Is freelancing just exploitation dressed up as independence?

How freelancers can use our strengths to help all workers

I love working as a freelance writer. Even in my current era of being someone else’s employee, I’m a huge proponent of self-employment and freelance work and an advocate for freelancers.

But the more I’ve learned about labor rights and exploitation in recent years (yes, it took me a long time to catch up), the more complicated my feelings about freelance work have become.

Is freelancing the key to freedom and autonomy? Or is it exploitation dressed up as independence?

Freelancing as independent work

For the bulk of my career, I thought only about the freedom of freelancing and self-employment. As a writer with creative ambitions and a hunger for travel, I found solace in earning money through freelancing without being strapped to a desk and a schedule.

I continued to love freelancing through my first stint as an employee, too. When I returned to it after four years of employment, I actually turned down a full-time job offer and asked the company to give me a freelance contract instead. I couldn’t accept the idea of working for a single company, having limited time off and showing up on someone else’s schedule.

Continuing as a freelancer let me work with several publications and companies, learn about a variety of subjects, land bylines all over, work on my own schedule and make more money in less time than I could do as a staffer.

Being an independent contractor meant my clients were legally prohibited from telling me how or when to do my job. For someone who usually thinks other people are wrong when they tell her what to do, that’s a pretty strong argument in favor of freelancing.

One of the best things for a worker about being a freelancer is the lack of expectation of loyalty. Representing a company or brand isn’t part of your job, so you don’t have to drink the company Kool Aid. You can do your work well and move on; you don’t have to expend energy thinking about internal processes and company culture. And even though some companies try to stick non-compete clauses in freelancer contracts, it’s not reasonable or typical (or, probably, legal) for them to restrict who you can work with.

And I’ve written before about how freelancing actually offers more stability than employment.

For people who face discrimination or lack of equal access to traditional work, freelancing can be a lifeline, the only way to earn money. For others, it’s the best way to balance the life they want with the need to earn money in a culture that doesn’t prioritize work-life balance. For yet others, it’s the only way to do the kind of work they want, because their job doesn’t exist in the traditional workforce.

The ability to freelance offers a true sense of freedom for a lot of workers. I came of age into the era of the girlboss and the Great Recession — freelancing was baked in, and I’ve always loved it.

Freelancing as exploitation

But there’s a flip side to all of this feeling of freedom, and it’s — surprise! — worker exploitation.

This has long been the case for freelance arrangements, but the turn to freelancers as a mode of exploiting the workforce has accelerated in the last few decades. Technology has made remote work more feasible and cheaper. Companies have increasingly focused on short-term profits. Unions have all but disappeared in the private sector. The proliferation of knowledge work over manufacturing leaves labor the surest place for many companies to reduce costs.

A freelance workforce is a bargain for companies of all sizes. The pool of workers can expand and contract as business does. The tax obligation is on the worker instead of the company. Freelancers aren’t owed health insurance, retirement contributions, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation or any other benefits — and those don’t have to be managed. Freelancers aren’t part of the employee count, in case a business is worried about reaching thresholds that would require compliance with some regulations. Freelance workers can’t unionize. They’re not protected by labor laws.

In short, hiring independent contractors instead of employees is an easy way for companies to save a ton of money and skirt a lot of employee rights.

Of course, independent workers aren’t causing these problems by choosing to freelance. Companies are to blame.

Companies in industries like mine have so diluted the benefits of being employed that freelancing is often the better route. As they offer fewer staff jobs and disillusion more workers who defect to freelancing, they can hire all of those would-be staffers for a fraction of the cost.

Worse, those who can’t secure employment because of discrimination based on gender, immigration status, parenthood, race, history of incarceration, disability or something else are forced into freelancing and its lack of protections and security, whether they’ve sought that “freedom” or not.

It’s worth considering that the freedom freelancing offers is basically freedom from the constraints companies put on workers in exchange for a paycheck. So much about being an employee is disempowering: counting sick days, asking permission for a day off, weird surveillance, meaningless training, layers of management who can do nothing for you. But these aren’t inherent to employment. It’s just the shitty way employers treat workers who are afraid to lose their jobs.

You shouldn’t have to opt out of the workforce to seek basic dignity in your work.

Freelancing offers a reprieve from that treatment, so it’s a good choice for a lot of workers in our current environment. But it’s not the answer to the bigger problem.

Rather than opting out, freelancers could be a force to fight against exploitation, mistreatment and indignity in the traditional workforce.

Freelancers are workers first

Are we complicit in worker exploitation if we do freelance work? Should we all give up the veneer of freedom, join the traditional workforce, form unions and start worker coops?

I certainly don’t think so!

But when I tout the benefits of freelance work now, I have to think about the problems with this arrangement, too. And how we could use this independent position to support the greater good.

So much of advice for freelancers reminds you to act like a business.

For tax purposes, independent contractors are a type of business. As the proprietor of that business, you’re responsible for all of its decisions and money management. Guidance for freelancers teaches you how to run like a business.

That kind of advice is useful, because it helps you stay organized — pay your taxes, keep your paperwork in order, talk to clients without feeling completely inadequate.

But this view of freelancers does something that’s really detrimental to people and really beneficial to companies: It strips you of your identity as a worker.

Being trained to think like a business in a capitalist culture means being primed for competition, seeing exploitation as good business sense, prioritizing profit and glorifying growth. These messages are insidious in advice for freelancers and solopreneurs; I see the most well-meaning people guarding rate information, paying poverty wages to their own contractors, chasing six-figure profits and burning out in pursuit of higher revenue.

Thinking of yourself as a worker first puts you in your proper place in this ecosystem: Someone from whom companies are extracting labor for their benefit. Regardless of how much flexibility, autonomy and agency you have as a proprietor, in the capitalist ecosystem, you have much more in common with workers than owners.

How freelancers can help all workers

When you recognize your position as a worker, you can act in solidarity with fellow freelancers and employed workers, rather than in competition with them.

You can help other freelancers find work, share rate information and negotiating insight, broadcast red flags and mistreatment, subcontract without greed, and mentor up-and-coming freelancers in your field (without worrying about the cost of someone “picking your brain”!).

You can also use your experience across so many companies to support employees inside those companies. Write LinkedIn recommendations and share job postings with your contacts when it makes sense. Spread intel about employee experiences and company cultures where you feel safe to, to help workers find good companies or ask for changes within their own. Pause work for a company if their employees are striking.

We could join the traditional workforce, form unions and start worker coops! That’s definitely an option! And we’d probably be good at it!

Many freelancers have years of entrepreneurial experience. We learn how to manage a business, self-motivate, communicate with people at all levels of a company, build community with fiercely independent people, become experts in any given subject and so much more. We’re fearless. We’re resilient. And we are scrappy.

And we don’t rely on traditional gatekeepers to make money, so ruffling a few feathers at a traditional job isn’t all that scary to us.

We might look like pawns for capitalists — let the capitalists continue to see it that way.

Freelancers who remember they are workers first are a huge asset in the movement toward a just economy.

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