Because we’re big believers in using technology to innovate social change, and because all these tech and creative folks tends to be our folks (you know, independent, living and working beyond the 9-to-5), we think SXSW is the prime place to be having some important conversations about the way we’re living, working, and doing business today.

We pitched a panel (featuring awesome thinkers and doers like Etsy, Loosecubes, SnapGoods, Jim Gilliam, and our founder) for this conference, and if you think it’s a conversation worth having, please help it out by voting for it in the conference’s PanelPicker.

Here’s our pitch: Frontier Justice: Can Technology Save Creatives? It’s not a jungle out there—it’s actually a frontier being pioneered by creative and entrepreneurial trailblazers. In the economic Wild West, we frontiersmen (or freelancers) lack things like laws that protect us from outlaw clients who don’t pay, affordable health insurance, or unemployment if we don’t strike gold. Luckily, nobody’s more creative than us, and the homesteading movement we’re leading is set to make the creative, mobile workforce one of the most exciting and liberating places to work. Technology is empowering those of us who currently have the least power—the freelancers, the self-employed creative professionals, and the lone rangers without a traditional career track—to make new versions of the age-old practice of mutual support. We’re using the internet to make online and offline communities, and using those communities to build market power, organize politically, and form connections. It’s a cross between a saloon, a chat room, and a union hall.

And, for something a little different, we also proposed a presentation on a topic on which we’re working to become self-made experts: getting paid. We thought we’d suggest Get Paid, Not Played: The Answer is Rating Clients for the music and film folks, whom we know often work without much guarantee.

Community feedback makes a big difference in determining the lineup for the conference. And with so many ideas out there, please share other interesting ideas you’ve come across that we should help support for the conference.

One reader, Christopher, happens to be a therapist who’s worked with freelancers, and says that for them, having several jobs is a “significant stressor.” Whether they’re juggling because they need more income, are aiming for “breadth” in their careers, or are simply ambitious, he sees that being overworked for prolonged periods of time “ignores the need to have relationships, to foster marriages, to raise children, to care for our spirituality, to exercise and care for our health and all the other things we need to do.”

See the rest of Christopher’s thoughtful response here. 

Photo by Pedro Moura Pinheiro, via Flickr.

I’d like to thank everyone who participated in the Member Elections last month, and send a special thanks to those of you who voted for me, and supported my campaign. Thanks, too, to Executive Director Sara Horowitz, my fellow Board Members Stephanie Buchanan, Trisala Chandaria, Charles Heckscher, Andrew Kassoy, and Hanan Kolko, as well as to the Staff members and other attendees who all gave me such a warm welcome at my first Board Meeting this week. It’s an honor to have been elected Member Representative, and I’m excited by the opportunities ahead.

Running for this position showed me that no matter our titles or industries, we freelancers share common experiences and priorities, so I’m assured that I’ll be bringing both my experience as a self-employed designer and the more universal perspective of an independent worker to our Board conversations. There’s a lot of great stuff in the works, and once it’s rolled out, I guarantee that Members nationwide will be impressed.

However impressive the current work of the Board and our active Members is, though, I can’t stress enough that we’ve only just begun. The modern workforce is changing fast, and the rules in place are not. We’re working under laws that were designed to protect the workers of my Grandparents’ and Great Grandparents’ generations, and they’re simply not enough for today’s workforce.

That’s why Freelancers Union needs your continued help. Whether you write your representatives to ask for their support of healthcare reform, attend a Monthly Member Meeting if you’re in the New York City area (every month is a good month to come check it out!), or make a donation to the PAC, your efforts will go far to help us keep the momentum going, and change the world of today’s worker.

Thank you all, again, for the opportunity to serve on the Freelancers Union Board. I look forward to an exciting two years of bringing advocacy, fairness, and community to the Independent Workforce.

All best,

Joseph Caserto
Member Representative
Freelancers Union Board of Directors

Even though 19.3 percent more graduates are expected to get jobs this year than they did last year, according to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the truth is that many people graduating today can’t expect to work the traditional 9 to 5 for a single employer. Instead, they’ll have to turn to self-employment and/or work multiple part-time and temporary jobs to get by. “Young college graduates working multiple jobs is a natural consequence of a bad labor market and having, on average, $20,000 worth of student loans to pay off,” according to Carl E. Van Horn, director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers. Case in point: almost 2 million college graduates last year were “mal-employed” (working as babysitters or sales clerks for which they didn’t need college degrees) and had multiple jobs, according to a recent New York Times article.

Given these trends, the federal government should—and could—do a lot more to track the ways that people are working today. The last time they studied independent workers in any comprehensive way was six years ago, the last time a survey called the Contingent Work Supplement was administered. The survey has since been discontinued—and it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Freelancers Union Executive Director Sara Horowitz just explained how this bad data is affecting our understanding of the recession and recovery, too, in an op-ed “Why our employment figures are wrong.”

Luckily, even people who don’t think they have an entrepreneurial bone in their body (like me) can blaze their own trail. Above having parents who are entrepreneurs or having some kind of entrepreneurial gene, a study by Babson College found that just taking a few entrepreneurship classes is a greater determiner of who will start their own business.

If you’re a college grad, what was it like after you got your degree? If you just graduated, how have your job prospects been?

If you didn’t catch all the reporting-from-the-scenes #LobbyDay action on Twitter last week, I’ll fill you in on one our most successful advocacy actions yet! Last Tuesday, dozens of brave, dedicated freelancers got up before dawn and braved the rain to lobby for the Freelancer Payment Protection Act.

Six in the morning is early for a bus ride, but it was more than worth it! Members were joined by two representatives from the National Writers Union, including the President of their local, folks from Loosecubes, who provided us with snacks and wi-fi for the ride, and a videographer who volunteered to document the day for us!

All together we were 60 people, a veritable sea of red “Squeaky Wheel” t-shirts. In fact, while one team sat in on the Assembly Labor Committee’s vote on our bill (it passed!), we overheard one Assemblyperson say to another, “Who are those people?” To which the reply was, “That’s Freelancers Union. They’re a powerful new union.” To which we can only say, Yeah, baby!

Splitting up into teams, we zipped around the Capitol building meeting with our representatives—a whopping 36 in all! We snagged lunches from a pretty superb line of food trucks outside, then had an intel-sharing session with our longtime lobbyist Richard Winsten and heard from a few of our bill’s supporters. Barely a day later, we heard that 3 more legislators had already signed on to the bill!

On the bus ride back to New York City at the end of the day we were pooped. Pooped but proud, and pumped to keep pressing to get this bill passed! We were pleased to see that so many policymakers agreed with us that extending the rights and protections that regular employees have to us freelancers is pretty common sense.

See more photos on Flickr, and check out what Loosecubes and Lobby Day team captain Lynn had to say about their experiences as new lobbyists!

Get the full details after the jump.  What: Credit Ready NYC Credit Fair
When: Tuesday, March 22, 4:30-8:30pm
Where: Saint Francis College, 180 Remsen Street, Brooklyn

RSVP now.

(photo by EllePhotographie, via Flickr)

Thanks to Time Dollars, I’m due to get some jeans hemmed from a coworker who’s handy with needles, and I had a piano lesson that finally got my fingers moving again. That was a real score, because I couldn’t work regular private lessons into my budget otherwise. So I’ll have to keep earning Time Dollars to support my piano habit. Nobody’s taken me up on my offer of copyediting, but I did earn some time by… cooking lunch for a week for a coworker.

I usually do a big Sunday cook anyhow, and offered to do the same for someone else. With a couple hours in the kitchen, my lucky customer got to enjoy hearty lentil stew for days. I hear that he has been enjoying his home-cooked, affordable lunches, and I’m looking forward to more piano lessons from my musically inclined coworkers.

If you’re wondering how my coworker was able to afford the lentils, he agreed to paint our CFO’s kitchen. See how the little economy is starting to take hold?

Another interesting trend in TimeDollaristan is people offering group or individual educational opportunities. To date, we’ve had a roundtable on dance history and modern dance, a lesson on HTML markup, and an Excel workshop.

This prompted us to ask whether the teacher of such a class should earn a single Time Dollar for the hour, or if it was fair to collect a Time Dollar from each participant? We didn’t reach a verdict, but check out an interesting place called Trade School that has worked out its own form of knowledge exchange.

What do you think? And what kinds of services would you use for Time Dollars? Dog-walking? Massage? Tax advice? Fun extras, like Cocktail Mixing 101? Would you prefer to offer your professional services within such a community, or use your other skills?

The Times calls Nayantara Banerjee “a modern-day traveling tailor.” Though she has sometimes been contracted for big Hollywood projects, the profile points out that her freelance clients are mostly freelancers or independent workers themselves.

This sounds suspiciously like mutualism to me! Given our recent foray into alternative currencies, aka Time Dollars, I can’t help but wonder if she’s willing to barter . . .

(Head’s up: it looks like the Times is now requiring log-in to see the article online.)

Image by mrjoro, via Flickr. 

Building supports for freelancers can only happen if we know about you–what you’re doing, how often you’re doing it, why you’re doing it, and what you’re struggling with. That’s why it’s so important that you fill out our annual survey of independent workers.

While independent workers constitute nearly one-third of the workforce, there is limited information about the kind of work that they do and the issues that affect them. Freelancers Union aims to fill that knowledge gap through our annual survey. We use the survey results to help policymakers and the media understand issues that affect independent workers, as well as to shape our advocacy team’s agenda to push for legislative changes. Needless to say, the more respondents we have, the better our data and the more we can do. So we urge all independent workers—members or not—to complete the survey.

Your responses are not only helpful to us, but also lead to positive changes for you. For example, in 2009, we conducted a survey of over 3,000 independent workers from across the country and published the findings in a report, Independent, Innovative, and Unprotected: How the Old Safety Net is Failing America’s Workforce. The survey was covered by various news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, which highlighted our finding that 40% of freelancers had trouble getting paid what they earned in 2009, and USA Today, which mentioned that 18% of independent workers were forced to give up health insurance last year, and 39% cut back coverage.

After hearing from independent workers that one of their greatest challenges in 2009 was not being paid for the work they completed, Freelancers Union developed a policy proposal to allow independent contractors to file wage claims through the New York State Department of Labor. Working with New York State policymakers, we successfully convinced the Senate and Assembly to introduce legislation (S8084/A11520), and we will continue to push for this bill to pass in 2011 to ensure that independent contractors have access to the same labor protections that traditional employees do.

If you’re an independent worker—self-employed, freelancer, consultant, part-time, or temporary—please take a few minutes to complete our survey now to advance issues that affect you. And, don’t forget your freelance amigos—email this link on to them, or post it on your Facebook profile: www.surveywriter.net/in/survey/survey937/2010Advocacy.asp