And then it occurred to me that their thousands of writers are not employees. They are 1099 contract positions.
And then I remembered the awful stuff that went down when the Fortune 500 company I worked for created WFH positions for my exact job. It was a big fat nope for me for reasons that boiled down to the company invading my home and trying to control my life in ways I found highly objectionable. And then thing got worse as it went along because they put your quota 30% higher if you worked from home for no real reason. This was literally a figure pulled out of thin air by a person high up in the department.
When they found that people were working 11 hours a day and this was a violation of the law on their end, rather than lower the quota, they just got psycho controlling about how many hours a day you could be logged in. So I guess at that point people needed to log off to go pee in order to preserve the 8 hours a day of work time they were allotted.
This has me thinking that there may be deeper systemic issues with the very concept of a WFH employee than just "Well, it is new and different and weird and it just needs good PR." Perhaps the (apparent) Textbroker model is the actual sane thing: If you want to work from home, you get a contract position and are not classified as an employee.
I am aware they did some really crappy things. Unsurprisingly, the company has shrunk in recent years. I left in part because I was having nightmares that I was on a sinking ship.
None of that precludes the possibility that WFH arrangements may be inherently poorly suited to an employee contract and may be better suited to a freelance type situation.
I thought it was worth tossing the idea out there.
And then it occurred to me that their thousands of writers are not employees. They are 1099 contract positions.
And then I remembered the awful stuff that went down when the Fortune 500 company I worked for created WFH positions for my exact job. It was a big fat nope for me for reasons that boiled down to the company invading my home and trying to control my life in ways I found highly objectionable. And then thing got worse as it went along because they put your quota 30% higher if you worked from home for no real reason. This was literally a figure pulled out of thin air by a person high up in the department.
When they found that people were working 11 hours a day and this was a violation of the law on their end, rather than lower the quota, they just got psycho controlling about how many hours a day you could be logged in. So I guess at that point people needed to log off to go pee in order to preserve the 8 hours a day of work time they were allotted.
This has me thinking that there may be deeper systemic issues with the very concept of a WFH employee than just "Well, it is new and different and weird and it just needs good PR." Perhaps the (apparent) Textbroker model is the actual sane thing: If you want to work from home, you get a contract position and are not classified as an employee.