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