Working on International Workers’ Day?
Chances are you’re a freelancer!
An eight-hour day, a forty-hour week, annual leave… May Day, or Workers’ Day, began with a demand for an eight-hour day, in the 1880s. People fought, and sometimes died, to achieve these simple labour rights so many of us are able to take for granted.
But the employment landscape is changing fast – since 2021, says Forbes magazine, the number of full-time freelancers has doubled. While few countries track the freelance industry adequately, a number of sources say well over 1.5 billion of us on Planet Earth are freelancers now – at least one in eight of us.
What does Workers’ Day mean for freelancers, who have:
- No pension
- No medical aid
- No inflation-related increase
- No annual bonus
- No on-the-job protection from harassment or bullying
- No sick leave
- No annual holiday?
“For most freelancers, a public holiday is just another working day,” says Nathi Gule, chair of the Southern African Freelancers Association (Safrea), which represents freelancers in the media and communication industries. “It’s a tough market, with stagnant rates, increasing competition and none of the protections against exploitation that employed workers enjoy.”
In 2019, the International Labor Organisation (ILO: https://www.ilo.org/ ) did a groundbreaking report on self-employed workers and small enterprises. It revealed that the highest numbers of self-employed – the turquoise bars seen in the image – are in the developing world: in other words, in countries where even the sketchy protections afforded to freelancers in the developed world is not available.
Those are whopping numbers which indicate that remarkable numbers of workers are as unprotected, in law and custom, as those brave workers who marched for an eight-hour week in the 1880s.
Is it not time that labour organisations, like the ILO (https://www.ilo.org/), the Labour and Employment Relations Association of South Africa (LERASA https://www.lerasa.org.za/ ) NEDLAC (https://nedlac.org.za/ ) and The South African Society for Labour Law https://saslaw.org.za ) sat down with groups like Safrea to brainstorm around protections for freelancers?
“In our industry, there are many vulnerable people who are freelancing – young graduates unable to find work, people with families to feed who’ve been retrenched and booted into freelance work unprepared, older people desperate for work,” says Gule. “They are ripe for exploitation; they should be our concern.