Self-employed freedom’s not so lovely on 10 grand a year

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/03/self-employed-osborne-entrepreneurs

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Theatre is like sex. When it’s good, there’s nothing you’d rather be doing; when it’s bad, it seems like an awful lot of effort for not much. Sometimes, you know straightaway. I knew straightaway the other evening. When the curtains opened to show a man in a smoking jacket gurning and looking theatrically gormless, I knew I was sunk.

It got even worse as another man, pretending to be a butler, and another man, also pretending to be a butler, started telling a convoluted story and acting out all the parts. As they leaped around the stage, and sweated in the costumes they threw on and off, the audience giggled and guffawed. I, on the other hand, gazed at the walking sticks propped next to tired old knees, and wondered how I was going to manoeuvre my way out.

I managed it, by climbing over a seat, and I thought of the actors trapped on that stage for the next two hours and again that night, and then for every night of the run. And I wondered how often those actors have dreamed of finding an easier way to pay the bills.

I thought of this again when Keira Knightley said this week that she wouldn’t want a daughter of hers to “follow in her footsteps” as an actor because “the amount of rejection is enormous”. Yes, that’s the beautiful international superstar Keira Knightley. And she’s right. Even for the most successful actors, the amount of rejection is “enormous”. I met one the other day who has starred in a cult TV series, but who was feeling a bit fragile after a grim few months of failed auditions.

Actors have to audition for every bit of paid work. Indeed, most freelancers have to audition for every bit of paid work. Whatever you’ve done in the past, the person sitting in front of you, or at the end of an email, only wants to know one thing: are you going to solve their problem now? If you’re not, then the time you’ve just spent trying to persuade them just gets added to the lost oceans of time you now spend doing stuff you would call “work” if it was ever actually paid for.

Most self-employed dream of turning up at an office and putting a jacket over a chair, knowing that jacket will be picking up a tidy sum just by saying that you’re there. They dream of being paid to go to meetings, fiddle with the printer and tweet pictures of cats. They dream, in fact, of being paid, knowing that money they earn tomorrow might not reach their bank account for six months.

There’s an army of us, and it’s growing. The rate of self-employment, according to the latest figures from the ONS, is at its highest for 40 years. Since 2010 38% of the growth in employment has been because of the self-employed. There are now 4.6 million, about 15% of the workforce. Politicians love to call us “entrepreneurs”, as if we’re all about to unveil a blueprint for the next Google. “It’s never been easier,” George Osborne told the Tory conference this week, “for thousands to start their own businesses in Britain.” It certainly isn’t difficult to start a business. It’s keeping one going that’s the challenge.

Most of the self-employed work in building and construction. After that it’s cab drivers, and after that chippies and the “skilled trade”. Most women who are self-employed are cleaners, carers or hairdressers. Does the chancellor really imagine that workers like these are raking it in?

The average income from self-employment has fallen by 22% since the financial crash of 2008. Last year’s figures showed that average earnings had dropped from £15,000 to just under £10,400. This year’s figures from the ONS talk about a “median income” of £207 a week. That, of course, is without hope of any sick pay, holiday pay and paid maternity leave – or, for 70% of self-employed workers, a pension. It starts to make a public-sector wage freeze look like a banker’s bonus.

In his Labour conference speech last week, Ed Miliband said to “every entrepreneur” that “we” needed their “ideas” and “enthusiasm”. He didn’t say how these “go-getting people” were meant to find enthusiasm on £207 a week. He also didn’t say exactly what he meant when he promised the self-employed “equal rights”. Equal rights for what? For answers to emails, or for invoices to be paid? Freedom’s lovely, of course, but the 27% of people who, according to the Resolution Foundation, have registered as self-employed because they cannot get better work might also quite like a living wage.

The play, by the way, was called Perfect Nonsense. It was inspired by PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels, but seemed to bear about the same relation to the original as The Da Vinci Code did to the Mona Lisa. The actors did the best they could. That’s what actors do, often on less than £10,000 a year. They might have to start giving the rest of us lessons in how to make the best of a bad job.