We've had some tense discussions about adjuncts this week. Personally, I was devastated to learn that my PhD and years of experience were only worth about $3 an hour on the local market. I want to broaden the discussion. The move towards hiring temp workers is bigger than just academia.
Steve was downsized from his permanent position at a Wall Street firm last fall, along with thousands of other workers. At some point, I'll talk about that stressful period of time, but not yet.
Now, he works for a very, pleasant firm in Connecticut. The commute is about the same, but now he drives for an hour, instead of taking the bus. (One car accident, so far. Ugh.) It's a much less intense workplace, so he's not walking around with bucket-loads of tension all the time. He's also a consultant, rather than a permanent employee.
For the most part, that's fine. The weekly paycheck is about the same as he made before. Even though it's not a permanent position, it's about as permanent as any job is these days. The only downside with this arrangement is the benefits. We're researching health insurance right now. Apparently, if you incorporate yourself, you can get access to cheaper health care programs. There aren't paid vacation days. We have to figure out our own 401K program.
So, from our perspective, there are pros and cons. From the business perspective, there are only pros with the move towards hiring consultants over permanent employees. In the banking industry, there are so many unemployed workers, they can easily find people to take benefit-less jobs. I'm also hearing anecdotal stories about this movement from friends in law and publishing.
Are consultants and freelancers and adjuncts the wave of the future?
Apt. 11d 
It’s not just in business, either. I have a friend who works for the state of Wisconsin and has been a “temp” for them for a couple of years. He is actually quite well-paid – a computer guy who does stuff I don’t understand – but apparently it works better for them to use temps without benefits. His wife also had a temp job without benefits for a while, with a small firm, though she insisted and after a while got them.
It will be interesting to see how the new health care laws affect this trend. They’ve managed health care without too much trouble, but I imagine as you get older (or if you have kids) it might become more of an issue. The lack of vacation days has been a source of contention, as well.
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Apparently, if you incorporate yourself, you can get access to cheaper health care programs.
I know a guy who retired at 60 but had to keep his business going on paper to maintain his insurance until 65. The cost was still well over a thousand a month for coverage with a very high deductible.
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We’ve still got COBRA for another year and it’s tax deductable, so we have some time to figure things out. Maybe the Obamacare will kick in at some point. Maybe Steve will land a permanent position. Maybe I’ll get some crappy adjunct insurance, though that doesn’t seem likely. It’s really weird how adjunct pay and benefits are so horrible here in NJ. Sounds like people in NC and PA have better deals.
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“It’s really weird how adjunct pay and benefits are so horrible here in NJ.”
Not weird at all. High cost of living, so people are looking for extra money. Some of our adjuncts teach a course after they’ve put in a full day teaching at a local high school. Others are retirees looking to supplement decreasing pensions. Also, you have a large talent pool of PhDs in the area. Market forces are keeping wages down.
It’s also why econ profs make more money than humanities profs. People with PhDs in econ can go off and work in businesses, and universities have to compete with that. Again, market.
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I bet the population density is part of it, too. Out here at my rural state university we have hardly any adjuncts – maybe a few faculty spouses who teach comp or something like that. We had a temp whose wife had a tt position an hour away (the nearest city to us, of 30,000), but he taught full time and had benefits, and made about 75% of a starting assistant prof’s salary. I don’t think our administration is more virtuous than other places – it’s just hard to find any teachers.
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My high school teacher friends tutor, rather than adjunct. They make $70-$100 off the books, which works out better per hour than adjuncting. I also know a couple of guys who run landscaping companies on the side. But your point about the large supply of PhDs in the area is probably correct.
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I also think you’re thinking a PhD is a qualification for the adjunct job. It’s not. You’re overqualified to teach political science at the community college level.
And here’s another wrinkle. Let’s say I make $60K a year to teach 10 courses (teaching university!). (#s are slightly fictionalized, though the basic point is still true) I am eligible to teach overloads, extra courses. But when I do, I am not offered $6K per course; I am offered $3K per course, similar to the adjuncts’ pay. I’m not sure how that data fits in, but it’s something to consider.
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I agree that it’s a temp world (which we can also call consulting or freelance).
In such a world unions as a solution for anything becomes difficult (though the model of guilds should be explored). But, people have to agree to bond themselves together, and not just act as individuals (that, is, refuse the underpaid acting gig because it isn’t up to scale, because they see a value to the system). I’m not sure how well even that fairly long-standing scheme is holding up as it encounters the economics of small scale theatrical productions. One thing I noted, naively, early on is that the amateur productions were “better” (because they were bigger). I was informed by someone in the profession that that’s cause the equity productions need to pay everyone, so they had to use small casts to stay in budget. So now, I’m seeing a greater use of non-equity actors by equity houses (they must have gotten some special rulings).
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I’m not sure how Obamacare will affect middle-income people who are struggling with health insurance costs. There will be subsidies for low income folks, and there will be guarantees on the ability to obtain insurance (which we already have in our state). But, costs won’t be highly regulated. I think the system is fully expecting most people to pay 10-20K for health insurance, depending on their individual situation.
We pay $1400/month for our family health insurance (privately obtained for semi-complicated reasons). We think its reasonable, for our family, which values the one-stop service of a managed care shop, doesn’t have any unusual health care needs, but does have the standard set of treatable health situations that seem common these days.
Given the frequency with which folks access health insurance, I think its really health care these days, and needs to be payed for as a service (and not as an insurance policy, which doesn’t usually collected on, like term life insurance). Like funding education, and unlike fire, flood, or other insurance it’s something that we are likely o use, and need to pay for over our lifetimes because our use is uneven (not unlikely). Then we need to talk about who “we” are — do we pay for the service individually over our life times (saving or paying taxes as young people and old people to fund education, as young and middle-aged people to fund health care, but with no redistribution)? or do we generalize the cost over everyone, having people pay more if they earn more?
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Yes, overqualified to adjunct. So what does one do with a degree in the liberal arts, if you are geographically limited and can’t go on the larger job market for a tenure job? I can’t get a job in a high school without an education degree. Freelance writing is extremely fun, but not very profitable. At least not yet. An editor from a new magazine asked me for a submission last night, so I’ll keep going and see what happens.
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That whole thing of not being able to teach high school PISSES ME OFF big time! Why in the worlds if we’re qualified to teach college and grad students we NEED an education degree to teach High school? I actually have a Teaching Licensure degree from Brazil on top of my bachelors (I had to do all required classes in the school of Education to get that), but that wouldn’t do anything for me here. Is it that hard to figure out the public school elementary & high school system? Why this requirement? (apparently it can be waived for private high schools — see Anastasia, What Now? and Laura/Geeky Mom? What say you?)
Good move to try to go more general with this still extremely disheartening discussion. I think it’ll continue to be heated, though!
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Hey, are you actually asking us for suggestions, or is your question rhetorical?
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In high school, I do think it’s a guild protection measure. But, it’s not something I get up in arms about because although the examples we have hear are good examples of why schools miss out on good teachers, I think there are also plenty of folks who are good a what they do but are bad teachers. I think the guild protections are worse in the east coast than the west.
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PS: Is your question rhetorical, or do you actually want us to make suggestions? And, are there are other non-negotiables on your list? (in addition to geographical limitations)?
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In the building trades, we’re all “temps”. But for union workers, this isn’t a problem. We have “hiring halls”, which means each Local has a list of people in various classifications (types of work) seeking work, and employers “call the Hall” when they need people. Since the work is governed by contract, wages and benefits are already “portable” within the same Local (and are similar for various other Locals in the same geographical region; usually closer for “sister” Locals—those bodering one another—than for more distant Locals. Pension and healthcare benefits are “reciprocal”, which means the portion of the benefit package that goes towards those areas goes back to one’s own Local….you don’t end up with umpteen healthcare and pension accounts; they are centralized).
The advantage to workers is that you don’t have to pound the pavement looking for work. No job interviews, no rigamarole. You just go on a “book signing tour”—sign the book at your Local, then sign as many books at other Locals as you care to travel to. “Book 1” is “local hands”; they get first dibs on jobs in their home Local (home jurisdiction). “Book 2” is journeymen from other Locals; they are next in line. “Book 3” is out-of-classification (ex.: journeyman wireman working as a groundman on a line crew). “Book 4” is any old yo-yo off the street that is not a union member. If you get laid off, there’s a clear shot at work with a reasonably accurate estimate of your downtime. You know you’ll be paid the same and receive the same benefits if your next job is in your home Local, and you know what your wages and benefits are going to be if you work in a different Local.
The advantage to employers is they don’t have to do job interviews—just call the hall for a qualified person. They can lay off when work gets slow without having to worry about finding qualified people when work picks up. (Nonunion employers who become signatory to the contract often do so because of the healthcare and pension benefits—most of them are small-time operators who don’t have a lot of personnel issues, but they get hosed on healthcare if they provide it, and lose workers eventually if they don’t. The ambitious ones like the hiring hall though—growing a business is hard without ready access to skilled help.)
All this came about because of organizing and activism. If white-collar folks ever get over their love affair with the “individualism” that is screwing them like housecats when it comes to their paychecks and benefits, they can form an arrangement like this, too.
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I am a consultant in the computer industry; I am a little more protected in the sense that my consulting firm sells the work I deliver, and handles my paychecks/health insurance. But they also take a big part of my hourly compensation. (I can clearly see my hourly rate in each statement of work, and it’s obviously a big markup over what they’re paying me.)
Quite a few people in the computer industry go out on their own when their skills are hot, in order to make sure they pocket more of this overhead themselves. The paperwork is a PITA and it’s very very helpful if your spouse has health insurance. But you can get coverage on the market too. We joke that you can tell people are “feeling entrepreneurial” when they start asking about market rates for health insurance. (“Feeling entrepreneurial”, in my office, is synonymous with looking for work.)
Honestly, over the years my family’s health insurance has gotten progressively worse. Every new open enrollment period we learn about new exclusions and higher deductibles, and are expected to cover more of it out of health savings accounts. For example last January I did the math and quickly discovered it was cheaper to simply pay the dentist/orthodontist and skip the insurance. Likewise I just pay from the HSA for out of network providers and off-list prescriptions, as our family max for deductible is like $5K. It’s not even worth filling out all the forms to keep track of what we’re spending.
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Thanks, La Lubu, I always appreciate your perspective on these matters. Agree about the individualism problem.
Back to the local adjuncting situation. So, a number of the local schools pay their adjuncts less than 2K per semester. 17 weeks of classes. If you teach in the humanities or the social sciences, you have to prepare two lectures every week. If you give written assignments and exams, you really are looking at less the minimum wage. I guess you could bump up your hourly rate, if you only gave a multiple choice mid-term and final and refused to answer e-mails. But, still, I think it has to be less than a retail job in Barnes and Noble. Even if you don’t have a PhD, that’s still not a good deal.
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One other comment about computer consulting; there’s huge incentive to learn new/hot/in demand skills. People are constantly retraining themselves to make sure their skills are always needed, and in general consultants are considered to have much stronger skills than “FTEs” (full time employees). When I go to a client site and encounter their FTEs, maybe only 1 in 5 could ever hack it as a consultant. So interestingly full time positions are viewed as a little bit dangerous to take; they’re cushy in the short term, but will likely lead to your skills aging and may end with you washing yourself out of the industry. And organizations that still employ all FTEs are pretty old-fashioned and are probably using old (and maybe crappy) technologies. The same aversion to change that leads them to stick with an all-FTE model also contributes to them skipping on upgrades or changes to their systems.
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BTW. I just fished a bunch of comments out of the spam filter. I’m not actually banning anyone, despite some annoyance the other day. At some point, I’ll get a proper blog, but not just yet.
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And organizations that still employ all FTEs are pretty old-fashioned and are probably using old (and maybe crappy) technologies.
This is why I avoid IT people whenever I can. I’d still use Windows XP if it were possible.
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Fascinating input from La Labu & Jen on the two sides of the “temp” workplace. I’ve always wondered exactly how that “union local” idea worked. I’ve been trying to figure out the system in the acting guilds (not for personal use), but I ’cause I think that all are examples of how to build share risk within a freelance work environment.
I think the academic attachment to tenure (personally, practically, and ideologically) has made those who were trained in academics particularly at a loss in facing the freelance/temp workplace.
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I think the academic attachment to tenure (personally, practically, and ideologically) has made those who were trained in academics particularly at a loss in facing the freelance/temp workplace.
I don’t think tenure is the whole deal as far as avoiding the union-hall model. It might work for teaching, but research is all soft money. The tenured faculty are the people who might hire out of a union hall, not anybody hired from it. The others usually aren’t even eligible for tenure and even if they are, “tenure” doesn’t mean you’ll get paid if you can’t find a grant on your own. The need for high degrees of training and specialization keep the faculty from going to consultants for most jobs. Health insurance keeps the workers from leaving to work as consultants.
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as far as I can tell, in the temp/adjunct/consultant/independent provider world, the only pro for the employee is that they have a job of sorts. The rest of the benefits go to the employers, who already had a disproportionate share of the power in this relationship. We need unions but we can’t get them anymore. It’s not looking good for the middle class.
Laura – once you take out the healthcare and 401k and vacation days and sicktime costs, is Steve’s paycheck really the same as before ?
Incorporation would also let you use a solo 401k, which seems a decent option.
I work in IT support. The companies with FTEs tend to be stable and seldom have problems. The companies that have outsourced/offshored tend to use vendor support for design, analysis, and operation of their systems: because their consultants don’t last long enough to understand the business or the history of the systems. They are using the same software of ours, just taking very different approaches to implementations. Outsourcing does not seem to be optimal. It lowers wages and wage costs, but its costs and inefficiencies are poorly accounted for.
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I never thought it was fair to make employers responsible for their workers’ healthcare costs (oversimplification but you know what I mean). In fact, I do think that we are moving towards a more freelance-based world, and I don’t think this is bad. My husband and I are in creative professions and we’ve been freelancing for years. It’s a lot of work but there is, in some ways, a lot of freedom in it too, and in my experience it’s an efficient organizational structure for figuring out who does what best and where they should do it and when. The downsides are – and these are really, really big downsides – health insurance and retirement.
One works out the sick days and vacations by being in charge of one’s own schedule (note: this does mean you have a bit less vacation than you realize… you’re always checking in on your work. But I suspect people do that anyway, no?) I’ve found that freelancing makes childcare much easier to organize.
But… I do feel the US economy would benefit hugely from having a better structure for healthcare/retirement organized independently of specific employers.
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What about teaching online? Lots of places (including us) are looking for people to teach courses for us online. Some places pay crap – we’re not great at about ~3600 per class. But given that you don’t have to physically be there to teach, you can shop around for the best paying place to teach online. There are start up costs to building a good course site, but you can build some that do at least a portion of grading on their own. Best of all – you can do the work and the grading when you want (i.e. when the kids are in school, when you don’t have a meeting with school, etc).
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After taking out retirement, vacation days, and health care, we’re are making less money, Doug K. No question about it.
Steve hasn’t been a consultant long enough to make any real evaluation of the concept. He talked to one woman who said that she loved it, because she didn’t feel as tied to the company and didn’t feel obligated to put in a bazillion hours into the job. She worked 40 hours and left without guilt, as opposed to 50-60 hours. But she didn’t have kids and thus, didn’t need fancy insurance to pay for braces and frequent bouts of strep throat. She had a partner who worked minimal hours in a low stress job to get some cheapy insurance.
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Yeah? Thanks, Shannon. I’ll look into it. $3,600 is GREAT compared to $1,800.
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I’ve been working freelance since the beginning of the year and so far, so good. My circumstances are not typical – we moved to a small town for my husband’s job, and there are not a lot of employment opportunities here. I was able to leverage contacts at a large international organization, where I worked for many years, to find work, and it keeps coming. The same org will pay me a decent pension and we get health insurance through my husband’s job, plus we live in a fairly low-cost area. I would not want to be the sole earner, but I have a lot of freedom . I don’t think I would want to work in an office again.
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Now braces are a perfect example of something that doesn’t seem like a “insurance” cost to me, using the word insurance to mean shared risk. We have insurance for our house (mostly in case it got destroyed) and we’re counting on the odds of it being destroyed as being extremely low. So, the insurance company figures out those odds, and adds a profit, and a risk cost, and then shares out the risk, with each of us having to pay much less than the cost of our house.
How does that work with braces? What percent of kids need braces these days? In our (admittedly non random sample), it’s probably 90%. That means, as a pool, we are all going to have to pay the cost of our kids’ braces, in our pool. So, who are we adding to the pool? adults? some of which already had braces? Braces seem like something we’re all going to have to pay for, with the only benefit of “insurance” being some scheme of getting people to start saving for the cost very early (well and transferring the money from people who don’t understand that, apparently, everyone needs braces and who never have children).
We pay for our kids’ braces out of pocket; our insurance may cover it in some form, but at a low enough value that the coverage is nothing more than a coupon, one that we aren’t willing to trade for the provider we prefer, who does not take insurance.
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Those of you chiming in on how you’re making “freelancing” work is really interesting to me.
I agree with MH above that a large part of the modern university is becoming “freelance”, in the sense that many ostensibly employed aren’t really, but instead, depend on grants for their income (and, that includes PI’s, but also all the people they hire with their grants, post-docs, grad students, techs, . . . .). Grants are pretty much like getting freelance work (though a bit more systematic, with rules).
Though that is the university reality, I think that the mindset of tenure still plays a huge role in how people think of the system. There are big discussions going on now, as in times of very tight dollars, PIs (and the people they employ) are coming to realize the precariousness of their position. Universities, still, have an incentive to place the risk on the individual, since they can find replacements.
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My BFF is a freelance book editor. She left her last employer and went out on her own, after she couldn’t deal with the HUGE hours she put into her job. She had no life outside of the office. She still puts in long hours, but she doesn’t feel exploited anymore. EVery penny she makes goes into her pocket and there isn’t an asshole boss taking credit for her work. An asshole boss who is incompetant and makes tons more money. She has the same problem of health insurance, retirement, and paid vacation days, but she says she would never go back. She loves the independence and boss-free life.
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There are university/college jobs that aren’t teaching jobs. I’d look into them. You can teach on the side or, if you’re lucky, you can teach during your regular working hours. I ran the tutoring program at a college in NYC. I started as a part-time writing lab coordinator and worked my way up to the director of all tutoring programs simply by being competent. When I left the job in 2000, I was making $55K, which was pretty decent at that time.
You may be too extraverted for this job, but you could also look into library work. A friend of mine started doing this at a college in Brooklyn and really likes the work (she is also very introverted). And library work can often be part-time. A lot of times it does require an MLS, but not always.
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Library jobs are very hard to get these days. A friend left her TT job and went back for an MA in MLS (a 2 year degree). No job yet. I looked into administrative jobs a few years back. Either I was overqualified (bursor’s office stuff) or they used those positions for tenured faculty who were burned out on teaching.
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From a business perspective, you DON’T get unalloyed benefits from hiring temps. You need a work culture – it can’t all be terrified mice working for Donald Trump. Even the Donald has long-termers, I’ll bet! You need people who think their interests are aligned with the longterm interests of the company/institution. I work for the government, and we are supposed to think about tasks in terms of whether they are ‘essential government activities’ in thinking whether they can be contracted out.
And you need to have people value their jobs. If you hire people at $15 an hour to count out pills, all the Oxycontin will go out the back door and they won’t come back. If you hire a pharmacist who has invested time and money in her training and needs to maintain her state license, not so much.
On the other hand, if you hire enough permanent postal delivery people to get all the Christmas cards delivered timely, you are up shit’s creek in August with them all sitting around.
I think there’s a good case, an overwhelming case, that universities are going too far onto the temp side in delivering courses. A freeway flyer can’t be part of the academic community which is part of what kids should be seeking from schools.
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Just $70-100 for tutoring? The going rate here is more like $150-200. Maybe you should move to PA? 🙂
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Also, I know you’re a public school advocate, but you don’t need an education degree to teach at an independent school. In fact, having a Ph.D is better in some cases. The hard part is getting in. Subbing is how most people start, then maybe a part-time gig, which would probably pay better than full time. So,etching to think about.
I tried the consulting thing for a while. I found it hard, but I think it’d be easier now.
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I just wrote a comment about this and it got eaten, but no, you usually don’t need an education degree to teach in a private school in most places.
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“So what does one do with a degree in the liberal arts, if you are geographically limited and can’t go on the larger job market for a tenure job?”
The conventional answer is that a liberal arts degree fits its holder for any job that requires critical analysis and clear exposition of ideas. But this suggestion of a job for our hostess is kind of new. Are you really looking for a job? Full-time or just part-time? Give us a some parameters. There are all sorts of banks, law firms, consultants, stores etc. in northern New Jersey where a person could work.
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“Are you really looking for a job?”
I think that’s what we’re all asking.
Not all admin jobs are given to burned-out faculty. I’ve already done a perusal of the job sites for colleges close to you and have identified some possibilities, but so much depends on your precise skill set, your needs (hours/commute), and the culture of the college.
You also have to be persistent in both looking and applying for jobs. Yes, many jobs have inside candidates, and it’s frustrating when the perfect job for you is going through an obligatory search process and you’ll never be hired. But that is not always the case. I have insights into the way quasi-academic administration people are hired (i.e., the people who work with students in terms of academics and who are not faculty or student life/registrar people), so if you ever want info, just ask.
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Maybe actual temping, of the Kelly Services type, is a way in. It’s what I did in college and one summer in grad school, and as a very good typist and someone who could handle Word, Excel, etc., I made something like $12 an hour in Boston in the late 90s. After a couple of weeks at one law firm I pretty much wrote my own ticket (hours wise, and I was also able to get the temp agency to bump me up from $10 or so to $12)- told them how many hours I’d like to work while I was taking a language class. Once people realize you are smart and can do things, they are happy to keep you around. They might have agreed to pay the temp agency the extra fee for hiring me directly if I’d wanted to work beyond a summer.
Of course this was pre-recession, so maybe it’s a lot harder now.
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bj said:
“Braces seem like something we’re all going to have to pay for.”
I agree that braces or strep throat should not be an insurance item (there’s no point in pre-paying the insurance company for totally predictable expenses, any more than you should be getting “dinner insurance” or “diaper insurance” or “toothpaste insurance”), but I think 90% is way high as an estimate of kids who will eventually get orthodontics, even for upper-middle class kids. With any luck, I hope not to pay for them at all.
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“All this came about because of organizing and activism. If white-collar folks ever get over their love affair with the “individualism” that is screwing them like housecats when it comes to their paychecks and benefits, they can form an arrangement like this, too.”
This is an excellent point. I can confirm that this casualization of the workforce is well and alive in the tech industry in Silicon Valley, where almost no one gets hired into a permanent position for anything anymore. It’s all contract work, stressful because you don’t know when the job will end, when and if you’ll get another one, weak if any benefits, and layoffs happen on a regular basis: companies get rid of a huge portion of their workforce and then hire back cheaper ones with less job security–often outsourcing work to labor abroad or bringing in labor from abroad via H-1B visas.
The answer? What La Lubu said.
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Thanks, guys. No, I’m not looking for a FT job right now. I’m really liking the writing. I still have an itch to write a book. Freelance writing works out well with the family responsibilities. I wanted to add just one adjunct job to the mix, because I missed teaching and also because I wanted a little extra cash. I’ll probably follow up on the leads for online teaching, but I’m a little sad that I won’t be able to ham it up in a classroom anymore. It’s actually a lot of fun.
I have been playing around with writing about the consultant, temp worker thing. It’s a straight business story, so it’s not quite my thing, but I love the topic. If I follow through with it, I might ask you all for feedback and interviews.
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Wendy said:
“You can teach on the side or, if you’re lucky, you can teach during your regular working hours.”
An adjuncting auntie has been doing that this year, although I think she’s not going to last much longer burning the candle at both ends (she’s also got a couple other irons in the fire).
dave s. said:
“A freeway flyer can’t be part of the academic community which is part of what kids should be seeking from schools.”
Now that you mention it, the adjuncting system must wreak havoc when students need recommendations, but the adjunct has long since moved on to Home Depot. (A husband of a friend of my husband had that career trajectory.)
Wendy said:
“Not all admin jobs are given to burned-out faculty.”
Yeah, some go to recent graduates of the institution.
I’ve mentioned before that one of my in-laws is very happy as a technical consultant for a company you’ve heard of. He’s been asked to come on full-time a number of times, but for a variety of reasons, prefers his current status. The hourly rate for consultants is better, I believe, and being a European, he likes his six-week vacations and long Christmases in the old country. If he gets let go from the big-company-you’ve-heard-of, he and his wife have several other businesses. They recently bought a house for cash in a suburb with good schools. This is not a bad model for a high-flyer like him.
There is something to be said for diversification of income streams.
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Laura, one way to make freelance writing pay is to expand your definition of it beyond bylined, mass-market articles and books. (In the past year, I’ve written press releases for a tech startup and maintained a blog for a local arts organization–not bad for a medievalist.)
The down sides are that you’re writing for someone else, and you’re also scrambling all the time for new clients. The up side is that once you land a new client or two, your professional circle expands dramatically, and you have tons of people eager to vouch for you.
Really, if you can string words together without the intervention of an editor, as this blog proves, then you’re way ahead of more would-be writers than you may realize.
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The last time I looked into commissioning corporate writing from someone in the NYC area, the going rate was around $2/word.
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La Lubu is completely right. I don’t get why most white collar Americans are allergic to unionization. The only way workers get rights is to fight for them, and the only way to really successfully fight for them is through collective action. It’s like we’ve completely forgotten how the 40 hour workweek came about in the first place. The general media trend seems to be to fiercely attack the few white collar industries with somewhat robust unions, like teachers and government employees. Why otherwise progressive people don’t see how regressive this is surprises me.
On health insurance, I completely agree that the insurance model is the wrong way to look at health care, because accessing medical care isn’t something we should hope to avoid or do as little as possible. This is why I think it’s absolutely mind-boggling that we trust our health care to for profit insurance companies, whose whole business model is predicated collecting premiums and paying out as little as possible. With fire/car insurance, your and the insurance company’s interests are aligned, in that neither of you want an accident or fire. With healthcare, the goals are completely at odds, as the insurance company really doesn’t want to pay out even for routine life events like check ups, cavity filling, or giving birth (much less actually pay for treatment for illnesses).
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I did some temping in the legal world while I was between full time jobs. It is definitely growing rapidly. There are lots of unemployed lawyers so the supply is there, and there are lots of things that require a lot of people for one project. Normally that’s document review, where someone needs to go through all the email and other documents for a case. Back before the recession junior associates sometimes did that – but even then temping was growing because it got so expensive to bill hundreds, thousands, or on a really big case even tens of thousands of hours as associate rates.
I found it very stressful at first. Projects end and you have no idea where the next one comes from. There was and continues to be downward pressure on pay rates that will probably continue until the legal job market improves. And there were no shortage of people who felt oppressed by the terms of the job. I was surprised how many people I found who really enjoyed it though. Young people who would work a few months and then travel a few months. Older people who had figured out how to make the temp lifestyle work for them, including health insurance and retirement savings.
It continues to move up the food chain though. Lots of new hires even at big firms are hired on a temp or temp-to-perm basis. Sometimes that works out, but certainly not always.
What worries me about the temping situation is that at least as a lawyer there is use for fairly junior people, and for fairly senior people, but outside of the traditional big-firm job (of which there are less, and with less security) it is very challenging to get the training and experience to go from one to the other. Meanwhile IT is slowly but surely eating away at the need for the juniors. And for that matter due to broader trends in how business is done lots of things that lawyers used to do are being done by accountants and other professional service providers at lower rates. And law schools continue to graduate about 2 JDs for every lawyer job.
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Thanks, MichaelB. My cousin, a former law review editor, had to temp for a year before he found a FT job. When you have to pay NYC rent and student loans, it is very stressful.
White collar workers, like lawyers, academics, and writers, aren’t unionizing not because of ideology, but because they can’t. Adjuncts set up unions, but they’re pretty ineffective for the most part, because they are in a separate union from the TT faculty and because there is such a huge supply of desperate, disconnected workers. Same goes for law and other professions.
My publishing BFF will occasionally send me links to job ads that ask for hours of editing work for free. She’s horrified and wouldn’t take those jobs, but other people do. Anything to put on their resume. So, publishing companies keep lowering and lowering the wages for work.
To be an effective union, you need a group of people who are committed to not working for a while in order to demand certain rights. For every one person who is willing to strike, there are a hundred people who won’t. Too many scabs.
Unions also got their start when all the workers were physically in one location, the shop floor. Bonds could form between workers and information could be easily shared. Freelancers, consultants, and temp workers are spread out and don’t know each other.
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Unions also got their start when all the workers were physically in one location, the shop floor. Bonds could form between workers and information could be easily shared.
Also, you could require labor solidarity by smacking people hard.
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Just ran across this article:
http://www.boston.com/yourcampus/news/babson/2013/04/adjuncts_from_more_than_20_boston-area_schools_announce_plans_to_unionize.html
Emerson is mentioned, and their adjunct pay seems to be about $3000-$6000 per course.
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I wonder if the airline magazines still pay. I’ve always felt I had one great piece of writing in me and that the title of that piece was “Sometimes You Don’t Get to Pick Where You’re Going: How to Pass Time in Charlotte.”
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Thanks, Wendy, for the link. There was some useful numbers in there. I just sent the editor at the Atlantic a pitch for a long article on this topic.
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Nice thread, with lots of contributed info!
Regarding unions, I think the union model the white collar folks in the “casual” workplace need to be thinking about are the “union locals” (for subcontractor/skilled labor) & screen actor’s guild type unions. Those are models that circumvented the “unions work for people who work together in a common physical location” issue that Laura mentions. They’re under pressure, too, but they are examples of other collective labor agreements, different from the factory assembly line union model (or the government contract model, like teachers).
MH joked about the use of force, but, some form of requirement to join the group (laws, minimum wages, certification) is probably also necessary and has real costs.
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Laura, wondering if you’d thought about consulting with families who have kids working on college essays. Come to think of it, I’d be in the market for that service. And I think you’d be fantastic at this!
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And, yes, what Y81 said — I am absolutely sure that you are employable in some capacity, but that finding the right position and fit would require working contacts, not answering job advertisements.
The route I see for someone like you finding a job (highly capable, organized, efficient writer, solid social skills) is somewhat orthogonal to the union suggestions we’re having here. The benefit of *not* having required unions is that you could convince someone to let you jump ahead of everyone else (in the right private enterprise, which means, not universities, public schools, or government, but could mean consulting, law firms, start ups, private schools, . . . .). I’m guessing you know that, to some extent, since that’s what S. did, when he had to.
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MH joked about the use of force, but, some form of requirement to join the group (laws, minimum wages, certification) is probably also necessary and has real costs.
I wasn’t joking. I was making that point obliquely. I’m very near the site of the Homestead Strike. There’s a Target there now.
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I guess “only joking” would be more accurate.
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Yes, I did see that you were making a point as well.
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When my husband got laid off last April, he was pretty happy to go back into consulting. He’s had almost as much work as he can handle. His current contract, at 18 months, is way beyond the horizon that the FTEs are looking at even at the same employer. Downside for us — at the moment — getting a new house/mortgage. The banks won’t even look at us until he’s got 2 years of independent contracting. So, I know you’ve got your house settled, Laura, but if others are thinking about going independent, try to settle the house thing while still employed.
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Here’s a tenured prof who was only making $40,000 a year: http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4711
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