Bonus Episode: The Power of Creative Freelancers (with Mathieu Young)
Episode Description
In this bonus episode, Baratunde follows up on an audience member’s question asked during the live taping of episode six, “Making Work Work for Everyone.” How can independent contractors or freelancers find their collective power to address issues they face as self-employed workers? What would that look like? Baratunde speaks with Mathieu Young, a creative freelancer based in Los Angeles who straddles all the employment labels from self-employed, to employer, and employee about the power of community and what the future may hold.
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We are grateful to Mathieu Young for joining us for this Bonus Episode.
Follow @artoffreelance and @mathieuyoung.
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Note: This is a rough transcript generated by underpaid robots. It will be updated over time.
Baratunde Thurston 0:05
Welcome to How to citizen with Berra today, a show where we reimagine the word citizen as a verb, reclaim it from those who weaponized it, and remind ourselves how to wield our collective power. This is a new episode. I'm Barrington de and
this show is about all of us reclaiming our collective power. And that doesn't just mean in politics. It also means in the economy. It means we need to look at our work lives and ask, is our productivity valued by society? Are we powering an economy that benefits the mini or the few? Are we just widgets in a machine with no rights? Or are we agents of the economy, who have choices about how our contribution shape our lives, our neighborhoods, our environment? We took on many of these questions in our previous episode, making work work for everyone. That was with Michelle Miller, and Saru gr Amman. And we've remained very grateful for both of their contributions. But the questions we have on this topic, are too big to fit in just that one episode. So here is a bonus episode focused on one type of worker. And a question we got from Ned in Madison, Wisconsin, who asked
Ned 1:25
a lot of the folks that I know have a lot of work experience as independent contractors. And I noticed there's a significant amount of shifting of hiring practices, particularly in tech industries, and other ones and people who are self employed. You know, a lot of them are in really bad positions, because they're essentially on their own, and they don't have a lot of the backup of being a full time employee. And I've often wondered if there's an opportunity for independent contractors to actually leverage power away from employers through unionization of industries that aren't unionized, or more collective action. And I'm wondering if that's something that also even people who are full time employed might be able to join in on as well and curious your thoughts.
Baratunde Thurston 2:07
Ned, we've been wondering about this, as well. So we decided to go deeper on this question of how independent contractors who aren't necessarily on the low wage worker into the spectrum feel in this uncertain time and how individuals might be starting to address this issue, but not just as individuals. Now we're making a whole episode because of you, buddy. Thanks. We often hear about gig workers, independent contractors, being people who drive for delivery company or a rideshare service. But there are a wide range of people who get classified as independent contractors. Some are self employed and prosperous, some make a decent middle class living. And of course, others are low wage workers who are having a hard time just making ends meet. I'm somebody who's moved between being employed, and self employed fluidly. Over the past 20 years, I've been funemployed. I've been self employed and all kinds of labels, and I can relate to this feeling of going solo and feeling like there is no labor law for me that it doesn't apply that I don't really have protections and if I want to raise a flag with the client, I don't have the leg to stand on or the lawyer to stand on instead of I was in New York City for years and I heard about the freelancers union. Thank you so much subway ads, and its initiative to fight for state and federal rights for freelancers. The freelancers union estimates that nearly 56 million people, and $1 trillion are added to the economy every year by freelancers. It's a part of the workforce that needs attention and more collective action. So in this bonus episode, we're going to speak with someone who basically only knows the self employed life as a veteran creative freelance photographer in Los Angeles, and someone who's created a community around creative freelancers to help them find camaraderie and support in a field that's usually pretty isolating as a self employed worker. He's thinking about the Civic power and voice this industry could have if it were more organized, especially in this age of Coronavirus. When we see other independent groups starting to come together like the independent Restaurant Association. Matthieu young is an advertising photographer who has shot award winning campaigns from major brands around the world. He's also the founder of art of freelance, an online community for creative freelancers, and hot shot muffler, our production studio in Highland Park, Los Angeles. Matthew, welcome to the show.
Unknown Speaker 4:44
Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
Baratunde Thurston 4:47
So Matthew, you're here with us because you're an interesting person to speak with. on this topic. You have lived the self employed life of a creative freelancer, but you've also essentially become a Small Business Owner yourself, employing one to five employees at any given time over the past few years, and hiring people as you do your own photoshoots as you direct. So you're navigating this topic as an employer. And as a contractor who works with big brands like Samsung or Amex, can you tell us a little bit about your journey, starting out as a self employed photographer some 15 years ago, and how you ended up becoming a creative small business owner?
Mathieu Young 5:30
Yeah, it's a big question. I mean, even before I was a photographer, you know, as an independent contractor, I was a photo assistant. That's how I started my career and started earning a living and getting the experience you know, so I would go and work for other photographers and get paid 150 200 bucks, you know, they'd write you a check. Most of the time, sometimes you get paid the day up, sometimes you get paid a month later, sometimes you'd be chasing him down for six months trying to get paid, you know, I started doing smaller photoshoots and getting paid that way and my career's, you know, grown over the last 15 years signing with agents hiring full time employees, and growing at one point to a team of eight, I think it was between sort of the the full time and the part time people who were working in the studio with me. And then on any given shoot, you know, like you said, we could have, you know, 20 to 100 people that we're employing just for that shoot, whether it's a day or a week, or 10 days, or something like that, to the point of I think this conversation, it's been a really interesting journey I've gone from, you know, not having any business entity and just taking personal checks to my name to becoming doing a DBA to becoming an LLC to becoming an S corp, and gone through lots of different sort of structures, business formations, to find where I am. And to your point, yeah, and both an independent contractor, I get paid on a 1099. But then I'm also an employer, I pay myself on a W two, I pay my full time employees on w twos. And I also pay, you know, lots of what really are independent contractors, people that I hire for one day, but I have to classify them as employees because of California's labor laws. This 85 law that happened last year,
Baratunde Thurston 7:20
we're going to come back to a b five, you rattled off a series of three to five letter words DBA, LLC, S corp, did you go to school for that? Did you just Google it? Like how did you know, to go from taking personal checks in your name, to creating business entities so that you could navigate more smoothly the business that you're in now?
Mathieu Young 7:46
And it's such a good question, because I know zero photographers, or at creative freelancers in general, that got into the field that they're in because they wanted to figure out how to incorporate or they wanted to figure out, you know, their tax liabilities and they want, you know, it's not the reason why I became a photographer, I loved holding a camera and making pictures and the immediacy of that kind of creativity. But you know, as you keep going, and you start to realize that you need to also balance that creativity with the business, thinking, you know, the left brain and the right brain. The thing that, you know, got me to make the transition was every time I screwed it up, you know, every time that I had a tax bill that I was, how am I going to pay that, or every time that I got some letter from the state because I wasn't doing something right. You know, forced me to make that next step and research the next thing and, you know, honestly, a CPA, a good CPA was a superman Savior. For me as a creative it took so much burden off of me as a creative and pushed it on to someone else. I think that's something that we get wrong as creatives a lot is we think, because we are solopreneurs or we're, you know, we're alone, we're independent contractors, we can't have support from other people. But, you know, I didn't want to learn every in and out of the tax code. One day rate paid for a year of my CPA, and aren't I better off doing the thing that I'm good at taking photos and doing my job versus spending all this time trying to learn Turbo Tax and what qualifies as an exemption this year versus last year? So I think that we as creatives also we get scared to take that next step because it is scary, and there's stuff that we don't know. And so we get scared to hire a part time assistant or studio manager we get scared to work with the CPA instead of doing the taxes ourselves. But I do think that if we want to grow our creative careers into successful and sustainable business says we have to take that leap. And we have to make some of those investments. And unfortunately, or fortunately, that's part of being a successful creative, it's allowed to do what they love to do day in and day out and make a living of it. But those were not my favorite times of being a creative was the deep dives. And you know, employment law by any means. They felt like this necessary evil, something you had to do to get it go do the creative part.
Baratunde Thurston 10:36
This doing of the creative part is something you've invested a lot into with the art of freelance program is kind of the other side as my understanding of your professional life. What need were you trying to meet in creating this course and community called artist freelance?
Mathieu Young 10:55
Yeah, you know, being creative freelancer, I wouldn't trade it for anything. It's been the most amazing career path I could have imagined. It's given me just immense amounts of freedom, experience, venture, meeting interesting people, but it's also hard. You know, you are extensively alone. In your creative pursue, there's very little accountability or feedback or community that you would get if you were an employee, you know, we don't have a water cooler. And sometimes even the sort of digital watercooler the social media sphere feels pretty isolating, just because it's very competitive. And people do such a great job of projecting their perfect finished lives, not the work in progress, messy business that we all really are. So Arthur Freeland started as you know, trying to sort of fill the need that I had felt for a long time as a creative freelancer, the workshop is set up to give you some goal setting some accountability, some community, some feedback, and some deadlines for the kinds of personal projects, the important projects, the ones that you aren't being hired to do, but the ones that you know you want to do, because they're your creativity, your soul work, the kind of work you want to get hired to do in the future. So we created the program to kind of fill those needs.
Baratunde Thurston 12:19
I want to kind of bring these topics together a bit. Because you've described through the art of freelance work a bunch of creative freelancers who can be pretty alone, in terms of a lack of a watercooler, lack of accountability, a lack of feedback, you described in your own business structure, that's not the fun part. And you had to figure out a lot of this on your own.
Mathieu Young 12:46
So it's, it's a big tangled web, when you think about freelance and the gig economy, and you know, all the different words we use to describe it. And, you know, it's interesting that we sort of have the same job classification for somebody who is driving for Uber or delivering for doordash, as a musician that does gigs in a stadium, that is also a designer that works from home. And they have very different lives and very different ways of making their livelihoods. But we sort of all get mushed into a job classification. But, you know, for a lot of freelancers, that even you know, very successful ones to ones that are, you know, just starting out or struggling, or wherever they are in the career trajectory, the work can be inconsistent, they have multiple clients, you know, one job leads to the next job, but you don't always know where your work is going to come from six months, three months, one month, down the road. And for a lot of us, our job is done out in the world, you know, we we're not we're not considered essential workers, because making music or photographs or advertisements, or whatever it is, we do, obviously, is not putting the food on people's tables the same way farming and grocery store workers and the first line responders in the hospitals, like, it's not the essential work, but it is done in person with other people. So yeah, the work went away, it became an entirely new world instantly. And so quickly, we started trying to spend our time and you know, we consider ourselves creative problem solvers, when I'm doing that for a client for a photoshoot. So to sort of apply those skills to what is going to be available to create a freelancers. Are we being included in the cares act? Do we need to advocate for that to happen? What kind of petitions Do we need to sign? Once it was clear that there was going to be some unemployment insurance available for 1099 employees? How do you access that it got really complicated with what they called mixed income, which was people that were paid on w twos 1999 when the PPP program came out, it was, you know, is that available to independent contractors, people that are paid on 1099. So we started setting up webinars, these zoom calls, and just asking smart people the questions and then making the information public that they gave us and writing blog posts and sort of how to guides and just sort of sharing the information that we could find, as best we could.
Baratunde Thurston 15:27
When you layer, a pandemic, on top of that, it feels like it adds even more stress to a pursuit to a living to an occupation that's already difficult and isolating an improvised DIY. How have you seen this creative freelance community be affected by? And then how have you responded to this new, more tense, more isolating circumstance?
Mathieu Young 15:54
When we were allowed to do our work again, it was going to be with other people and put us in that sort of health risk and have that conundrum of Do I go back to work and risk my health? Or do I stay at home and, and face the economic consequences? But then also, there was this big lack of a safety net, and all this confusion, you know, it's fine when everything's kind of humming along, and you don't really ask the questions. But this pandemic really did reveal the cavities that existed and those safety nets and creative freelancers, I think, really were affected by it.
Baratunde Thurston 16:26
So what did you all do about that? What did you do with that state of confusion with that? isolation? With that frustration? Did you figure it out? Did you come together? Did you rally?
Mathieu Young 16:38
I have seen more camaraderie in the creative freelance community during this pandemic in the past six months, and I've seen in my whole career, I will say, it does seem like people have come together. But no, sir. I don't think it's been figured out. I mean, I'm sure you could talk to people that still never got the unemployment money that they were, do you know now that the unemployment, extra assistance is run out, they might be living on 150 bucks a week from the unemployment office still not allowed to go back to work and do what they did beforehand? So there's still a lot of issues that exist. But you know, it's a really competitive industry, you know, we're all sort of competing against each other. And I guess that's part of the problem, right? When you don't have any kind of collective organization, it's really easy for companies to pit us against each other information is held really tight to the chest, people don't share things like rates and contract and negotiations. And so we started from a real disadvantage, it feels like so even though Yes, there has been more camaraderie in the past six months, it still doesn't feel like a problem has been solved.
Baratunde Thurston 17:56
I'm ready to come back to AB five. Now. Buckle in, in the state of California assembly bill five, we've got a new set of classifications about what type of worker is full time versus independent contractor, and it's more stringent now. And the fines are higher for Miss classification. And so there seems to be this trade off of sort of freedom for the worker, and the independent status, but protection for the full timer. Who gets reclassified? What has been your experience of this rule, this law on you, and on Creative freelancers that you're in touch with?
Mathieu Young 18:35
Yeah, um, you know, I understand, I think, where they were coming from and trying to do this provide a little bit more of the employer protections, to create a freelancers to gig workers to all freelancers. You know, it's tricky, because we get jumbled. You know, Spielberg and doordash are like, sort of jumbled into this same world. And so I think that it was trying to be one big solution for a complicated problem. I think there was good intentions with it. But it made things only more expensive and confusing for, you know, a graphic designer trying to make a living. You know, for me, when I if I hire a photo assistant to come and help me with lighting for one day, I now have to classify them as an employee, even though obviously, they're an independent contractor. They're showing up for one day doing one job, they work for 100 photographers in a year. But the way this new law is set up, they need to be classified as employee. That's easy. For me, I pay people through a payroll company, we try to write off the costs of hiring people as employees to the clients when we're doing jobs. And we factor that into our estimates, but it's not as easy for everybody. You know, I hear from musicians that are just trying to play a gig at the local venue. And in order to pay their drummer $100 for the night, they got to go get set up with a payroll company and pay them through a payroll company and have taxes withheld, and you can't just give your drummer 100 bucks anymore. But on the flip side, you know, when you were just getting paid on 1090 nines, and before we were classifying people as employees, you know, it left people really exposed, no one was forcing you to be smart about withholding your taxes throughout the years, you didn't have some big tax bill due at the end of the year that you couldn't afford, nobody was encouraging you to pay into the unemployment system so that if something like a global pandemic happened, there actually was a safety net. So there needs to be a third way, a middle ground, some sort of different classification, that's neither an independent contractor with all of the insecurities that come with that, but not an employee status, because that makes it so difficult for somebody to build their business and having to classify people as employees also makes it harder to naturally grow your business. You know, I feel like my business has really naturally grown on a nice steady curve over the past 15 years. And it's not like you turn on a switch. And, you know, one day you're a creative Freelancer getting paychecks under the table The next day, your S corp, with payroll company able to pay people that way, it's a more gradual process, and there's not really a good, you know, middle ground and and we're seeing this with the gig workers too. And you know, a b 22, a bill that's going to be on the ballot in November in California, where, you know, a lot of Uber drivers don't want to work nine to five for Uber and drive 40 hours a week, they want the freedom and flexibility to be able to make up their own hours. But right now we're in this binary position where either they're an independent contractor, when all the insecurities that come with that, and they can make up their own hours, or they're a full time employee, and they have to work 40 hours a week nine to five, and Uber makes their schedule, like, you know, it just doesn't seem like those are the only two options we should have. I want
Baratunde Thurston 21:53
you to explore some of what those other options might look like you've done such a good job of painting this binary, and if we're learning anything in this world, is that most things are on a spectrum. So find a different position on that spectrum that you think makes sense to get the combination to get the flexibility and the relative independence of this contractor status, but not lose the safety net, that so many people didn't have access to not because they didn't want a safety net, but they were forced into a binary, what would it look like to do it differently?
Mathieu Young 22:29
You know, creative freelancers, sometimes it gets, it feels that you get thrown in the deep end, and you just kind of sink or swim. And I don't think that that's a great way either. I do think that some more structure to how you build and grow a business would be helpful for creatives. You know, sometimes, when speaking to young photographers, or young creatives I, even though what I want to say is find your voice and have your vision and know your goals and make art and you know, get unique and make it weird and make it good. I also have to say, but don't forget to get insurance and pay people appropriately and get a bookkeeper and start doing spreadsheets. And you know, again, it is that balance of organization and creativity that I think makes for the most successful creative freelancers. And I think that withholding your taxes as you go is a good thing. You know, when I was younger, I used to brag like, Oh, I don't have to really pay any taxes because I get paid on 1099, I write everything off. And at the end of the year, I only owe you know five grand, but then that number turned into 20 grand, and then it turned into 50 grand. And then all of a sudden I was like, Oh, I have 50 grand to pay the taxes right now. So like estimating your taxes is important. paying into a safety net is important for when situations like this happen, or God forbid you break your leg or fall off the ladder or something else. Workers Comp is important. You know a lot of the stuff that we do the number of times I found myself standing on top of a 12 foot ladder hanging out of a moving vehicle with a camera or, you know, jumping off a boat into the Mediterranean to like get the shot, you put yourself into some risky positions sometimes and like all of that is to say that somewhere between full time employment, and fully independent, there does seem to be like there could be a happy medium that we could investigate and sort of start creating as a as a community, what that would look like.
Baratunde Thurston 24:21
And it's very tense time for a group of workers who are pretty isolated through the art of freelance through your webinars through information sharing, which wasn't common. And still the unresolved tension of this forced binary of freedom versus security of independent contractor versus full time employee. Do you see any path forward any leverage points that can be exploited when independent creative freelancers come together to shift this system more in favor of finding that healthier balance without so much pain?
Mathieu Young 24:55
I really hope so. I mean that what's the alternative? The Alternatively, as the race to the bottom, where we just become sort of commodities, were all Amazon basics, everyone's just racing to the cheapest price. And you see that, you know, I don't want to rag on Upwork because, you know, I think that they have done some interesting work, just try to support the creative freelance world, but just the, the basic model of what they do is sort of sort by price. And you can go find the cheapest option very easily. And it's pushed this race to the bottom mentality where you have to be $1 an hour cheaper than your competitor in order to get listed on top of the search results when people go and look. And if that's all we are, and we're always going $1 underneath each other. It's a bleak future for these creative fields that provide so much joy. And at its best creative freelancers are the ones making all the art and music and culture and film and photos and you know, all the fashion, the stuff that we get so inspired by. But if we just kind of push all that down, and there's not that kind of community camaraderie, unionization, I don't know what you call it, it's a bleak thing. But we are a huge block the stats you mentioned at the top of this, you know, 56 million people, considering themselves independent, you know, not in that full time employment and that number growing significantly, I think it's a big group of people. It's an important group of people. And there is a lot of power, if people could come together, share that information, support each other, and try to create fair and equitable working conditions for everyone trying to do that kind of work.
Baratunde Thurston 26:49
And here, you said you didn't have any answers. He was here yourself. That was a Braveheart speech. So we have a thought in this show the way we set it up where we say the word citizen is a verb or practice. If you interpret the word citizen in that way, what does it mean to citizen to you?
Mathieu Young 27:10
So I love that question. I love the framing for this podcast about reimagining you know, citizen as a verb ahead, you know, I've listened to some of your episodes. And so that thought, has struck me before. And I think I've had a different answer. At different times. It's inspired different thoughts right now, what's coming front for me, is, it's scary to try to have a voice, it feels like like, I was scared to talk to you today about these subjects, because it feels easy to get it wrong, it feels scary to try to bring people together because it feels like you might do it wrong, or someone might yell at you or something like that. But what I have seen is that, the more we're able to fight that resistance, and the more as individuals, we're willing to stand up and speak, to try to bring people together, to join with others, to try to be those kind of magnetic forces in the world, the better things become. And so for me right now, the idea of to citizen as a verb means getting over that fear and resistance, and being willing to have uncomfortable conversations, to meet new people to hear new ideas. Like, for example, we've been phone banking recently, it's super scary, you just think you're gonna get yelled at all the time. But until you start getting over that fear, when you do start getting over that fear, you discover is not nearly as scary as you thought it was. And you can actually have an impact just no matter who you are, how small you think your voice is, where you are in your career. It just not waiting until you get there. Because there is no there's just this journey and be willing to share along the path.
Baratunde Thurston 29:01
I got one more as my last 150 6 million people fall under this category, this 1099 years of America. Yeah. If they came together, based on your experience, what's on the shopping list of different ways. We should be interacting with our society, with our government, particularly with our safety net 56 million people, what do you think they should get done?
Mathieu Young 29:30
I mean, it's a leading question, because I think the answer is a lot, right? Like we could we could build a better world if we were to come together. And you're not just talking about 56 million people, but you're talking about some of the most creative and inspiring and, you know, the best artists and communicators and singers and actors. I mean, this is also a really compelling group of people. I think on this spectrum of the rugged individualism of the United States, you know, Manifest Destiny, which I think create a freelance There's kind of get attracted to that rugged individualism, you know, versus the sort of more social collective kind of political systems. It seems like creative freelancers would be happiest and most successful and most fulfilled, most inspired somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. You know, we've seen the folly of the rugged individualism in our national response to COVID, in my opinion, and you see other countries that have some more collective spirits do a lot better, both from a health perspective and on the economic perspective. And I just think that, whether you're talking about business structures, whether you're talking about the tax code, whether you're talking about health care, whether you're talking about worker protections, bathroom breaks, you know, whether you're talking about rates, whether you're talking about contract negotiations, whether you're talking about any of these things that are really, you know, sticky for creative freelancers, that kind of collective spirit, information, sharing camaraderie, could do a lot of good for people to come together and carve that out.
Baratunde Thurston 31:06
Well, thank you for being willing to share with us along your path. Matthew, I think in some ways you underestimated the impact you've had. We're excited to have spoken with you. Tonight you see your answers, but your questions, which help us all illuminate this very frustrating and often dark time. So I appreciate your time. I appreciate your openness. Appreciate your citizen. Thank you,
Mathieu Young 31:31
man, thanks for doing everything that you're doing. Also, a big gratitude to your team that's putting this all together. And yeah, love hearing your voice out there, man.
Baratunde Thurston 31:45
There were a few ideas that I'm still thinking about after that conversation with Matthew young. One is that you have an entire industry of creative freelancers. That's premise on pitting one Freelancer against the other freelancer. And I would know I've been a creative Freelancer myself. And you're discouraged from sharing pricing information, or anything else that might lead you to not get the job. The other idea that stands out to me is this binary choice, this false binary choice we've been given, especially in the United States, that you can either have creativity and flexibility and independence in your work, or you can have rights. And that is a false dichotomy that I hope we work hard to escape, and on the matter of people being pitted against one another. I think it's really beautiful to see folks viewing themselves more as a collective, especially in such a fragmented industry, that is using power that is understanding power that is people power. So let us all continue to be creative in the question of what does work mean? And who does work actually work for? in every episode, we've promised to give you things you can do to citizen better. In this bonus episode, we're doubling down on everything we said in Episode Six, making work work for everyone, because it's the same topic. If there's more you want to say to us share with us or exchanged with Matthew, hit us up at our email comments at how to citizen.com. As always, if you are digging the show, let the platform's know with a positive rating and a review. And if you want to stay in touch and get updates directly from me, I've got something special for you. Text me 202894844 put the word citizen in the text and you'll get alerted to future tapings, you'll get to chat back and forth with me. And you'll have a chance to find out more about the How to citizen universe and about my own work. How to citizen with bear today is a production of I Heart Radio Podcast executive produced by Myles gray Nick stump. Elizabeth Stewart and Barrington de Thurston, produced by Joelle Smith, edited by Justin Smith powered by you