Posts filed under 'Overworked and underpaid'
I did a post this a.m. on Nine to Thrive (my NWjobs blog on work/life balance) about the nastiest work from home scams people have been reporting of late.
Of the many the FBI warns against, my personal favorite has to be those package forwarding or product reshipping jobs listed online. If you’re lucky, your so-called employer will merely neglect to reimburse you for the shipping fees on all those electronic goods you’re repacking and reshipping. But if you’re unlucky, you could get caught up in a criminal investigation, as many of the goods these employers are hiring home-based workers to ship are stolen.
You may think that having viable a freelance skill to sell over the web and in person makes you immune to such scams. “Only rebate processors and envelope stuffers get taken for a ride,” you may tell yourself. “Not writers, web designers, and software programmers.” But I beg to differ. (Seen Craigslist lately? Or those useless “paid in promotion” — aka, PIE — gigs?)
When it comes to listing my most-hated freelance scam, I’m torn between all those “Will pay $50 for a 2500-word article/five-page website/three-city PR campaign” project listings polluting the web and those heartless do-it-on-spec-and-then-see-if-anyone-will-deem-you-the-contest-winner-and-reward-you-ten-bucks-for-it sites. (Exhibit A. Exhibit B.)
Perhaps “scam” is too strong a word here, as these outsourcing practices aren’t illegal, only insulting, not to mentioning damaging to professional freelancers who need to earn a living wage. Still, part me wishes there were some regulatory labor body that required such sites and ads to prominently display a “Hobbyists, Apply Here — Pros Who Want to Eat, Steer Clear” graphic at the top. Then those hiring managers without a clue would more quickly come to the realization that you do indeed get what you pay for.
April 6th, 2009
I’m looking for full-time, part-time, temporary, or contract employees who can talk about the below. Anonymous is fine, and I won’t mention your company name (legally, I couldn’t). If interested, email me here. The deadline is Tuesday, so I’d need to hear from you by Monday night. Thanks so much.
How are you dealing with rumblings around the office about impending or potential layoffs at your company? Glad to know (information is power!)? Rather not know (too stressful/depressing!)? Wish your boss hadn’t told you that that nice dad down the hall was on the layoff list? Taking bets with your coworkers about which dead-weight manager will get canned next? Know someone who’s started an anonymous blog about layoffs at the company? If you have a tale to share about how people are dealing with layoff gossip at your job, I’d love to hear from you. I’m also happy to talk to anyone who’s been laid off in the past six months who’s dealt with this.
March 6th, 2009
Like everyone else, I’m looking for ways to shave expenses. Dinners, presents, movies out, and tickets for live music are now few and far between. If I need clothes, I buy used as much as possible (I’ll break for new undees, sneakers, and socks though). If I play with friends, one of us suggests eating in or going to a free event, like a book reading or a talk. European vacation plans with the boyfriend are on hold. You know the drill — the frugal freelance budget, only on steroids.
I’m especially psyched that this insurance agent helped me pick a healthcare plan that costs $1500 less a year but still covers the stuff I need covered. (By dropping maternity, pharmacy, and vision bennies, I save money — who knew!?) And I made the switch from cable TV to Netflix a little while back. Together, these changes save me $200 a month, which ain’t too shabby.
Still, each time I revisit the “Where I can save?” question, two monthly expenses that I don’t really need to be incurring jump out at me:
(1) The money I pay to have my house cleaned every 4 to 6 weeks (about $100, depending on how dirty the house is). This is a total guilty pleasure for me. But I hate to clean and rarely have time to anyway. Besides, I look forward to that one day a month when I sit on the freshly vacuumed couch, survey the tidy, dog-hair-free living room, and think “Ahhhhhh.”
(2) The money I pay to have a 40-pound bag of Buddy’s food delivered every 4 to 6 weeks (about $10 delivery charge each time). For some reason, picking up the dog food is an errand I’ve always hated. Usually I realize I’m out of kibble when the dog needs breakfast and an editor needs the article I’m working on. Also, those bags are dang heavy. So when I heard about a local delivery service, I was all over it.
Although I aspire to live leanly as possible — even if it means sucking it up and picking up my own mutt chow and mopping my own damn floors – I have a hard time letting either service go because these people are independent business owners. It’s a total thrill to not have to pay Comcast $60 extra a month or to tell LifeWise Health Plan where they can stick their stupid, plundering rate increases. But it does not feel good at all to take business away from another self-employed person. So I’ve decided that I’m keeping both services, depression be damned. Unless I have to start dipping into the dog’s food myself, I’m getting my house cleaned and my kibble delivered to my doorstep.
How about you? Are there expenses you feel you should cut back on but can’t bear to dump because you’d be contributing to another small business owner losing income?
February 28th, 2009
I have a guest post on Marci Alboher’s Shifting Careers blog in the online version of today’s New York Times. The intro follows. You can read the rest here.
Despite the fact that I’ve gone from greenhorn to grizzled veteran in my 16 years as a freelancer, I receive calls and e-mails like the following at least once a month:
“We really love your work. And we have a great opportunity for you at our exciting new media venture.”
Translation:
“We’re launching a new Web site/magazine/start-up and we’d love to have you do some consulting work for us. For free.”
My hopeful client will then explain that his or her company is poised to be the next Google or that some former “Apprentice” contestant who’s long since faded into oblivion is on the advisory board. All this is meant to butter me up for the next line, which happens to be the sentence in the self-employment lexicon that I hate the most:
“It will be great exposure for you.”
No one ever filled a gas tank or bought groceries with exposure. The 20.9 million Americans working as consultants, freelancers, small-business owners and independent contractors are not keeping a roof overhead by getting paid in exposure, or “PIE,” as I’ve taken to calling it.
But writers, illustrators and other creative types aren’t the only ones who routinely get asked to donate their time and talents to clients devoid of outsourcing budgets. Business consultants, virtual assistants, bookkeepers, programmers, publicists and all other manner of self-employed professionals get offered platefuls of PIE, too.
Sometimes the PIE — with all its promise of fame and fortune at some vague date on the horizon — will sound pretty delicious, especially if the economy’s in the gutter like it is now. Sometimes you’ll convince yourself that a little sliver of PIE couldn’t possibly hurt your bottom line. But usually these gigs are as empty as the calories at your favorite bakery counter.
Read the rest of this post here.
November 10th, 2008
I am sleep deprived and drowning in deadlines. Posting will continue to be light until May 5th or so. For now, enjoy this freelancer-related randomata.
Here’s what happens when Homer Simpson decides to work from home. (Via Jezebel.)
Here’s what the New York Times has to say about charging your clients enough money. (Here’s what I — and some of you — have to say.)
Here’s what a recent study on individual health insurance found:
People who buy their own health insurance saw their average annual premiums rise 18 percent between 2002 and 2005, a modest increase compared to the 34 percent jump in average premiums for people insured through their employers, according to the latest News and Numbers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Somehow that didn’t make me feel any better about the 30+ percent increase in my health insurance premiums this year. After all, I don’t have an employer to subsidize the monthly premiums. Instead, I raised my deductible so I can afford coverage. Lame. But a common problem in this country.
Here’s a story that made me feel better about the above. This kind doctor quit the medical rat race and started a clinic that serves people with no health insurance. 40,000 patient visits since 2002. Nice!
April 25th, 2008
Exhibit A: I’m sure you’ve by now seen the sensationalist New York Times piece that might as well have been called, “Blogging Killz!” While it’s tragic that three prominent bloggers have had heart attacks recently (two of them fatal), this article was a huuuuge stretch. It did remind me, however, that no career is worth compromising your health (as I write this at 5 am, said the insomniac).
Moral of the story: The webconomy didn’t invent workaholism, crappy pay practices, and on-the-job stress. Workaholics, companies with crappy pay practices, and stress bunnies did.
Exhibit B: It’s worth reading Freelance Fizzle! The Decline and Fall of the Writer in the New York Observer, which pines for a freewheeling freelance past (complete with expense accounts!) that died decades ago — and probably only existed for a handful of A-list writers anyway.
The Reader’s Digest version: Once upon a time, magazine writers in Manhattan supposedly had it made. Today they have dwindling markets/readership/budgets to content with, not to mention — cue scary music — the web. Believe me, it saddens me greatly that print pubs are in peril. (Just this week, one of my beloved print clients had massive layoffs.) But I can whine about it, or I can wake up and smell the new economy.
Moral of the story: Freelance publishing rates haven’t gone up in decades. And unfortunately print as we know it is rapidly becoming yesterday’s news. Writers who want to eat need to have at least a couple toes in the digital pool (and depending on how much money they need to make, perhaps a couple more in the copywriting world).
Exhibit C: Procrastinating writers, take heart! Now you can strip away all toolbars, inboxes, and web connections and focus on the blank page at hand. Two distraction-busting word-processing programs (Mac version here; PC here) try to recreate the supposed glory days of writing by typewriter or clunky 80s computer, only with today’s processing speed.
On the one hand, I’m sorely tempted to check out this cool-sounding app. On the other, I did a fine job of procrastinating in the 80s and 90s, first with a typewriter, then with a Mac SE.
I applaud entrepreneurial software devs who sell their creations one download at a time, so I’ll skip the snide moral of the story here. And if anyone’s tried an app like this, I’d love to know what you think.
April 10th, 2008
Who would answer this (sadly, quite real) Craiglist ad? WHO?
I need a ghost writer, someone to help me finish some stories and make them presentable to be published, I can’t pay for the time and effort, but an willing to give credit where credit is due. I currently have 5 stories, and you can choose which one(s) you want to work on. These are typed out COPIES, I have the originals and will keep them, looking for someone that will not tamper with the original idea, but add to the story to make publishable. I have all the ideas, just no time or patients for details, but it’s all in my head. Please let me know if your interested.
In other words, “Hi, I want to be a published writer, but I don’t want to write. Or learn how to spell. But trust me, I have the chops. It’s all in my head. I just don’t have time to type, or use my brain, or open a dictionary. And you should help me. For free. Because I said so.”
What this person doesn’t realize is that if a writer needs to do a couple freebies to beef up her skimpy portfolio, she’s going to write and publish her own dang articles (say for a cool indie women’s mag, or the newsletter of the women’s shelter down the street), not waste her time with this nonsense. Ads like this do a huge disservice to paid ghostwriting gigs offered by credible authors, business executives, and book publishers.
Promise me you will never answer such an ad. I’d sooner advise you to answer a listing on Craig’s like this.
(This rant made possible by my dear friend Diane, who sent me the CL ad in question.)
February 17th, 2008
Pity the doctors and lawyers. They slogged through countless, sleepless years of higher education and amassed astronomical student debt only to realize that they’re no longer envied and revered by the rest of us poor working slobs.
According to yesterday’s New York Times, “some doctors and lawyers feel they have slipped a notch in social status, drifting toward the safe-and-staid realm of dentists and accountants.” What’s more, MDs and ESQs “only” make six figures, when much sexier-sounding hedge funders and webpreneurs (some of whom didn’t even go to college — gasp!) are making millions.
Call me callous, but I find it hard to feel sympathy for anyone who chooses a profession just because they think it will sound good at a dinner party. (Why does the Sunday Style section measure everything against the dinner-party yardstick?) This might have something do with the fact that when I was in school, everyone and their grandmother (mine included) regarded Lawyer or Doctor as the holy grail of career choice. As for flexible, creative, entrepreneurial work? That’s what stoners and slackers did.
So score one for the so-called slackers. And note to the Times: Not everyone under 30 in the brave new entrepreneurial workforce wants to be the next Web 2.0 bazillionaire. Some just want to do work they can stomach, have some time left over to spend with the people they love, and avoid a hefty dry cleaning bill in the process.
January 7th, 2008
Here’s the latest PayScale piece. Thanks again to everyone who sent in their best hell-meeting tales.
When Marie, a sales assistant, showed up for a routine meeting with a big-time retail client, she didn’t expect to find the guy drunk. With a bird cage containing a latex chicken hanging on the wall behind him. Nor did she expect him to spend the entire meeting on the phone, haggling over money with a bunch of car dealerships.
“I thought about Kafka,” Marie says. “This was so weird.”
While most meetings from hell aren’t quite so surreal, they’re every bit as maddening. Take Judy, who worked as managing editor at a magazine and had the classic sitcom experience of suggesting a story idea in a meeting only to have her boss ignore her and then present the idea as his own ten minutes later.
“Everyone’s jaw dropped as they turned to look at me,” she says.
Or Lawrence, who worked for a travel company where the president’s wife (who doubled as the business manager) would monopolize the first ten minutes of every meeting by lecturing the staff on the finer points of carpet stain removal, sometimes even demonstrating how the team should go about cleaning spilled coffee from her prized new office carpeting.
Then there’s Ruth, who worked at a non-profit arts organization where many a meeting devolved into a group therapy session:
“At my very first staff meeting, one woman announced that she had to leave early because she was going to see her therapist, another woman started crying over something and then apologized because she was hormonal, and more time was spent talking about hair than anything else.”
With such a sense of uselessness and futility at meetings — and such a dizzying percentage of the workday sucked up by them — is it any wonder that so many attendees have taken to working on their laptops, texting friends, even snoozing through them, often in plain sight of the boss? Should it come as any surprise that workers overwhelmed by the onslaught of irrelevant meetings block out several days a month on their calendars so they can get some actual work done?
Managers, the next time you feel compelled to schedule a team meeting, think long and hard before you hit Send. The way to earn your employees’ respect is not by scheduling a pre-launch meeting to discuss what next week’s launch meeting will discuss. It’s not by holding a meeting at 7:00 a.m. on a Monday or 6:30 p.m. on a Friday. It’s not by showing up five minutes before the hour-long meeting you called is scheduled to end (and no, you don’t get points for actually showing up). And it’s certainly not by hijacking a meeting so you and the one other manager in attendance can beat to death a topic that has nothing to do with the cube monkeys helplessly held captive in the conference room.
Managers, don’t say it with a meeting when you can say it with an email. Don’t say it with a meeting before you know what the heck it is you want to say. Don’t be the crazy drunk guy with the rubber chicken in a bird cage who haggles with car salesmen during meetings with business colleagues. And if you have to be that guy, make sure you bring enough booze for the rest of the class.
For some ideas on putting meetings out of their misery, see this PayScale page.
November 11th, 2007
If you’ve spent any amount of time on this blog, you know that I’m a champion of unmarried singles and couples being treated the same as their married counterparts. Sometimes I even publish some writing on the topic. That’s why I was thrilled when Bella DePaulo wrote an entire book on the subject: Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, which is essentially a myth-busting, consciousness-raising, totally unapologetic take on singlehood. In honor of the book’s recent paperback release, I asked Bella a few questions about the unbalanced treatment of single people in the workforce. Here’s what she had to say.
Q. Can you give us some stats on how single workers are treated differently by their employers and colleagues?
A. The most important differences are in salary and benefits. Single men are paid less than married men — probably about 26 percent less — even when the single and married men have done the same job at the same level of competence for the same number of years. Now consider health care plans. In many workplaces, a married worker can put a spouse on a health care plan at a discounted rate. That can amount to a very substantial financial benefit. But the single worker cannot add someone important in their life, such as a parent, sibling, or friend, and no other worker can add the single person to their plan.
Readers of Singled Out e-mail me all the time with their workplace woes. What singles complain about most often are the expectations that they should be able to cover the holidays and the travel that no one else wants and to stay late when others go home — the assumption is that since they are single, they don’t have a life, so why shouldn’t they cover for everyone else? The other part of that issue is that when single people explain why they need to take time off, their reasons are dismissed as not good enough. So, for example, a single person can get “the look” for wanting to take some time to help an ailing friend, but their married colleague gets a pass to leave early to meet their spouse for dinner.
Q. What do you think are the biggest myths about single women in the workplace, both childfree and moms?
A. I think that childfree single women are seen as having nothing important in their lives — no important people and no important pursuits. Single mothers are seen as “at risk” for leaving the workplace on short notice to tend to their child, or not showing up on days when their child is sick. In some workplaces, colleagues and bosses look askance at single mothers, and maybe even their children. Fortunately, though, not all workplaces are like that.
Q. Do you see a difference in how single men vs. single women are treated at work by management and their co-workers?
A. In terms of salary, the data show that single men have it worse — most studies show they are paid less than comparable married male colleagues. For women, there is not much consistency from study to study.
In the culture at large, single women seem to be targets of what I call “matrimania” more than men are. Matrimania is the over-the-top hype about marriage and weddings and brides that saturates our culture. You can see it coming down especially forcefully on women by the number of bridal magazines on the shelves, unmatched by an equal number of guides for grooms. You can see it on the “reality” TV shows, in which dozens of bachelorettes vie for the attention of just one bachelor far more often that a truckload of bachelors all compete for the one bachelorette.
I think some of that special pressure on single women seeps into the workplace. I have been taken, though, by the number of single men who have told me their stories of being belittled and dismissed by colleagues. Some of the teasing they describe sounds especially nasty. One man told me about his colleagues who would bring in stories about social science findings showing that married people live longer or are happier (all grossly exaggerated or just plain wrong, as I show in Singled Out), and taunt him with them.
Q. What can singles do about those “lost” workplace rights or benefits?
A. I do think that singles should do what they can to get their issues on the table. Laws and policies can be changed, and awareness can be raised about insensitive and inappropriate workplace behaviors. I have to add a warning about this, though: Colleagues and bosses often react very badly to these topics and the people who raise them. That’s true even (or maybe especially) when the single person is clearly on the side of the angels. Lots of people in today’s society like to think of themselves as open-minded, fair, and non-prejudicial. When a single colleague points out a way in which the workplace has been unfair to singles, the people perpetrating that unfairness can suddenly feel very defensive. Their first reaction can be to lash out at the single person, rather than standing back and saying, “Wow, I never thought of that. I’m sorry. I won’t do that again.”
So another way singles can get these issues addressed is by supporting relevant advocacy groups. For example, the Alternatives to Marriage Project is very good at taking on issues involving all unmarried people (coupled and single).
When singles contact me with their workplace stories of cloddish colleagues or bosses, I often offer to send those clods a copy of Singled Out from Amazon, with no note attached. I think the insensitive ones would reconsider their behavior if they would read it. But I also warn the single worker that this is risky, because if the recipient of the book suspects that the single worker was involved, it will only make the colleagues or bosses even harder to deal with.
There are some small things that should be a bit easier to do. I actually have no problem covering for a colleague, whether married or single, as long as it is reciprocal. So when someone asks you, say something like: “Sure, I’d be happy to. I know there are times when I’ll need to leave early, and I’m sure you will do the same for me.” Then ask, when that time comes.
I also think that workplace policies should be fair for all workers. So, for example, all workers should have to cover holidays an equal number of times. And when workers have a certain number of days off, they should not have to account for what they are doing with their days off, or justify the days they want to take. That doesn’t mean that company needs are unimportant — of course they’re important — but the personal lives of single workers are also just as important as the personal lives of married workers and should be subject to no greater scrutiny.
Q. Do you see the rift of understanding about lifestyle choices and workplace inequities between singles and marrieds becoming greater or closing up the more these issues get discussed in the media and public eye?
A. I think that at first, the issue will be very hot. People on both sides will feel offended and misunderstood. It is funny that you raise this question, because just recently, I got a fascinating e-mail from a reader of Singled Out. He told me that he put together a carefully prepared audiovisual presentation on the ways in which family-friendly workplaces can be unfair to single people. One of the people in the audience stormed up to the podium, unplugged the equipment, grabbed his papers and threw them up in the air, then marched out of the room! So I think there is going to be some of that sort of thing happening, though perhaps not always so dramatically. Eventually, though, as the topic gets discussed more often online and in the mainstream media, we’ll probably be able to have more thoughtful and calmer discussions. The thing is, I’ve never heard single people say that they want more than what married colleagues get; they just want to be treated fairly. If other people can stop and hear that message, it should be hard to object to. In theory.
Q. In addition to your book, are there are organizations working for policy/workplace change and other resources you recommend singles check out?
A. My current favorite is the Alternatives to Marriage Project. There’s another group that works under the title, Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision For All Our Families and Relationships. Their point is that even if same-sex marriage were made legal everywhere, there would still be many uncoupled people shut out of the 1,138 federal benefits and protections given to people who are legally married. As the subtitle indicates, this is a group that believes in the significance of all of our close relationships, not just our conjugal ones.
November 4th, 2007
Previous Posts
