I’ll make $0 off of all of this by the way.
September 19, 2018 1:58 PM   Subscribe

WorkMarket is a "payment processor" that Huffington Post, Yahoo, and many other media companies use to pay freelancers. WM offers a super-convenient feature called "FastFunds" that gives those freelancers the "opportunity" to be paid immediately, rather than after the usual few weeks that a megacorp will make a freelancer wait, in return for an 8% cut, which works out to about a 200% APR. They won't call it a payday loan, though. [CW: Pointless picture of injured bird at top of article]
posted by Etrigan (27 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
Been thinking about this one informally this afternoon. The legal distinction is between a loan and an assignment of your right to collect payment from the publication. Because WorkMarket will not come after you for the money if the publication defaults, and because WorkMarket collects directly from the publication (I'd love to see their contract), and because you have no right to "repurchase" your claim, that may well be correct, under NY law. But I still don't like it. I looked up the "user agreement" (aka freaking contract!!!) and note that it looks on quick inspection as if WorkMarket charges a 10% fee right off the top anyway, for the privilege of getting paid.
posted by praemunire at 2:07 PM on September 19, 2018 [4 favorites]


This was a very angry read for me. Seriously, HuffPo? Pay shit and pay late? And the NYTimes uses this service? Ridiculous.
posted by dobbs at 2:20 PM on September 19, 2018 [4 favorites]


In order to get paid by one of the large movie studios for a piece of work at one point, I had to first pay them for the work needed to add me to their gargantuan payment system.
posted by humuhumu at 2:26 PM on September 19, 2018 [10 favorites]


Does the employer get a kickback or rebate from the fastfunds penalty amount? I didn't see it mentioned in the article and a quick web search isn't telling me anything useful.
posted by mattamatic at 2:27 PM on September 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


You'd have to see the contract to know. But in theory the benefit to the company is obvious. WorkMarket stands between the publication and the freelancers clamoring to get paid. It's (effectively, probably not legally) lending the publication money. Honestly, it's harder for me to understand why WorkMarket wants to do this in an era of unstable media entities, but presumably they've crunched the numbers themselves.
posted by praemunire at 2:35 PM on September 19, 2018


It doesn't have to be a payday loan to be a shitty deal.
posted by theora55 at 3:17 PM on September 19, 2018 [5 favorites]


It’s always so impressive when a large corporation finds yet another way to fuck the little people!
posted by scratch at 3:23 PM on September 19, 2018 [7 favorites]


Ugh, I’m actively working on growing my freelance business. Until now, the clients I’ve worked with have paid super promptly, no fuss, paper checks in the mail. And there are plenty of small companies in my field. But also plenty who are part of giant media conglomerates; how long until I run into this extortionate nonsense just to get an invoice paid?
posted by uncleozzy at 3:30 PM on September 19, 2018


Disgusting. I've quit jobs over lesser forms of payday bullshit. Am I right that if the company that's paying you uses this and you want to be paid promptly, the service takes almost 20% of your pay? Makes me want to spit.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 3:33 PM on September 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


Journalism isn't the only field in which this sort of fintech firm is getting involved in 'mediating' payment to small vendors. My partner's small business was recently contacted, repeatedly, and with high-pressure tactics, by C2FO offering to get outstanding invoices to a multinational in the transportation industry paid more promptly at a discount.

This wasn't a cold call—they had all kinds of personal information including outstanding invoice values. The language suggested there wouldn't be any payment without dealing with them. The whole matter still isn't fully resolved, but normal payments seem to have continued without significant delay. I'm waiting to see what sort of stick is going to accompany the carrot.

You can see from their website how they spin it as doing you a favor by providing this 'financing'. I don't know I'd put them quite on the same plane of existence as payday lenders, but the whole thing certainly stinks to me.
posted by bcd at 3:49 PM on September 19, 2018 [5 favorites]


And the NYTimes uses this service?

That's news to me. The article says they use it for editorial freelancers, but I freelance for the NYT pretty regularly and they still have their circa-2005 in-house invoice system as of a week ago when I sent an invoice and as of today when I logged in to check on payments.
posted by msbrauer at 3:49 PM on September 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


> the usual few weeks that a megacorp will make a freelancer wait

My freelance writing days are long over, but very few of the publications and institutions I did work for paid me for anything I did in less than a month.
posted by The Card Cheat at 3:54 PM on September 19, 2018


What the absolute FUCK is the reason for the horrific picture of the wounded cockatoo with an arrow through its body at the top of the article????? It illustrates nothing discussed in the article and is in extremely poor taste. We don't sprinkle in some pictures of mortally wounded humans in an article about banking. Why in the world would that be done here with a poor parrot who almost certainly died? And why hasn't anyone commented on this?

I really would like to resign from the human race.
posted by nirblegee at 4:35 PM on September 19, 2018 [4 favorites]


Thanks for the warning nirblegee, I'll be skipping this one.
posted by tavella at 4:49 PM on September 19, 2018


Funny, my eye has gotten so used to blocking out superfluous elements on a webpage that I didn't even take in what that was (I think I thought it was another power line behind the bird). That's just gratuitous. Yuck.

UPDATE 2: ADP, the human resources conglomerate that owns WorkMarket tells me they have “decided to temporarily suspend WorkMarket’s FastFunds offer until we can review the practice more carefully.”

Ha! Of course, you could've reviewed the practice before you started it, but I guess that wouldn't be the startup leech-intermediary-disruptor way.
posted by praemunire at 5:17 PM on September 19, 2018 [4 favorites]


Holy crap, I didn’t even notice that either. Mods, can we add “CW: Pointless picture of injured bird at top of article”?
posted by Etrigan at 5:32 PM on September 19, 2018


"From a financial wellness perspective" Well, I learned a new euphemism today.
posted by surlyben at 5:42 PM on September 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


Mod note: Added, carry on.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:42 PM on September 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


From a financial wellness perspective

Sadly, this is exactly the kind of nauseating rhetoric people like this use ALL THE TIME.
posted by praemunire at 6:00 PM on September 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


Related w/r/t publisher shittiness: Interview Magazine Sidesteps 300 Unpaid Creditors and Relaunches: "Interview, the splashy art and fashion magazine founded by Andy Warhol in 1969, [...] was able to skirt around paying $3.3 million owed to nearly 300 creditors–including the Hammer Museum, a litany of freelancers, photo agencies, staff (longtime former editorial director Fabien Baron has sued Brant for $600,000), and top modeling agencies–by filing Chapter 7 bankruptcy so that owner and collector Peter Brant could buy it back (from himself) through a new holding company for $1.5 million."
posted by nicebookrack at 7:04 PM on September 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


We don't sprinkle in some pictures of mortally wounded humans in an article about banking.
We certainly could though and I'd consider it a lot more relevant than the bird.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 8:30 PM on September 19, 2018 [4 favorites]




krisjohn, there’s nothing in the linked page that’s even close to being pertinent—it’s all about employee rights, which are quite different from freelancer rights. This is really just an extreme abuse of the globally common practice of factoring. I’m not aware of any jurisdiction in the world where factoring is illegal.

But I don’t think that it’s very important here that it’s legal. The important thing is that it’s exploitative, and presented to individuals in precarious positions.
posted by tkfu at 3:06 AM on September 20, 2018


I’ve been freelancing on and off since the mid-90s, and I only ran into problems getting paid once. A publisher didn’t pay me for several months; after four months I threatened them with legal action, and wouldn’t you know, I got a check in the mail within the week. I was fortunate in that the delay didn’t disrupt my life, but my conception of financial wellness places a strongly worded email far above forfeiting a percentage of my money to some random assholes to get my money.
posted by scratch at 3:54 AM on September 20, 2018


I read this yesterday and watched the video. Then, I cancelled my sub to the NYTimes and sent this link as the reason. Now the video is unavailable.

For those who missed it, it was a WorkWatch higher-up and a NYTimes higher-up sitting on a couch gushing about one another to a live audience.
posted by dobbs at 6:12 AM on September 20, 2018


So, when are they just gonna stop paying people entirely?
posted by The Whelk at 10:31 AM on September 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


I do some work for a large pharma company, and they push payments out to the limit of the contract (90 days). If you want the money sooner, there's a healthy, sliding-scale discount you have to give them based on how much less than 90 days you'd like to be paid. They're basically monetizing their subcontractors and suppliers powerlessness.
posted by Mental Wimp at 2:36 PM on September 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


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