WHAT HEELS: Deadbeat Clients
Too many established and struggling businesses share a disturbing MO: They routinely fail to pay freelancers and independent contractors fees owed to them for their labor within the standard 30 days - and especially shameless and heartless companies don’t pay at all. A ground-breaking study by Rutgers University economist William Rodgers finds that roughly 380K of the 900K freelancers and independent contractors trying to make a living in NY were stiffed a collective $4.7 billion last year. Extracting labor from people without pay is slavery, and it is illegal in this country. Some state legislators want to stop media companies and others from paying freelancers “slave wages,” reports Crain's New York Business:
Under companion bills introduced in the Assembly by Speaker Sheldon Silver and in the state Senate by Daniel Squadron, freelancers would be allowed to file a claim through the state Department of Labor to collect unpaid wages, and employers could face stiff personal fines for refusing to pay. …
According to Mr. Rodgers' analysis, more than 35% of freelancers in the state were paid late last year, with the average payment past due totaling nearly $12,000. And nearly 14% were not paid at all, losing out on an average of almost $8,000. (Some independent workers reported experiencing both.)
For freelancers in the five boroughs, wages lost last year could cover nearly two months of household expenditures, according to Mr. Rodgers, who analyzed a Freelancers Union survey of 1,500 New York independent workers to produce his report.
For its part, the 120,000-member Freelancers Union is launching a public information campaign - “Get Paid, Not Played” - to shine a spotlight on deadbeat companies and to build support for the proposed legislative remedy.
Editorial Note: The Stiletto also urges Silver and Squadron to extend similar protections to workers at dot-com and print media companies that spend every last dime of money raised from investors and loans, and then go belly up owing their employees a month or more in wages – as The Stiletto previously noted, the WARN Act does not cover white collar employees. The latest media miscreant to pull this stunt is music magazine Paste, which “told staffers on Thursday that it could not meet its payroll,” reports The Wrap:
Nine of 12 full-time Paste employees were let go.
“We ran out of cash,” vice president Tim Regan-Porter told TheWrap. “We’ve been struggling to sell ads, primarily, for awhile now.”
The three that remain - Regan-Porter and co-founders editor-in-chief Josh Jackson and publisher Nick Purdy - will try to keep the Paste website afloat while they evaluate their options. …
With a circulation of 180,000, Paste magazine was one of the biggest music titles in the country, but financial struggles forced the monthly to combine four issues - April and May, and June and July - into two. The August issue was completed, Regan-Porter said, but they could not afford to publish it. The September issue was nearly complete, he said. (Jackson said those issues will likely not go online so the writers "have an opportunity to take their work elsewhere" and get paid for it.)
How magnanimous of Jackson. Better he and Purdy should have pulled the plug on the June/July issue so as to preserve enough of a financial cushion to pay their employees – and so that the staff didn’t work on several more issues with the expectation that they would be paid when Jackson and Purdy knew all along (or should have known) that they did not have the money to pay them.
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