WEEK 3: What a way to make a living

Ramon Lobato and Julian Thomas, 2015, ‘Work’ in The Informal Media Economy, Polity Press, Cambridge UK, ch.3.

I feel like the average person would have a glamourized perception of what a media related job entails, however there is a general diversification of what we understand work in the creative industry to be versus what the work actually is. In this weeks reading, Thomas and Lobato gave a realistic description of the nature of work, suggesting that media workers, especially freelancers are often exploited if it benefits the company in some way or can add to the freelancers resume. It was said that the majority of workers within the media industry are not “stars” – they are the workers toiling in “anonymous enterprises” and live off erratic incomes such as occasional freelance work. This instability and unpredictability is a major deterrent for people looking to work a standard 9-5 job however like myself and many people my age in particular, we preger the choice to work in a “less routine way” and enjoy a fluid boundary between work and leisure. However there is a definite difference between infrequent work and underpaid work which is essentially a company setting a price far too low for the hours of work involved. The reading mentioned the companies “Elance” and “Odesk” who were offering $50-$70 for a complete summary of a novel requiring 20-30 hours of work, meaning the person was getting as low as $1.60 an hour. Personally that horrifies me, knowing things like that exist out in the world, but workers are so desperate for money that they are willing to do it.