Living as a freelancer...

Elizabeth Dwoskin in "Begging for Your Pay" (New York Times, December 15, 2010):

"An opaque terminology accompanies these delays. There are “checks” versus “processed invoices,” “mailed checks” versus “cut checks,” “payments processed” versus “payments in the system.” It was always unclear to me whether any of these terms described real occurrences, actual actions taken, or whether they were merely meaningless placeholders for an action that never took place. There is always something that holds up the payment — a lost invoice to be pursued, a person who went on vacation who is suddenly being replaced by someone else, a contract that wasn’t signed, somebody to follow-up with in another, buried department, until you get to that individual who may have actually laid on eyes on your check....

At least Jason Wisdom, Ben Ryan and I have a least some expectation of being paid. That’s not the same for many people doing construction or domestic work in this city. I once interviewed a nanny in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, who said she worked for a year without being compensated. Her job wasn’t even really a job anymore, because she was working for free. But she stayed on because working for free with the faint possibility of getting paid was better than the prospect of not having any job in this economy."