For Freelancers, the Road to Stimulus Benefits Is Paved With Dysfunction

Columbia Journalism
Columbia Journalism
10 min readApr 28, 2020

By Amanda Christovich

By April 8, Eva Doherty had spent weeks calling the New York State unemployment office more than 100 times a day. Before COVID-19, she was working as a freelance script supervisor, taking notes on production progress that editors could use when they received footage. She was set to begin work on two separate projects, and was climbing the film industry ladder with the hopes of one day becoming a screenwriter and director.

But now, as the U.S. economy grinds to a halt and unemployment skyrockets due to COVID-19, millions of freelancers like Doherty have been left without a job. In search of financial relief, Doherty filed for unemployment in mid-March, hoping she might qualify. Because she’s a freelancer, she needed to speak with a representative from the unemployment office to finish her application — but the office didn’t have a call-waiting feature. So she was left to call whenever she wasn’t cooking, eating or sleeping. “It’s been pretty nuts,” she said. As a result, she and her roommates — also out-of-work freelancers — couldn’t pay their rent when it was due on April 1.

On March 27, President Trump signed the CARES Act, a $2 trillion stimulus package that offers loans, unemployment benefits and cash to freelance and contract workers like Doherty for the first time in US history. But the rollout of the stimulus package’s benefits has been bogged by problems. Many states didn’t set up unemployment applications for freelancers until a month after the CARES Act passed. Freelancers like Doherty in states that had created applications said they suffered long wait times, website crashes, perpetually busy phone lines and cumbersome questionnaires. Furthermore, banks didn’t technically open stimulus package loan applications for freelancers until April 10, and reports surfaced that large corporations gobbled up the funds before they dried up entirely six days later, and didn’t reopen for more than week. And all the while, freelancers have no idea when they may go back to work.

“This is not the quick relief that Congress envisioned,” said New York-based accountant Jonathan Medows. Medows, who specializes in helping freelancers file taxes, said that even professional accounting firms were confused by what many of the nebulous guidelines in the CARES Act would mean for their self-employed clients.

Freelancers made up 28 percent of the U.S. workforce in 2019. They span across industries, from rideshare drivers and delivery workers to journalists and marketers, and their incomes make up almost 5 percent of the nation’s total Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Traditionally, however, freelancers haven’t qualified for unemployment benefits, which are handled by the states, because state unemployment forms require applicants to list the company that laid them off to ensure it had paid taxes into the state’s unemployment insurance. The only way freelancers could qualify for unemployment was to create their own companies or join unions that paid unemployment insurance to state governments.

The CARES Act changes that. In its online description, the package claims to help freelancers in three main ways: making unemployment benefits available; sending one-time payments to eligible people; and providing loans for small businesses, including sole-proprietors, to cover expenses for up to eight weeks.

The CARES Act was meant to provide relief for the millions of people like Doherty and her roommates who have lost their jobs to COVID-19. More than 26 million freelancers and full-time employees have filed for unemployment since mid-March. But so far, the CARES Act has helped few, not only because of the problems applying for unemployment but because the one-time payment is so meager. The most a person can get is $1,200, and anyone who reported more than $75,000 in earnings on their 2019 tax returns will get less or nothing at all. The checks barely cover a months’ worth of expenses — median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the U.S. is currently $1,221. “It’s such a strange amount of money,” said freelance exotic dancer and brand ambassador Kimberly Johnson, whose work has also dried up due to COVID-19-induced closures. “Especially when you consider being out of work for two months.”

One of Doherty’s roommates, Jake Rydell, primarily works as an actor, but also works as a waiter and teacher. He has also lost all his income, given that his jobs require in-person interaction. In mid-March, he was backstage during a performance when he found out that the show he was acting in was ending its tour early. Like falling dominos, his other employers closed or canceled in the ensuing days. “It was unbelievable,” he said. His words tumbled over each other. “It didn’t really click, it didn’t really make sense to me at the time. … How do you rationalize this with the reality you’ve lived in beforehand? It’s sorta impossible.” Like Doherty, he is relying on the CARES unemployment benefits.

Under the CARES Act, freelancers like Rydell, Doherty, and Johnson can apply for unemployment benefits based on recent income, which could include both whatever their state would provide, plus an extra $600 a week from the federal government. The federal money is available for up to 39 weeks, spanning from January 27, 2020 — when people may have begun losing work due to COVID — and December 31, 2020.

But applying for unemployment continues to be overwhelming and cumbersome — if it’s even possible at all. California, where Johnson lives, didn’t make state unemployment applications available for freelancers until a month after the CARES Act had passed. And Rydell, filing for unemployment in New York, experienced dozens of website crashes when submitting the online form. Like Doherty, he was also told to speak with a representative to finish his application as a freelancer but couldn’t get ahold of anyone for weeks. At one point, he even found out that the Department of Labor had lost his application, the online record having disappeared into cyberspace.

Jeanne, a playwright who prefers not to disclose her last name for the sake of privacy, also told of a stressful, dehumanizing process applying for unemployment. “You feel like a non-human. You feel like you don’t exist,” she said.

Jeanne usually writes early in the morning and supports herself by working temp jobs during traditional business hours. After finishing her last job, she spent months searching for a new one, until she finally lined up work as a full-time administrative assistant at a New York City law firm. She explained that she had signed her offer in mid-March and had plans to attend company-mandated training in Philadelphia when COVID-19 struck.

The firm cancelled her trip. Then, on March 20, the day New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an official mandate to close non-essential businesses, she received a call from the firm saying that she couldn’t start work at all until the lockdown ended. “I think I was a bit in shock,” she said. Jeanne is now left with neither the salary nor the benefits she was supposed to receive from the firm, which included healthcare.

Jeanne was forced to begin looking for stimulus assistance. She turned to a New York Times article for help, but suspecting that navigating bureaucracy’s “labyrinth” would be a full-time job, she wasn’t even sure where to start. “I think what I’m most panicked about is being neither fish nor fowl in terms of qualifying for unemployment…” she said before she began the process. “My sense is that it’s gonna be a shit-show.”

She was right. First, she couldn’t get through to the online application, so she applied via New York’s automated call application in early April. Now, she has spent the last few weeks in bureaucratic limbo, waking up early to call various government offices and waiting on hold, playing phone tag with unemployment representatives who promised to call her, and receiving call-backs at odd hours, like midnight on a Saturday. By the end of April, she still wasn’t sure if she’d get any unemployment and was finishing up her taxes to receive a stimulus check, despite the fact that it wouldn’t help her much. In New York City, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is a whopping $3,150 — more than twice as much as the stimulus check. “So far, nada, zippo, zilch!” she wrote in an email of the help she’s received a month after the CARES Act passed.

Outside New York, other states are experiencing similarly overloaded systems, and in some cases don’t even have applications for freelancers at all. Every state’s website looks different, with unemployment information scattered about in blocks of text in thin fonts, endless links promising more precise information and a maze of FAQs. California’s website announced that the state would begin distributing the extra $600 per person for the week ending in April 11, but didn’t begin accepting freelancers’ unemployment applications until the end of April. States like Alabama, Alaska, Colorado and Maryland also took weeks to release online applications or even basic information for freelancers. And the list goes on.

Minnesota claims to be ready to implement stimulus unemployment benefits now. Yet, Minnesotan Andrea Yoch, a freelance sports and entertainment marketer, says she has gotten nowhere with her application. Yoch provides marketing skills for events ranging from international soccer bonanzas to music festivals, so her income depends on mass gatherings, all of which — save a marketing position with a Minnesota-based vodka company called Gray Duck Vodka — evaporated as a result of COVID-19, she said.

Before the CARES Act passed, Yoch tried to file for unemployment through Minnesota’s online system. On her first attempt, she couldn’t get into the site because it had crashed. The second time, when she finally got through and read the questionnaire, she realized that as a freelancer, she didn’t qualify.

She tried again twice after the stimulus package passed, but by the end of April, she hasn’t received a penny. “I probably need to call but don’t want to sit on the phone for 5 hours,” she wrote in texts. “We are completely falling in the gap.”

Yoch also applied for a Payroll Protection Program (PPP) loan, a federally-backed loan distributed by banks. These loans, totaling $349 billion in funding, were supposed to be the third form of relief available to freelancers. But the loans, extremely popular and mistakenly available to large corporations, ran out six days after applications opened for freelancers. Yoch missed out on the first round of funding as a result. What’s more, not all freelancers Columbia Journalism School interviewed even knew the loans existed. The loan pool has since been replenished, but it remains to be seen whether the loans be more accessible to freelancers during its second round.

Perhaps one success story amid the bureaucratic chaos lies in the finances of freelance sports broadcaster Will Haskett. On March 12, after a long day of calling The Players Championship golf tournament in Florida, Haskett finally made it back to his hotel room. He was about to fall asleep when the text came: A producer told him that the rest of The Players Championship had been canceled, effective immediately. Knowing his gig in Florida was over, Haskett jumped into action, and before midnight, he had made plans to return to his home in Indianapolis, Indiana.

COVID-19 has wiped all the tournaments and games Haskett was set to broadcast, so he’s lost almost all of his income. “I would sit back and stain my deck and go do some yard work and live a happy life right now if I knew that sports were being turned back on May 1st or May 15th,” Haskett said shortly after the CARES Act passed. The uncertainty has led him to apply for unemployment and the PPP, hoping he’d successfully receive one type of benefit.

Haskett said that because he had previously “incorporated” himself, meaning that he created a company in which he was the only employee, it’s been much easier to fill out stimulus package applications. He received his first unemployment payment from the state of Indiana on April 10 — about a month after applying — and eventually also started receiving the extra federal unemployment check of $600 a week. And although he’s still waiting for his PPP loan approval two weeks after applying, he said that his bank’s application process was fairly easy — aside from one system crash — and that he was able to apply before freelancers were technically eligible.

Companies that support freelancers are also trying to help. The digital marketplace, Fiverr, for example, is working on ways to help its users discern which stimulus package benefits might work for them, as well as services such as telemedicine, said Brent Messenger, Fiverr’s VP of Public Policy and Community Engagement. Fiverr also teamed up with the Freelancer’s Union to create a freelance relief fund, and the Freelancer’s Union regularly posts blogs trying to put stimulus package benefits in simpler terms.

Other independent organizations have set up grants for freelancers as well. Jeanne, the playwright and temp-worker, for example, was approved in mid-April for a private grant from a national advocacy organization for theatre writers called the Dramatists Guild. “I was practically crying with gratitude,” she said.

After New York was forced to revamp its entire unemployment system, Doherty, the script supervisor, said she messaged the New York Department of Labor on Twitter, sending her phone number. She finally received a call from an unemployment representative — the call she needed to finish the application — and got her money more than a month after filing. And Rydell, Doherty’s roommate, said he eventually received the $600 federal unemployment after he messaged the Department of Labor’s Twitter account — but had to reapply for state benefits, and still can’t find any record showing he was approved for the federal money. “This is insanity,” he wrote in a text.

Even with the obstacles, those who received any amount of money by the end of April appeared to be part of a lucky few. Many states are still struggling to churn out unemployment for freelancers; the loan program just reopened on April 27; and not everyone has received their slim stimulus checks. “It really is exposing the rickety capitalist system that we live under,” said Jeanne. “And it’s rickety.

--

--

Columbia Journalism
Columbia Journalism

The best and latest work from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism community.