The New Prostitution

A lot of people love the idea of being able to work from home, to work when you want, to have no boss breathing down your neck 40+ hours a week. The freedom to live life the way you want, to travel, to have lunch with friends, to be there when the kids get home from school. All this after working your super easy job in your pajamas.

Ahhh, it sounds like a dream. And it’s obviously real, considering there are hundreds, if not thousands of blogs posting the same information over and over... the same gig sites, the same transcription sites, the same freelance copy editor, survey, and website user testing sites.

The Side Hustle

A side hustle can be anything really, but for the sake of this piece it will mean something that is more passion and interest-related that could one day become a full-time job... if you HUSTLE enough. This would be things like freelance work including writing, graphic design, website design, et cetera, or something that you make and then sell like crafts, art, whatever.

Just admit that it’s a second job.

The term side hustle sounds like an accusation. The very name implies that if you don’t have at least one you are slacking. Even if you have a full-time job where you work overtime, have a family, and maybe you like to sleep or have a hobby that you do just for fun, you are expected to have some kind of ‘hustle’ to make extra cash.

Calling it a side hustle doesn’t change what it really is, it’s a second job. What is the point in trying to glamorize it? I know, saying, “I have a second job,” sounds so lower-middle-class-circa-1988 to younger ears. We live in a world where working a full-time job doesn’t pay the bills anymore, it doesn’t even come close, and pretending that it’s some proof that a person that has several side hustles is somehow better than someone else instead of acknowledging the problem itself, well, I call bullshit.

I personally think that acknowledging it for what it is means a lot. It’s not some fun thing you do for a couple of hours a week that you totally love, and six months from now, thanks to the affiliate links on your blog or your profile on a freelancer site, you too will be making six-figures a month! In reality, it is something that you have to put hours into when you could be hanging out with your kids or your friends that ends up being more work than you expected for less money than you hoped for.

You better monetize that hobby!

Oh, and heaven forbid if you have a hobby that you haven’t found a way to monetize yet. What?!? You like to knit for relaxation? It’s time to ruin that, and turn it into work. You do yoga? Why aren’t you making videos to post online? Maybe it’s because I like doing this thing because it isn’t work, and once it is work then I don’t want to do it anymore.

I find it funny that there is so much out there about self-care right now, at the same time that we expect people to make some sort of money from nearly every single thing they do. On one hand, there is a general nod that yes, we are overworked and need to take time for ourselves to unplug and just exist. On the hand, there is always someone saying, oh you like to do fill-in-the-blank? You should set up an online shop or something, essentially saying that it isn’t ok to just enjoy something, it is only worth your time if you are being paid for it.

The Gig Culture

The gig culture is similar to the side hustle. Where the side hustle is usually some sort of second job that you have that is often your own business like an online shop or freelance graphic design, a gig is a small task or working for a larger company where you are on call for whatever hours you select. Things like driving, delivery, pet-sitting, transcription, one-off writing jobs, and grocery shopping fall into this category.

Too many applicants, not enough jobs.

Let’s just focus on that for a moment, shall we? If you have hundreds of people posting the exact same information to everyone interested in trying to work from home, that means that every one that is trying to work from home is applying to the same limited job sites. That means that any place with limited positions is consistently overwhelmed with applications. It also means that the sites that take on anyone that passes their onboarding process have so many people working for them and there are only so many projects to go around.

There are companies that hire full and part-time employees with great pay and benefits to work remotely. It’s a major thing happening, especially with tech companies, and even online retail companies that still need customer service departments. Unfortunately, this is not the norm yet, so these positions are also limited and tough to get into. And I hate to say this, but, there is a tendency for these companies to seek out younger people just getting out of college, so for anyone older, these jobs are even more difficult to snag.

Too many hours, not enough pay.

This lack of work to go around often results in one thing... the need to work for multiple sites and companies in order to have enough work to make due. This means that someone meaning to find a part or full-time job working at home often ends up putting in more hours than they did at their last regular job. There are hours spent trolling the freelance sites and putting in proposals. More hours scrambling to grab a user test or a transcription project before someone else. Hours looking for more sites that offer work, creating yet another profile. Then, there are the actual hours spent working when you snag a gig.

Too much cheap labor, not enough real work.

Now, this is not to say that anyone working from home wants to be cheap labor, or is ok with it. What I mean is, the pay rate for most of these jobs is ridiculously low, like, possibly criminally low. There are no benefits, no guarantees, no stability.

Working for a transcription site means making roughly .10 to 1.00 per audio recorded minute that you type out. It doesn’t sound horrible except that 15 minutes of recorded audio can take an hour or two to type, depending on the quality of the actual recording. So, let’s say you are being paid .50 per audio minute... that’s $7.50 if you finish it in an hour, $3.75 an hour if it takes two. Yep, less than $4 an hour. Even if you work a full eight hours that day, that’s a whopping $30 or so for a full day. That’s IF you can snag enough jobs to fill the day, and if you can snag jobs that even pay that much.

If you are freelancing, it’s true that you can find very high paying gigs, but these projects are sporadic at best, hard to get hired for, and often are still underpaid for the skill level they expect. The folks outsourcing these gigs, expect an incredibly high skill level for a low rate of pay. It’s why these companies hire by the gig instead of hiring a full-time employee.

Want to have something nice? No problem, but you have to share it.

Another aspect of the gig culture and economy is the renting out of our own property. Hey, not making ends meet with your full-time job and your part-time job? No problem, just let strangers stay in your house. Pick up strangers on the side of the road. Go shopping for people.

This, to me, is ridiculous for a few reasons. First, why should you have to give up your personal space or property in order to just scrape by? Second, this takes regular, everyday jobs from people like hotel workers, restaurant employees, store employees, cab drivers, etc. And third, there are people that buy up properties, sometimes an entire block, in lower-cost neighborhoods and turn them all into short-stay rental style properties creating housing issues, parking issues, safety issues, noise issues, and more.

Conclusion

There seems to be some sort of break between knowing that we are no longer being paid what we are worth while most of the country is being priced out of even the cheapest neighborhoods and knowing that we are being expected to work ourselves to death for the privilege of being barely able to afford rent, or maybe even still not be able to afford it.

While I do believe the remote work is a good and major part of work in the future, there has to be a better way. There has to be something better than working 70 hours a week for less than minimum wage with no stability or benefits. There has to be something better than waiting for that one big gig that lands you a bunch of other big gigs that all those Work-From-Home websites keep telling you about.

Until we find that better way, I will continue to refuse to use ride-sharing and house-sharing companies and other business models like them. I will continue to work my part-time job and my own several “side hustles” until I find one solid job...or, you know, actually finish one of the five or six books I am working on.