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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