The Neoliberal Trap of Freelancing
Freelancing: freedom and free-market capitalism?
When I started remote work and eventually freelancing, it felt like achieving the intoxicating freedom: a passport to any coffee shop in the world, and a right to roll eyes at a 9 to 5. Little did I know that by blindly celebrating the tenants of freelancing: freedom, flexibility, and independence, I was furthering an all-consuming political ideology, which might be doing more harm than good.
To get to work, all I needed was my laptop, overpriced lattes, and other cliched accessories that make up the freelancing image. I could live anywhere, and work anywhere, at any time.
Why live in a city? Why not live in a van? I reveled in the possibility of other places where expenses would be lower. Each place meant I might discover a new side of myself, or allow me to recreate the image of freelancing that I had bought into.
Beyond relocation possibilities, freelancing was also sold as a means of “doing what you love,” the millennial mantra promoted by the likes of WeWork. Work is a choice, which says something about your identity, and values; as Erin Griffith wrote in The New York Times, many have “internalized the idea — rooted in the Protestant work ethic — that work is not something you do to get what you want; the work itself is all.” It’s also a matter of self-discipline, hard work, and good self-branding to hustle it out until you make it. Hustle culture is like the American Dream back with a new global marketing campaign.
These were the ways I experienced freelancing freedom, but a wake-up call was when I found myself chasing down compensation, and I blamed myself for my lack of experience with client management, or for not diversifying my revenue streams.
When I started searching online for resources however, I realized that this was practically a rite of passage. I learned that many experienced worse; according to PayPal’s 2017 report, almost half of the freelancers surveyed had experienced not being paid. However, issues like these still emerge somewhat in isolation, unconnected to dwindling corporate accountability or lack of protection for freelancers.
Since a lot of clients are dealing with tight budgets and are looking for lowest rates, they may often ask you to tell them how much you’ll charge, which means your payment can largely depend on your own calculations of what your services should be valued. I felt deeply uncomfortable having to propose and negotiate my own rates, let alone persistently bringing it up so that it actually end up in my account.
And it turns out that this discomfort may be part of a gendered problem. Not only do female freelancers can face more problems with being paid late than male counterparts with the same skills and experience, according to freelancing platform Bonsai, but a significant freelancing gender pay gap exists, with men out earning women by 28% according to Freshbooks, an accounting and invoicing service. Since freelancing is predicated on the belief that success lies in performance and discipline, this gender pay gap is easily prescribed as a matter of individual women needing to ask for more with more confidence, instead of a systemic issue that could be addressed on the client side as well.
While the pros and pitfalls of freelancing are well documented: from work-life balance, to the impact on depression or loneliness, few have written about how freelancing functions on a scale, what kind of society it creates as a large-scale phenomenon.
Freedom, flexibility, and independence may be how I, and others, experience freelancing in our bubbles. But the self-reliance, the idea of individuals being responsible for their destiny and over social and economic security in their lives, led me to consider the role of neoliberalism in this belief.
Neoliberalism is a term that originated in the 1930s for economic policies defined by competition, deregulation, and privatization of public services. Today, it continues to define relations in society through competition. As Stephen Metcalf writes, neoliberalism is largely invisible, but has infiltrated our everyday language and popular beliefs:
“You see how pervasively we are now urged to think of ourselves as proprietors of our own talents and initiative, how glibly we are told to compete and adapt. You see the extent to which a language formerly confined to chalkboard simplifications describing commodity markets (competition, perfect information, rational behavior) has been applied to all of society, until it has invaded the grit of our personal lives, and how the attitude of the salesman has become enmeshed in all modes of self-expression.” — Stephen Metcalf
Individual competition in its most obvious form, might look like global websites where freelancers post their services, such as Upwork, where you find trilinguals who can program and write and design in Romania, Philippines, or India. Here, unless you have a strong personal brand or large track record, the way to get work is to compete for the lowest price, bearing in mind that a fair amount of freelancers provide insurance that clients don’t have to pay them if they don’t deliver 5 star work.
Meanwhile, for corporations and their investors, the increasing adoption of contract work may mean more competition, and more profit. Hiring more contract workers gives companies more flexibility to restructure operations, makes it easier to cut jobs, and trim expenses; it can reduce office rent, and expenses such as paid holidays, insurance, and other employee benefits. This may be most evident in Japan, where the recent boom in freelancing has been accompanied by shifting labour practices over the last few years, away from seniority-based pay with high employee job security, towards “the Western model where salary is based on skills and performance.” I encountered American hedge fund managers and venture capitalists who rejoiced at this, because merit-based pay and contract work increases competition within the company, leading to more productivity and profit.
So when we talk about freelancing purely in a lifestyle context, and glorify its flexibility and freedom, we may lose sight of how it functions on a larger societal and economic scale. Some overlooked themes of the new work culture — competing with people all around the world, competing with skills to protect ourselves from the advancement of A.I., and most of all, competing with ourselves — help to uphold the concept of neoliberalism, “a name for a premise that, quietly, has come to regulate all we practice and believe: that competition is the only legitimate organizing principle for human activity.” It places increasing responsibility on individuals to fend for themselves, and normalizes the movement for companies to downscale their full-time workforce and increasingly outsource for larger profits.
The longer I spend freelancing, the more naive I feel for dismissing full time employment in a company as “too corporate”; though I may be working in well-lit cafes, and wearing what I want, I juggle sales, accounting, among other things, practically operating as a one-person company. Could that be the epitome of “corporate”?
Freelancing has also opened my eyes to the value of social support systems, and of companies as an extension of social support. Companies are entities that can incentivize people to save up for pension, provide insurance, withhold your taxes for you, give structure to the day, encourage teamwork, and allow you to be part of something bigger than yourself.
And finally, as the rise of freelancing increases among white collar workers, the deeper I empathize with temporary, informal, part time workers, many of whom have long experience income instability, lack of sufficient employee protection, and are expected to find insurance themselves.
For the time being, I may continue freelancing, but I’m left with big questions about the bigger picture of freelancing.
- While our freelancing lives may feel richer in lifestyle, who benefits financially from the increasing number of contract workers?
- What society do we create when we normalize individuals as solely responsible for saving their pension, finding affordable medical insurance, getting paid what they deserve?
- Does the lifestyle marketing of freelancing mask the ways it perpetuates social issues, such as the gender pay gap?
- Does an increasingly independent workforce come at the expense of social support systems or corporate accountability?
