Showing that in the ambiguous employment armpit of New Jersey, a
dedicated freelancer becomes like a Viet Cong guerrilla—armed with little more
than bamboo, spit, and a whole lot of spirit
For those blog readers who don’t know, Part 9 of the Prentice
Hall series and the three subparts of Part 10 (basically the concluding section
for the tale of the HS-literature project) are on my other blog:
PH 9: A journal entry
showing how my 1997-98 Prentice Hall gig started
PH 10, subpart A: A
closer look aided by a heat-aged journal, before freelancer Mike arrives at the
project in December 1997
PH 10, subpart B:
Mike lends a cheeky western academic’s eye to this process
PH 10, subpart C: Graduating
out of PH School (not such a bad idea)
Subsections below:
Temp agencies: For
freelancers, a necessary evil, and something to try to outgrow
A year-plus with Olsten (1994-95)
Sidebar: the insulting skills test from Olsten
Prime Time Staffing (1997-98)
Interlude: The
occasional downside to temp agencies: plugging the leaky lifeboat, so to speak
Adecco (2009)
Higher-class placement agencies specializing in medical-promo, other
corporate-client editing, and such work (2001-07)
The Creative Group (2006?)
The pros and cons,
especially the cons
Grateful for their role?
The present clot of stuff relates to some general features
of temp and placement agencies as I dealt with them over about a 15-year
period. This would have been a subsection of Part 10 subpart C, but that
subpart was getting too long, so I saved it for here. And, in a way, it may
seem more like technical mumbo-jumbo than most of the rest of the parts of this
story (except for those who’ve worked through placement agencies and are only
too glad to compare notes about them, with some vinegary attitude).
By the way, my comments here on agencies for payroll work do
not imply any conclusions, attitude, or other idea/motivation that I have
regarding literary agencies. They are
generally different kinds of agencies, and in my life for more than 20 years
(from very late 1985 to late winter 2005), my dealings with literary agencies
were “walled off” from my dealings in the paid-work world. (It is only in very
recent years that I would suggest that there are some general parallels [more
than dissimilarities]—not entirely favorable to participants who are relatively
naïve about these sorts of things—between literary agencies that specialize in
genre writers and placement agencies that represent “creative” workers. But
that’s for another possible blog entry.)
I hope you are looking forward to my future story on working
for Prentice Hall’s Higher Education division, when I will hopefully be more
warmed up for it (in a certain way, past summer trouble) in the fall. The PH
School (HS lit) story became a bit of a bear, and in a way this paralleled the
kind of schooling (at large) it is tied to: just as in grade school, you’re shepherded along, expected to conform
(not throw pencils across the room, etc.) and
maybe learning things or adopting practices some of which may not be your bag
(in the late 1970s, I had some amount of pleasure doing the proofs for
trigonometry in high school, but what exactly do you use trig for in later
life??), in the PH project there was a
pell-mell, be-a-good-lemming aspect to the work…. Also, in a way, grade
school can be like what that 1997-98 HS-lit project was (or represented, or
catered to) to an extent: education by
committee, idiot conformity, your being neglected by the prerogatives of the
herd and bone-headed power issues….
But college is more about tailoring education to your
talents, and about your developing sophistication as an individual. And my time
with PH Higher Ed rather echoed this: the
books were not built by committee (and to this extent they were more like
trade books), and your individual power
as a skilled white-collar worker was what was valued. That suited me
better.
But also, the Higher Ed story (from few-month periods in
each of 2001 and 2002) has some eye-openers. For instance, my supervisor Ginny,
who was generally quite good to work for—but who ended up in about September
2002 making a decision that ended my time with Higher Ed for the indefinite
future—did not have an education above high school. But she was in charge of
getting supplement books that were bundled with Higher Ed’s Social Sciences and
Humanities textbooks off to the printer. Is there a tasty “insider story” here?
We’ll see….
Temp agencies: For
freelancers, a necessary evil, and something to try to outgrow
I’ve spoken on aspects of working with temp or placement
agencies before, and will make a few apropos summaries remarks here. I remember,
in 1984-85, some temporary workers doing minor tasks in a special project in
the administrative office at the Marvin Center, the big student union at my
college, where I worked over a five-year period. I remember thinking that that (temping)
was one line of work I never had to do, and maybe hoped I’d never do.
But after my editorial career started in 1990, I found the
occasional need to utilize a temp agency or a placement agency. Note: This sort
of work arrangement was something I did intermittently, and over the long term,
I could work (very roughly speaking) alternating temp arrangements with
arrangements where I negotiated with (and worked for) an employer (that was a
media company) directly (and in fact, all significant cases I had of “entre”
into a new sort of company or field,
from 1990 on, I did without using a temp agency; the only specialized area
where I started with this “form of entre” was medical promotions in 2001, and
even in that field, I eventually started
occasionally working for such companies directly, not through a placement
agency, in 2006. In fact, 2006 was my most successful year money-wise, and
variously throughout the year, I did this via both a placement agency (GLG)
arrangement and via clients I worked for directly.
(It is something of a coincidence that I also, in the
trade-book realm, both worked with
literary agents—four of them, in total, and intermittently—and corresponded with publishers’ editorial
offices directly [starting in 1986]. And in fact, even after the start of
the millennium, when it seemed literary agents had become both essential and
exclusive to getting trade books published, I still heard directly from some
trade-book editorial offices—in 2005 and 2006 [and these weren’t ones I’d dealt
with through any literary agent previously, at least since ~1997].)
A year-plus with Olsten (1994-95). After what I had seen at the
Marvin Center in 1984-85, I wouldn’t work for a temp agency until 1994-95, and
that was Olsten; through Olsten, I worked at an insurance company, and this
overall arrangement was the best thing I could scrape together after the cold,
saddening end to my time at Clinicians Publishing Group in late winter 1994.
The insurance company—I was at the pensions and annuities division of
MetLife—was a very pleasant place to work, and I did consider the idea of going
into that field and (for payroll work, anyway) leaving publishing; but
insurance is respectable work but boring, and—as with sales—you have to have
the personality for it. The crazy office politics that were rampant in
publishing were blessedly absent from insurance, but I felt that publishing was
really where my heart was, so I wanted to get back to it.
Olsten turned out to be bastards in handling an unemployment
claim I made in mid-1995, after my time at MetLife was over. (What triggered
this is an interesting little episode that would add too much meat to this
entry. After MetLife ended, where I got $10 an hour—this had been raised from a
smaller amount when I started there—and which was less than the $12 an hour I’d
gotten at CPG, and following a tiny Olsten-arranged stint at an auction house,
in about late June Olsten suddenly put me in a demeaning clerical position at a
big company’s office in Parsippany, at $8 an hour. The day I started, I asked
to be removed from this and not be placed at a site until they had a job for me
at $10 an hour. Well, there was a kerfuffle where I was taken out of the
placement—there was a misunderstanding, or lie, on the part of either my
supervisor at the client location or the Olsten rep [or both; the Olsten rep
involved was also not the nice one
I’d worked under when I was at MetLife]—and then I didn’t have work through
Olsten for a while. I then filed for unemployment, and on the decision of the
local [Sussex County] unemployment office, I was denied benefits at first on the
premise that I had recently refused work. The rest is a long story that ended
favorably for me, but not before five
months of an unemployment juridical process.)
Then (independent of a temp agency) I started work for Reed
Reference Publishing in October 1995, and the unemployment issue with
Olsten—which was in a sort of court process—was still going on, only to finish
in about December. Winning the most important part of the case, I said good
riddance to Olsten, and never wanted to work for that kind of temp
firm—essentially, what I call an “envelope-stuffing temp” firm—again, and I
never have.
Sidebar: the insulting skills
test from Olsten (this in draft form was a footnote for Part 10 subpart
C that I redacted at the last minute): Similar
to Mike’s getting tested for computer skills in a way he found insulting, I had
a banal experience with Olsten temporary services in 1995. After I had worked
for them at MetLife (doing clerical work, including writing customized letters
to clients) for over a year, almost as if I was coming in completely new, I
believe in May or June 1995, Olsten ran me through a battery of tests in their
Parsippany office to see my full set of basic office/computer skills. There was
some problem with getting the printouts of my test, and as an indirect result,
I ended up taking home a bunch of bum printouts, which I used for scrap paper
for some time after. Anyway, the only thing among the computer skills I proved
good in was Word (I forget whether Word Perfect or MS Word—this was 1995,
remember), which accords with what has been my long experience in the work
world. Among today’s suite of Microsoft programs, I still am better at Word
than anything else; and rudimentary on Excel and PowerPoint, and with basically
no skill at all in what is called Access.
I remember feeling a bit humiliated
at the type of tests I was run through, as if I was to be considered little
better than a potential low-level admin. Needless to say, this was while they
weren’t considering me for my editorial skills (before then, I’d done millions
of words of work at All American Crafts, AB Bookman, and CPG; and in the future
I would work for Prentice Hall, The World
Almanac, Peoples Publishing, and eventually Cambridge Scientific
Abstracts/ProQuest). Mike’s experience of 1998 and my experience of 1995
comprise a good example of what defines what most outsiders would think of as a
“temp agency”—what I call the “envelope-stuffing temp” sort of agency, like
Manpower, Kelly, and Olsten. These handled lower-level office workers and were
a firm part of the business landscape by the 1980s. But over the years in more
recent decades, agencies for “creatives” and such sprouted; as one example,
Robert Half International, today, includes these in its panoply of
different-market agencies; and, more broadly, even lawyers and accountants can
be handled by the relevant temp agencies (including within the Robert Half
fold). The Guy Louise Group was a “creatives” type agency—and then in 2007,
after existing about seven years, it collapsed due to non-payment of its bills
by several of its clients.
Prime Time Staffing (1997-98) was more of a “creative staffing”
agency, or a placement agency, as I would come to identify the likes of Horizon
Graphics and The Guy Louise Group. By June 1998, I was fine with ending my
relationship entirely with PTS. PTS was the sine qua non for my getting into
PH, but then when the manic HS-lit project went on, all PTS did was collect
money off my back (as it did numerous other temps) without adding any value to
the work process.
Once Christina B. ended my time at PH as I’ve described in
Part 10 subpart C (and now you can see that with all my previous experience in
working for nationally-distributing publishers directly, and with my having
dealt with trade publishers as a writer for more than 10 years by 1998, her
condescending attitude as if I should be “tamped down” in my status as a temp
was grossly inappropriate), I don’t know if PTS held out any “hope” of my
getting more editing work through them (and probably I didn’t realistically
expect or desire any from them, anyway). But also, because I had much
experience with getting work from publishing entities without the aid of a temp agency (and had some in hand at the time);
and given my experience with Olsten in 1995 and considering PTS’s parasitical
role in 1997-98, I felt it was right for myself to end my association with PTS.
Luckily there was no nasty incident (regarding PTS alone) to how this
association ended.
Interlude: The
occasional downside to temp agencies: plugging the leaky lifeboat, so to speak
From much more recent experience, I can tell you, among
other things, that one defining feature in common to all the different sorts of
temp agencies is their occasional willingness, for sheer momentary practical
reasons, to try to shoehorn you into work that either is afield of what you want to do or have experience in (but may be
a grubby expedient you might consent to resort to), or is simply something you’re not qualified for, in a way that should forbid
your being considered for it.
(This experience has its analogue for other workers in
different ways: Tony, a fellow freelancer I worked with occasionally in the
decade 2001-10, and with whom I traded many humored e-mails about our work
lives, for years worked in temp arrangements, and this dovetailed with his aim
to be able to collect unemployment when he wasn’t in a temp-agency-arranged
placement. This is one indirect benefit of temp agencies: you are a payroll
employee, with taxes deducted from paychecks, including unemployment tax. Thus,
if you square with the requirements you must meet to collect benefits based on
when you stop having work, etc., you can go on unemployment [a state program].
[I personally didn’t prefer this arrangement, for reasons I won’t delve into
here.] But the downside Tony faced from one or more of the several temp
agencies he worked with is that he sometimes had to require of them not to place him in certain cities [near
the Hudson, like Jersey City, etc.] that they occasionally tried to put him in
[he lived in a township in Passaic County quite close to the western part of
Bergen County].)
(A metaphor for the issue of bad placement by temp agencies
is: deciding to work in a temp role is like getting into a special kind of lifeboat, from a putative emergency
service, after you have been floating unsupported for some scary time. But then
you find the boat occasionally springs a leak, and as a preordained condition of your staying in it, you have to put your
bare buttocks into the hole to plug up the leak. This is what it means to
be subject to occasional bad placements in this work arrangement.)
Adecco (2009). This almost doesn’t merit mentioning, but there
is an interesting aspect to it adding nicely to my gallery of temp-agency
ambiguity. In 2009, the nadir year for many of us who were punched in the
stomach economically by the 2007-08 financial crisis, I bit the bullet and
applied to work for Adecco, meaning sign up with them to get placed elsewhere,
in September 2009. I guess I saw them advertise in the newspaper; I don’t know
why else I chose this firm. And again, as has happened at other junctures in my
life, if I wasn’t financially desperate, I wouldn’t sign up for a placement
agency after all I’d learned about the nature of them since 1994.
Well, as it happened, this place showed its stripes early
enough that I withdrew my application from them when I was still in the
protracted sign-up process. Adecco is yet another big corporation, with offices
throughout the country; this one is based in Europe (Switzerland ?). I read up some stuff
online about them in 2009; there was the usual layperson snark/such where there
was questioning, or such, about whether they were a scam. There was some
information about a legal investigation; without the info readily at hand right
now, I suggest you merely Google “Adecco fraud 2009” and see what you see
(disregard the site that seems to show a “stolen” Adecco Web site page). Let’s
just say that in September 2009 there was enough to find online that I felt I
should be cautious with looking to Adecco for work.
I went to the interview (the office I was involved with was
in Parsippany, as it happened, it was on the same basic office-campus complex
that the Ferguson division of CommonHealth used to be in). I had to stop there
a few times. They even had me watch a video on the procedures to be followed
regarding sexual harassment and some other type of corporate issue, and this
was before I was even fully hired. Anyway, the sticking point was some
questionnaire, an online or intra-office computerized deal, where you had to
answer questions related to how you functioned as an office worker. There were
measures that were obvious enough for testing your honesty (e.g., questions
roughly along the lines of, what if you became aware of a coworker stealing
goods from the office, and/or what if you were required to fudge some data, or
such). I answered as best as I could, to try to reflect how I was as a worker.
Then I got word that I didn’t meet their requirements; they said, fudge your
answers a bit—obviously meaning, show how you could be less than honest
regarding some of the questions, just to get a better score. So, a bit bothered
by this, I took the test again, this time answering “to make myself look
better” (I believe that was almost the phrase given to me), to try to meet the
desired goal.
They came back and said I still didn’t have a good enough
score. In other words, I answered the questions to make myself look worse than
I aimed to be as a worker, to the point where I was a bit uncomfortable with
how I answered, and I still didn’t
pass. At that point, I withdrew my application from Adecco; and this was with
some resignation and annoyance (I felt slightly justified given the item I’d
seen on the Internet about Adecco getting in trouble for fraud in Missouri or
some other Midwestern state). It was better to avoid sleaze rather than cave
into it just to get some money rolling in. And signing up with Adecco didn’t
even guarantee I’d have steady work (from some factual statement I got from one
rep, I think), or work at places I didn’t feel comfortable, or served
professionally well, at.
To add insult to injury, when I talked about this experience
in about 2013 with a man who has run a support group/coaching setup for people
long out of work, in Warwick, N.Y.—a nice man in other contexts, and I
repeatedly attended the group when its main facilitator had previously been a
female who has since left the region—he didn’t quite get what I was talking
about (specifically the creepy computerized-questionnaire situation), or was
surprised as if he found it hard to be true. At one point—he was familiar with
one or more branches of Adecco from his own work experience—he even corrected
me (pedantically) on how to pronounce Adecco’s name (which was petty, given
what ethical anecdote I was trying to relay to him). He knew of a branch of
them in Orange County, N.Y., where apparently they handled jobs like box-making
in a factory, or such. Well, maybe Adecco was on the up-and-up in Orange
County, but the sleaziness I saw in the branch in Parsippany turned me off them
a good bit, enough to withdraw my application. Enough said.
Higher-class placement agencies specializing in medical-promo, other
corporate-client editing, and such work (2001-07). Horizon Graphics and
GLG were different animals. Horizon I’d actually first contacted in later 1993
(they used to run ads a lot in the classified section of the state newspaper),
when I was itching toward getting into substantial (or at least, better-paying)
freelance work. Horizon in 1993 rather snootily said they required three
professional references for its workers—or else they could get sued, was the
rather ridiculous-sounding claim, by none other than Louise A., whom I would
find a principal of GLG in 2004. I did not have three professional references
to use until late 2000 or early 2001, when I would start signing on with
Horizon (and then, I wanted to try to make more money hourly, which the likes
of Horizon would help me do).
Signing on with Horizon—around the time I no longer worked
for The World Almanac, which moved to
Manhattan from Mahwah, N.J., meaning my hourly rate would have to be higher to
accommodate travel expenses (our association ended quite peaceably)—finally
happened, with my first placement through them at a first called Noesis, in
Morristown; this meant a decidedly increased hourly pay. This also started my
association with medical-promotions firms, which I had come closest (but not
close enough) to getting into when I interviewed at a firm called Ferguson 2000
in early 1995.
I worked through Horizon at various firms—with ad/promo
agencies in the Interpublic conglomerate as well as in the WPP conglomerate,
among others—from May 2001 to about April 2004; Horizon had virtually gone
dormant by very early 2004. Then I signed on with The Guy Louise Group in April
2004, and started getting more regular work at medical-promo firms again. I
only found later that both Guy and Louise had started GLG in 2000, after having
been at Horizon for years before (in fact, I met a freelancer who had known Guy
originally from Horizon and automatically thought that Horizon, by 2005, was Guy and Louise, which by that point it hadn’t
been for five years).
Horizon shrunk up enough by mid-2004 that it moved from its
longtime location in Boonton , N.J. ,
to one owner’s home in Montclair .
The separate company of GLG, as I’ve recounted, suddenly collapsed in 2007, due
to nonpayment (or increasingly lay payment) of its bills by several clients,
including the medical-promo firms CogniMed and Access Communications.
The Creative Group (2006?). The Creative Group (which I think
changed its name a bit) was (and still is) a “creative”-staffing agency, and I
think Tony, whom I mentioned above, talked me into signing up with them (he had
been with them, and would continue to after I left them). I was with them a
year, but I wasn’t keen on working with them, and I can’t even remember what
year it was (I can safely say it was within the period 2005-07). But I had
enough other work gigs going on that the few times they called with a possible
assignment, I preempted it by the fact I had something else.
This was a peculiar arrangement. I only had one assignment
with them, a few-week (?) spell doing editing at a small firm in Fair Lawn,
Bruce Leeb Associates (or something like that). The rest of the time (months
after this), I kept them at bay by having something else that occupied my time,
and I think they stopped calling me. Eventually I peaceably cut ties with them.
I might not have mentioned them at all, but for the sake of completeness (and
also in light of the fact that one or more of their reps have turned up among
the “name cards” in my “People You May Know” section of my LinkedIn page) I
include this here.
The pros and cons,
especially the cons
Throughout the years 1994-2007, temp and placement firms
were a crucial aid to my getting certain kinds of work. But as shown with
Olsten and PTS, they could also (not over especially lengthy continuous time,
but badly enough in certain pinching situations or limited periods) become
seedy, parasitical places who seemed to be more out for themselves than for
you. This is aside from the fact that every so often such firms—and this means
Horizon and GLG, too—would try (as I said earlier) to wedge you into a position
for which you really weren’t qualified (by virtue of type of work) or which was
grossly inconvenient (located too far away, such as a gig I had in Manhattan in
2005). Olsten, also (as I said), fought my unemployment claim, and ended up
losing on the bigger-money issue. PTS in 1997-98 was (to me) just distasteful,
and I cut off from them at a good time to do it income-wise (and regarding what
quality of companies I was with).
Horizon simply faded into nonexistence in my life. When they
were virtually dormant in 2004, they spoke as if they would call me when they
had work again, and they didn’t. I was surprised to find, in 2006, that a
freelancer was working for them by late 2005 as if Horizon was back in the
saddle again. So much for loyalty to someone like me.
GLG’s collapse speaks for itself—though I have to say I’ve
always felt rather sorry for Guy, the principal who was left with trying to
mitigate the mess he was in, getting his money in from clients “whenever” and
paying the payroll money that numerous temps were owed (and I know at least one
former worker was suing GLG by June 2007 [End
note]). Others might have felt Guy and Louise were sleazes—I heard stray remarks
to that effect—but I didn’t feel quite that way. I could work with them.
My mother has often said that Guy was more diligent about
satisfying my demands or requests “because you keep after them.” Well, I acted
to protect my interests to earn my money in a timely fashion, and I don’t think
I was too difficult to them. I also found that, when GLG’s checks started to
bounce (which first happened by late 2005 [and happened with a few other
workers] and then happened in a much worse scenario about a year later), it seemed
to be female temps who were being made to wait, more, than was a male like me.
Afterward, Guy (who had a family to support) founded a firm
that wasn’t a placement agency. Louise, I found, was doing placement work again
by 2010. When I was at CommonHealth in 2010, I heard something about Louise
being used as a placement agent, and I was STUNNED. It wasn’t long after that I
have found she was working for ADP, doing placement work. I have never wanted
to work with her again post-2007. When GLG collapsed, she was cut loose from
the situation, with Guy in effect left holding the bag.
Grateful for their role? Temp agencies and placement agencies,
as I said, were key to my getting certain kinds of work (and I basically NEVER
looked to them for permanent placements; rather long story why). But in
general, after a certain point, whether with respect to specific longish-term
gigs or over the very long term of your association with them, you become aware
that they parasitize off you without adding a whole lot to the “work package”
in terms of value for the money the client pays. If a childish person asked,
“Are you grateful to them for their getting you work?,” I would answer that
such childish morality doesn’t really apply to tough-minded commercial
situations, not least when you end up victimized by them without adequate legal
help. Temp/placement firms are a blessing, very loosely speaking, in terms of
getting you work when you’re desperate for it. But their ambiguous nature
becomes evident before too long, and they can sometimes do you a bad disservice.
When you also consider such news stories as, in The Star-Ledger (from 2012?), how a
former state investigator for the Labor Department, in south Jersey, got five
years in prison for taking $1.86 million in bribes from temp agencies regarding
their being certified as in compliance with wage laws—you start to consider
how, depending on the people running specific ones, temp agencies can be an
unmitigated racket. (The news article is headed “Ex-state investigator gets 5
years in bribery case,” and is written by Jason Grant. Wish I knew what date
paper it’s from—I usually scrupulously keep records of that.)
End note. The
person who was suing GLG by spring 2007—there may have been more than one, but
I’d been told of one specifically by a third party—was a former (retired)
teacher, now working as a freelance editor, whom I’d met at Access. This person
roots a few comments I could potentially make about the debatable suitability
of teachers for the type of freelance editing work I’ve long dealt with the
complexities of. But suffice it to say just this: When the symptoms of GLG’s
breakdown were in my lap—i.e., I had several checks that would bounce if I
cashed them—I found (from whatever legal resource I consulted in the library)
that because GLG was a payroll employer of me, what I should do regarding the
bouncing checks was make a formal complaint to the Wages and Hours division of
the state Department of Labor, which I did. Suing was not the first step to
take.
But this teacher/editor had elected to sue GLG (and I’m sure
he had an attorney who came up with some pretext for taking the litigation
route rather than his client’s filing a complaint as I did), and this teacher,
as I could well imagine, had the sort of sense of entitlement that teachers can
have: we can see this broadly from the phenomenon (not at all the teachers’
fault)—which is loud in New Jersey—of their public-employee pension funds
needing to be more fully funded, and particularly the resulting personal
complaints voiced in letters to the editor, the concerted union activity, the
occasional childish rhetoric (in TV ads, or wherever), etc. It isn’t hard to
see that when you are a teacher, and you’ve had union protections your entire
career, you probably feel that, now retired and working as a freelance editor,
you should have the perfectly accessible option of suing your employer if your paychecks
are bouncing.
But I knew, from my own research, that we editors were in
about as “unprotected” a situation (unprotected by unions, anyway) as we ever
were: we had to file a complaint with the state, with whatever slowness and
cumbersomeness that entailed. And as it happened, the state had contacted me
and was just about to interview me on the phone to proceed with the complaint
(this was in June 2007, after my complaint had been filed in about April) when
Guy came up with the last check, and I could withdraw the complaint. (He knew I
had filed a complaint, as I had few other practical recourses with the
situation, but when he produced the last check, I cordially withdrew the
complaint. As I said, I’ve felt sorry for him in this situation.)
