Independent Workers Blog No. 2
This is the second part of at least a five-part series on independent workers. It’s based in large part on a PBS NewsHour article written by Sara Horowitz, the Brooklyn-based Freelancers Union‘s executive director, that is entitled “The Unemployment Numbers as Sham: Where Are the Freelancers?”
My first blog in the series was entitled “Many Jobless People Get ZERO Unemployment Benefits.” The series was inspired by my anger over the debate about extending unemployment insurance benefits. During the debate, I didn’t hear anyone say that millions of people have never received a penny in unemployment benefits because they’re independent workers. We are 42 million strong, according to an outdated 2006 report by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
I don’t know how many people make sure they find out what the U.S. unemployment rate is on the first Friday of every month, which is generally when the U.S. Department of Labor releases a report based on the previous month’s numbers, but I’m one of them.
Consequently, I’m an idiot.
The unemployment rate is a sham -- and I have known that from the first second that I learned that people who worked full time could not receive unemployment insurance benefits if they were not categorized as employees by whoever paid them. And I learned this fact in the 20th century.
The fact that there are 42 million independent workers leads me to believe that the U.S. unemployment rate is way……………………………….............way higher than the U.S. Department of Labor’s claim that it is 6.7 percent.
Almost by definition, independent workers have a more unstable income. We often get more interesting assignments, have a more flexible schedule, and are exposed to more lucrative opportunities than full-time employees, but we also earn zero on days we want to work but there’s nothing available.
The PBS NewsHour concluded a few months ago that when the unemployment rate was officially 7.3 percent it was actually 15.9 percent.
“The BLS surveys haven't kept up,“ wrote Horowitz. “They don't capture this type of independent, variable employment because they're not asking the right questions. The baseline question in the household survey is, "Last week, did you do any work for either pay or profit?"….The BLS still uses a standard workweek as the measure of employment, but there's a whole workforce out there that doesn't fit easily into that box. For many freelancers, full-time employment is really a series of short-term (or part-time) gigs and projects.”
Horowitz wrote that the definition of “employed” needs to be changed so it reflects “whether your income provides a sustainable life.”
“The unemployment numbers currently tell us whether a person is or is not going to a job, but they don't tell us much about the quality of that job -- from an economic or social viewpoint,” wrote Horowitz. “Instead of focusing on whether someone's job is full-time or part-time, how about asking if they have enough work to sustain a life?”
The blogs below Horowitz’s article are very interesting because some of them reflect the reality of being an independent worker -- who are often called free-lancers.
“We work seven days a week, and there's no vacation,“ wrote Jan Hall. “Sometimes we work and are stiffed for the pay, with no practical recourse. Often we work for as little as possible, just to beat out the other freelancers for the job. There's no health care, because it is beyond our reach. We go without heat in the winter in order to pay taxes.”
The bottom line is that the safety net for struggling independent workers has lots of holes in it. The leaders in the U.S. government -- Democrats and Republicans -- should be ashamed that it has known this for a long time and has done nothing about it.
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