright law ``does not permit the publishers to license individually copyrighted works for inclusion in the electronic databases,'' according to the unanimous ruling issued Friday by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals' Second Circuit in Manhattan.

The lawsuit was filed in 1993 by six writers and the National Writers' Union, which represents 5,000 freelance writers. The suit was filed against The New York Times Co., ...

What’s A Joke Worth?

Not even late-night TV pays well, according to this New York Magazine article:

an underground network of freelance joke writers [...] get paid between $75 and $100 for each joke of theirs that manages to make it on air