#09 - Dirty Money
Cash rules everything around everyone and you're mad if you think otherwise
We want money here. This is not a place to pretend money is not (one of) the only thing that holds value in a capitalist society.
And I got very little time for all the live-love-laugh and the money-dont-buy-happyness because honey gimme it and I’ll show you it does…
The year I quit my minimum wage job and started freelancing was the hardest of my life, but the ones after that have been the happiest.
I have never been happier than on a trip to NYC eating ramen daily without looking at my bank account. When I got refused onto a flight and could afford buying another one without emptying my account. When I got locked out my apartment on a Sunday and the £340 locksmith fee didn’t destroy my life.
Because really, we need to feel like we can afford to survive. It’s primal.
I have this image of me and my friend Luca, sat on the floor of my first room in London, circa 2018, smoking out of the window and imagining life if we didn’t have to re-paint photo studios at 11pm for a living.The question was how much money would you need to make to live a good life. There has been a few months, since, where I almost doubled that.
But no one talks about money unless they’re complaining about the lack thereof.
Even in uni, the place that was supposed to get us ready for life, no one really talked money. Taxes? Pretend that don’t exist. Contracts? Pretend you’ll never need one… I remember asking a professor some advice on how to price a freelance gig and having the feeling he was gatekeeping this information out of some primal fear. Old freelancers fear the industry being too small for new generations? Who knows.
They want to push out graduates with a lot of aspirations but no sense of what their labor is worth. Do we need an academically trained army that has no idea of the market, its values and its participants.
I love what Charlotte Rhode did HERE, and I’ll pull this quote, but read all of it:
Design academia needs to get off of its high horse if it wants to become a force for change.
The avoidant and reluctant attitude of academia towards the market and its values seem to make these institutions archaic and elitist. It felt like being an intruder into a class I didn’t belong to. A class where I am not on my way to become a worker, just to have a degree for something. The value is placed on the wrong placemat.
Because at the end of the day, no one asked for that piece of paper. But I use and exchange many pieces of a different paper daily, and that seems more relevant to my ability to live. As Max Weinland answers:
But of course, it’s absolutely mandatory to teach anyone who’s on their way to become a worker about the exchange value of labor and how to correctly assess it. How do I calculate an appropriate hourly and daily rate? How do I invoice? What are my options if a client won’t pay? How can I apply counter-pressure on an exploitative client? And how can I interact with other designers beyond the competition principle? This very idea that there are others in similar situations, that there is such a thing as society, there are class struggles – it’s under heavy attack by market ideology.
And I think we’re not saying fixed market standards, but there has to be a minimum, because all the unpaid or barely paid work we produce, goes to devalue the industry as a whole, whether we like it or not. The fact that anyone can learn how to use tools and charge as little as $50 for a website, commercially, makes it harder for others to set a fair rate, and it sets a precedent. Precedent is the cousin of struggle. Charging a reasonable fee becomes an act of community care and solidarity.
This was the first thing I found when frantically googling “how much should I charge for X” and also the first time I see factors like
• do you like the project?
• will it look good in portfolio?
• what will happen after?
to be taken into consideration, and it’s quite refreshing. As freelancers, we absolutely cannot ignore these. Especially whenever we consider lowering our rates or working for under what we would charge. Who is benefitting from it, and what do I get in exchange.
Little storytime:
I was on a call a few weeks ago with this person in NYC who was looking for a designer to volunteer their time for a project loosely about re-gardening the city and reclaiming green spaces. Sounded all class and for an environmental fun project that has “not crusty” in the moodboard and is for the community, honey I’m always a hard YES. Turns out they wanted to set this up as a contest-style (don’t get me started on that, will keep for another day) where a bunch of designers would pitch ideas and THEN the chosen one would “win” the creative direction of the project.
If you don’t see the problem, you are the problem.
Where it’s perfectly fine for me to donate a few hours a week for a project where I can have some more creative freedom, be the head designer, and be in charge of it from start to finish, it is absolutely unacceptable to make a handful of designers grind for the hope of it. So I ended up kindly refusing, while explaining my views.
Seems like often, the designers that can take these projects are the posh ones that don’t need a salary, making the industry elitist and unaccessible. As a recent report by The Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Center found, in the UK, 52 percent of creative workers are from families with high and stable income—with only 26 percent coming from the working class.
But generally, we don’t talk money, ROI, cost-value etc enough. I always have the feeling people are scared, ashamed or straight up don’t want to talk money. And this is slowly but surely eroding the working class: we lost unionising, we lost the value of the class, we lost community aid. We avoid the topic because it’s “cheap”, and by doing this, we’re cheapening the whole industry.
Disclosing earnings is a huge step in closing the wage gap in the design industry and THIS is another great place to look at (Interns HERE). In December 2019, Eye on Design published an open-source document where nearly 2,800 designers disclosed their earnings along with other relevant information such as age, location, skill level, job title, gender, and race. The main goal was to foster transparent conversations about income, with the ultimate aim of reducing gender and race pay gaps. By removing salary speculation, it also put pressure on managers to provide clearer justifications for compensation decisions.
Similarly, Fruits of Work is an academical project and tool dedicated to reduce secrecy around pay information and by that tackling labour exploitation and pay discrimination, focussing on work in the creative industries.
Pay (AKA MONEY) does, indeed, matter. According to Itsnicethat:
A third of individuals ranked salary as the most important factor when searching for a job with another third ranking it as the second most important factor.
Individuals were much more likely (>95%) to apply for jobs that transparently advertised the salary, rather than job postings that described the salary as undisclosed (50%), competitive (69%), or had no description (50%).
Lack of salary disclosure was the most common frustration when applying for jobs.
Picking up this draft a few months down the line, i am happy to see more folks going in this direction, with places like DJB,Ifyoucouldjobs, Superhi and most recently TBI Jobs declaring+
We firmly believe that applicants deserve to know what is on offer before applying and interviewing. Therefore, we have made it mandatory for every job to include at least a salary range. This ensures transparency right from the beginning, saving both parties the hassle of going through the application and interview process only to find out they have different expectations.
Are we finally moving past the silly idea that money is a dirty topic and realizing the ones benefitting from it staying that way are not the workers? Maybe.
I’m here to see it.
xoxo
G
super accurate 🔥