When Maddi Love first started as a freelance web developer, she charged about $500 for her first assignment.
After a week of no sleep and another few years of experience as a freelancer, she realizes that was a mistake. These days, she would have charged up to $3,000 for that same job.
“I was just so excited that somebody was going to pay me for something I really enjoyed doing,” Ms. Love said. “Hopefully other people don’t have to learn the same way I did and they can just skip that route.”
To help people avoid some of those same mistakes and learn more about what Ms. Love calls a “hidden economy,” a new group is working to gather freelancers and independent contractors to share information and resources about anything from how to navigate taxes, how to manage health care expenses and how to decide what rates to charge.
“You don’t know what you should be charging. You don’t know how to structure your contracts, your paperwork, who else you could partner up with in the region,” Ms. Love said. “There’s just so many unknowns when you’re trying to get started and we want to be able to provide resources for that.”
Known as Focus — or Freelancers Organized for Change, Unity and Strength — the group is centering its efforts on freelance workers in the technology and creative industries, from web developers to photographers.
The effort, which has been underway since May and is kicking off the first in a series of quarterly events Thursday, is spearheaded by the United Steelworkers and WH Digital, a creative and technical agency based in Allentown. WH Digital is a product of Work Hard Pittsburgh, a cooperatively owned and operated organization that helps entrepreneurs.
Ms. Love is the director of marketing at WH Digital and serves on the executive committee for Work Hard Pittsburgh.
Though it is partnering with USW, Focus is not aiming to create a union. Federal law makes it difficult for some independent contractors to unionize, Ms. Love said, but the regulations don’t stop the group from working together and doing “many of the things that a union does.”
Locally, USW, which represents more than 850,000 workers across many different industries, is involved in helping a group of tech workers who are contractors at Google’s Bakery Square headquarters to unionize. Those workers, who are employees of the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based tech company HCL America Inc., voted to unionize in 2019 after alleging they were being paid less and offered fewer perks than the Google employees they worked alongside.
In July, USW announced the union and HCL America had reached a tentative agreement that included additional paid time off, language safeguards to provide job security and address pay parity, and wage increases.
Focus has received a two-year grant from the Lift Fund, an organization dedicated to new forms of worker organizing that is backed by the AFL-CIO.
On Thursday, the group plans to welcome nearly 200 independent contractors to the first in a series of quarterly events to help workers connect and to help Focus learn more about the issues that are most important to them.
The gig economy, which could encompass workers from rideshare and delivery drivers to home contractors or painters, has continued to grow in recent years.
From 2010 to 2019, the share of gig workers in businesses increased by 15%, according to a 2020 report from ADP Research Institute, the research arm of New Jersey-based human resources software management company ADP.
Of those workers, 70% said they work independently by choice, not because they couldn’t find a “traditional” job. The flexibility, they said, is the driving factor behind their decision.
“It used to be you stayed at the same job for 10-20 years. Now people are hopping around and they want to do something they’re passionate about,” Ms. Love said.
“Everyone’s got a side hustle and people are trying to take the things they enjoy and that they have skills in and monetize them,” she said. “A lot of that is taking place as freelance work … it’s often not viewed as professional work but it’s dignified work and it needs to be viewed as such.”
Ms. Love got involved in web developing after participating in Academy Pittsburgh, a tech bootcamp that focuses on providing services to groups of people who are underrepresented in the industry. The bootcamp also spun out of Work Hard Pittsburgh and is based in Allentown.
Now, she wants to “help people meet other [workers] in this sort of hidden industry and allow them to have their voices heard,” she said.
“We have a bunch of chess pieces that we’ve thrown on a board,” Ms. Love said, referring to deciding which types of information and resources Focus plans to provide to freelancers first. “We need to know how to prioritize those.”
Lauren Rosenblatt: lrosenblatt@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1565.
First Published: August 12, 2021, 10:00 a.m.
Updated: August 12, 2021, 10:22 a.m.
