There are many street gardens in New York, large and small. If it’s windy, or even if it’s raining a little, it’s not uncommon to see a lot of people with computers in the gardens from morning to night. If you go up to them and ask them, they are probably freelancers.
Freelancers make up about a third of the workforce in the United States, and a larger share in New York. The “freelancers”, naturally, do not include people who occasionally help out with odd jobs, but rather workers who pay variable income taxes at the end of each year, meaning that their employment may be variable, but their income is relatively stable.
There are a wide variety of industries that can hire freelancers, and any type of work that can be paid on a piece-rate or hourly basis qualifies. The fashion industry is one such industry, and almost every large company, especially in the design department, often employs three or five freelancers, either to fill in the gaps or as a matter of configuration. I know several designers from the United Kingdom, even if they can do full-time, most of them also chose to freelance. One is because most of them are not troubled by their status, and the other is that they are good at their craft and have enough capital to bargain with their bosses on working hours. For example, most of them are only willing to work four days a week, and Thursday night in New York is bar day, so they all want to sleep at home on Friday.
I guess most people would like to be free if they had the conditions, like a skill. Indeed, in quite a few ways, freelancing has many advantages over a fixed career, or else it wouldn’t often be envied. First of all, the freedom of working hours: no need to go on the alarm clock, you can sleep until you wake up naturally every day; no need to work from 9 to 5, sitting in the office by the minute; if there is a ball game, you can go to see it any time you want, as long as you come back at night to finish the work you have to do. Secondly, the freedom of the workplace: sitting in a park or a cafe can be called “work”; thanks to the development of communication nowadays, even to a beach house in the United Arab Emirates or a resort in the Alps, as long as the computer can be covered by the network, freelancers can “start work” at any time. “No need to report their whereabouts to the boss. I had such a wonderful experience myself that I snuck back to Beijing for two summers, meeting friends for tea and dinner during the day and working in the Western Hemisphere at night before I went to work. When I later put my Beijing gifts on my colleagues’ desks in New York, they all stared in disbelief.
These are the visible benefits. The biggest benefit of freelancing, which is less visible to outsiders, is what it brings to the soul: it’s turning labor into a consciousness. While friends around them are complaining that their bosses are “insatiable”, freelancers find that they have no such opportunity or need to complain. They can work as much or as little as they want, whenever they want, without the pain of being under the control of others, so they always have a fairly healthy work ethic and psychology. In addition, since they are paid by the hour, bosses mostly try to minimize their overtime use in order to save costs, unlike full time workers, who hate to force them to work until dawn every day. And from the freelancers’ point of view, they are not as resistant to overtime labor as they were when they were working full-time, because according to the labor law, the hirer must pay 1.5 times as much for hourly-paid workers who work more than forty hours a week. That is, you must earn more if you work more. The more you do, the bigger the number on your tax return at the end of the year must be.
All in all, it seems like a boon for freelancers to have work to do at any given time, and working is often their happiest moment. Work seems to be a completely voluntary act, and the dynamics of labor are like an early entry into communism.