I think your cost/benefit analysis of the freelance "choice" really has to do with the robustness or not of the market in which you function. The San Francisco Bay Area probably has too many talented bodies for the available work, so freelancing can be an exercise in relentless anxiety.
And it's not just health insurance and retirement I have to pay for, it's actually five things: health insurance, retirement, disability, sick leave, and vacation. I last held a "real" job about 20 years ago, and that's the last time I took a real vacation. I sneak out for a few days here and there, but I have to be prepared to drop my plans if work shows up. The last time I honored a promise to someone I love to go away for few days, it cost me $10,000 dollars in work refusal. I learned fast that such promises will not be an option in the future.
I understand that employers have to make a living too, and that having too many staffers doesn't make sense. However, the laws that protect freelancers from working too much without benefits can sometimes backfire, in that they prevent folks like me from fastening on to a shop that has regular employment. Any employer will prefer to add to their freelance pool and split up the available pie into smaller pieces, rather than give me so much work that they get in trouble with the state.
Best,
Shirley
-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Hullfish <steve4lists@veralith.com>
To: Avid-L2 <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tue, Feb 28, 2012 10:22 am
Subject: Re: [Avid-L2] Going Freelance
Lots of people make a choice to go freelance. I know a lot of good editors that
CHOSE to go freelance.
And it's not all about not paying insurance for the production companies... it's
about knowing that you can't employ a full-time person.
If there are 10 production companies that don't have enough work for a full-time
editor, but there's one freelance person that wants to service all 10 production
companies, (s)he can probably make a decent living, where (s)he couldn't working
for any ONE of the ten.
I hire freelancers myself. I pay them a day rate that is definitely higher than
I would pay per day for a full-time person, so it's up to them to use that extra
money to buy their insurance and pay for their own retirement. If I needed an
extra editor five days a week for 50 weeks a year, I'd hire a full-time person
instead of a freelancer. Until that time, I'll pay freelancers. It actually
works out better for both of us that way. Nobody would have come to work for me
full-time for what I paid the freelancers, because I only had about two months
of "overflow" work.
Would you rather have a full-time job that paid 1/6th of what you want to make
in a year, or the opportunity to make more than you would be probably offered
for full-time work?
There are pretty strict rules for companies hiring freelance employees, at least
here in Illinois. Freelance employment has some very strict definitions. One of
them being the amount of time you work for a single company as a freelancer. If
the state sees too big of a percentage then the employer must actually count you
as a full-time employee with all the benefits included.
One of the large companies for which I have done freelance work in the past
recently had to change their freelance policies because the freelance/employee
boundary was too blurred.
Steve Hullfish
contributor: www.provideocoalition.com
author: "The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction"
On Feb 28, 2012, at 11:57 AM, Multimediac wrote:
> Freelance is a choice?
> In my experience its only been a loophole for production companies to get out
of paying insurance and benefits.
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