[This is not quite a follow-up to my entry "What is editing?" of May 10. Also, this isn't just technical mumbo-jumbo; there are a few common types of confusion about terms and general notions that need to be cleared up, so that--for instance--when people hear the term "freelancer," they don't automatically think "temp," and therefore "someone just out of rehab, a loser."]
On June 16, I heard a business-news item on WCBS Newsradio 880 (a New York news radio station) about what a temp worker is versus…. Part of the idea was to say that temps are at all levels of expertise, and employers that use them aren’t necessarily low-quality, etc.
On June 16, I heard a business-news item on WCBS Newsradio 880 (a New York news radio station) about what a temp worker is versus…. Part of the idea was to say that temps are at all levels of expertise, and employers that use them aren’t necessarily low-quality, etc.
A lot of this was old news to me, but it made me realize I should explain a few things that will help you understand other blog entries here that have to do with medical editing. And some of this is commonplace understanding.
In short, if you don’t work at a place as a “permanent employee” or a staffer, then you can be temporary—in one of a few ways:
A temp is placed at a workplace via what I call (and what the industry sometimes calls) a “placement agency,” or a temp agency. Temps can be of a few kinds—relatively low-skilled or low-experienced office workers (such as have been supplied by Olsten, Manpower, a branch of the Robert Half company, and the like), and more-skilled or highly skilled (supplied by a variety of “creative staffing” agencies, or some branches of Robert Half, or—as I’ve experienced in my past work years—Horizon Graphics, “The Gary Laverne Group” [a pseudonym], and so on). The more-skilled temps can be editors, graphic illustrators, accountants (cf. Accountemps, a Robert Half company), and even lawyers!
A temp is an employee of the temp or placement agency, paid usually in a payroll fashion by that firm, with taxes taken out. This agency is paid by the client company at which you, the temp, do your actual work. The client company and the agency have an understanding on how and when the client should pay the agency for the work the temp does; the temp, meanwhile, must always be paid in a timely fashion in the usual way a payroll check is handled (every two weeks, or whatever is understood in the given work situation as the rigorous arrangement). Sometimes, as a matter of happenstance, a client will not be paying a temp agency quickly enough to cover the temp agency’s financial obligations to its workers, so the temp agency will work with a funding company, a sort of bank for businesses, to have the money on hand to be able to disburse payroll checks. How this latter situation works may be clearer when I may look at a particular example of this, when things went wrong.
A freelancer is, in the older usage, a worker who works temporarily—on some pre-agreed schedule (days, weeks, months, or per project, etc.) for a client, with pay agreed to be calculated on a certain basis (per unit of time; per page of work; per other, big unit of work, etc.). A freelancer gets paid by the workplace or the individual client directly—by checks cut individually, with no taxes taken out, and with the result that the freelancer will need to report the income as self-employment income on his or her tax return (on Schedule SE), and for its typical part, the client or employer will send the freelancer a Form 1099 reporting all the money he or she has been paid the past calendar year.
There are professional associations for freelancers, like the Editorial Freelancers Association (based in New York, and which I’ve been a member of, and gotten good help from); there has also been the Freelance Editorial Association (FLEA, based in Boston, Massachusetts—apparently no longer in existence). Such organizations tell you how you can scout for freelance work; how to bill clients; what kinds of typical professional problems to expect; and so on.
These two types of temporary workers, as outlined here, should be fairly easy to understand. Some people prefer being the one, some the other. Generally being a freelancer is more “lonely”—you don’t have the protections you can get from being an employee of a temp agency, as you can get from an employer who is obligated to cut you a regular paycheck, etc. But to me, being a temp can be constricting, the management can be a little condescending (on the parts of the agency you work for and the client you work at), and the temp-agency business model can be apt (on rare occasions) to run into certain odd problems that I can give a vivid example of elsewhere. I think that being a freelancer teaches you discipline, both in terms of attending to your own needs as a worker and in how to conduct yourself in businesslike ways (as in preparing and following up on invoices, etc.). There are numerous pros and cons to both types of temporary worker that can’t be detailed here.
The term “freelancer” versus “temp.” One thing I should point out is that a lot of editorial temp workers (such as those who work at medical-advertising agencies) tend to call themselves “freelancers,” and the clients who hired them also call them this, which I think is, strictly speaking, a misnomer. But another complexity is that so many people—especially outside this employment situation—tend to regard “temps” as second-class, almost like people who recently emerged from rehab, a psychiatric facility, or a prison, or who are some kind of inveterate losers. Thus, to minimize the possibility of undue contempt from others, I like to refer to the types of agencies that handle the highly skilled workers they place as “placement agencies” instead of the commonly more pejorative “temp agencies.”
Being able to get unemployment benefits. Generally a temp can more easily qualify for unemployment benefits than a freelancer can, because the temp works for a payroll-based company, and out of the temp’s pay come payroll taxes some of which cover state programs like unemployment. But be clear on what your state’s rules are for qualifying for unemployment. In New Jersey, at least, you have to have at least 17 weeks of employment from whose pay unemployment taxes were taken out (I think this is the criterion that defines what is called “covered employment”), within the yearlong period that starts 18 months before you file a claim. And of course, when you file a claim, you have to have just left a payroll-type job from which you were cut off through no fault of your own. So, say you file for unemployment in February 2012 as soon as your temp work for Company X has just ended through no fault of your own. In the period September 2010 through August 2011, you have to have worked at least 17 weeks of employment (which could have been for another company than X, say Company Y or Z), which employment was in an arrangement where taxes were taken out to cover unemployment. This simplifies the situation a bit.
Some people prefer doing temp work because it allows them to go on unemployment readily when temp work runs out; they can be in and out of temp work, alternating with being on and off unemployment, for up to a year or more (depending on ability to get extensions). I know someone who has this method down to a science. This may be a legitimate way to bring in income, but I myself would not call this a freelance life, though I believe he has called himself a freelancer doing this.
Placement agencies compared to literary agencies. Especially regarding highly-paying editorial engagements, I like to think that placement agencies are similar in some broad ways to literary agents with regard to the latter’s placing trade books, because, for one thing, in both cases you can’t get access to the “publishing venue” for your work except by these agency routes. (I am especially apt to make the analogy because I have also had experience over years, especially between 1985 and about 1995, in corresponding with trade-book publishers directly, without an agent, before it became common and almost necessary to contact them only through a literary agent. And I also have worked with medical-media firms directly, not through an agency, so I have more of an “in and out” experience of the agency-business phenomenon. When it works well, agency representation can be a lifesaver of sorts for your career and financial needs. But when such an agency fails, there can be very unusual and disturbing problems. I also have experience with a placement agency’s breakdown to talk about [not here], which poses some thorny problems not unlike some you can encounter with a literary agency.)
A few remarks on details of the functioning of placement agencies, and common attitudes associated with these.
“Temp to perm.” Often you’ll hear people who work within placement agencies, whose job is to place temps with clients, talking about a particular “gig” in which they may place you, the temp, as “temp to perm,” as if you are at first working with the client as a temp to see if you fit the work, and for the client to see if you fit them, and then you may be offered a permanent position with the client doing the same kind of work. This option used occasionally to be an intrinsic component of a temp-work offer, or otherwise suggested, to me roughly 10 years ago; today—though I try not to work for placement agencies at all—I would tend not to look for the “temp-to-perm” aspect, or want to even be in a position of having it waved in front of my face. I never liked it that much in past years anyway. And I think, in general, that abuses can readily appertain to this “option”—such as (as I think is not only a credible possibility but may not be uncommon) a client talking to you or your placement agency as if a job for you is “temp to perm” to incur your interest and motivation to do the work, then the client decides not to offer a perm position to you anyway, for whatever reason that was pretty much foreordained.
Temps are dubious workers. This idea—which to me is clearly wrong, not only based on my own experience, but based on today’s business practices—seems common among young workers—among early twenty-somethings, or people with a very narrow range of job history and areas of work. I think it is eminently an unacceptable viewpoint, and I think any employer that allows this attitude to somehow hold sway over how temps are used there is not an employer worth working for.
Why do medical-media firms prefer hiring temps? And can you work for a medical-media firm without doing so through a temp/placement agency? These are two interesting questions, and they touch on the unusual business model of medical-media firms—and the potential for unusual and acutely bothersome problems for the temp/freelancer that can arise when working for medical-media firms.
The answer to the second question is Yes, and I have done this a number of times, in 2006-10, and that for different reasons. (I have seen others work for medical-media firms not through a placement agency, also. How they got the work as opposed to the complex way I got it, I can’t testify to.) But for me, the spur to working for a medical-media firm directly, in 2006 when I lined up a large amount of work, and in 2007 when I initiated working sporadically for one large firm over a number of years, was the breakdown of a placement agency for which I’d worked from 2004 and which went out of business in 2007. When you work directly for a medical-media firm, you can submit your own invoices to it (as I did with a few), payable on whatever schedule they use; or, as I did in one company’s case, you can be incorporated into a client’s “dashboard” system, reporting hours to superiors almost as if you are a permanent employee of the firm.
The first question is tricky to answer. For years I could only speculate on why temps were preferred. Part of what bothered me was the fact that, before 2001, I had about a decade’s experience in doing staff then primarily freelance editorial work, which entailed considerable volume of material I handled. Since, in addition, I could be trusted to handle financial issues (invoicing, etc.) for editorial work, why would a medical-media firm not want to hire me directly as a freelancer, and thus bypass the placement firm that tacked on its own surcharges, etc., to its bill for me? I could even bill it for the same hourly pay I got through the placement agency, and without the surcharges added, this would cost the medical-media firm significantly less per hour. This question puzzled me in about 2003 and 2004.
It quickly became obvious to me that the medical-media firm had its own reasons that did not amount to the concerns for getting good work as cheaply as possible, as was endemic to more normal media firms. But the benefits the medical-media firm derived from using temps were hard (at first) to determine: initially it seemed the main concern was control, in that the medical-media firm wanted to exercise its prerogative to end your work abruptly when it chose (which I found to be factually common starting in no later than 2002); and when it did this, then the only company you could and should address with your concerns was the placement agency, who was technically your actual employer. This buffered the medical-media firm from any fallout from you, if any was expected or feared.
