The Paymaster's Lament

I’ve spent a good portion of my editorial career getting hassled by freelancers over payment. Filthy scum! Why aren’t they grateful just to be published? For the exposure? Can’t they see I’m busy?

This is an old joke that somehow remains forever young, and somehow forever true, in the subconscious minds of media companies large and small. My current gig is pretty smart about timely payment due to my employer’s genuinely good intentions and my militant spreadsheet-mongering. What I consider pretty good in today’s market is (a) paying 30 days from acceptance, (b) being able to hit that target 80% of the time or better, (c) getting better about hitting that target each cycle, and (d) when the target is missed, communicating thoroughly and getting it resolved as a personal top priority.

Of course pretty good is not good enough. Good enough would be 100% payment on time, without fail. Of course it’s very rarely good enough for anyone, anytime, anywhere. I’ve been in my current editorial job for a year now, on an annual contract myself, and I still send my nice monthly payment reminder email to the boss. We’ve paid a few freelancers late a few times, but not as bad as most places I’ve worked. So far I only had one freelancer go truly ballistic due to late (by a few days) payment. This freelancer sent a series of angry, escalating emails to me, and then threatened to send a legal threat. I suspect they had decided I was the problem, the obstacle to payment, and they needed to circumvent me, when in fact I was daily pressuring the boss to resolve.

I responded that such escalations wouldn’t likely make much difference, but they should do what they felt they needed to do. They replied with an irate lecture about how I didn’t understand that writers provide everything that publications like mine publish, how dare I, et cetera. On reading this my immediate thought was … oh, honey. Not pity or condescension: I felt both glad and sad that the freelancer didn’t know my history, or the history of our shared profession, and didn’t know just how bad it can get. I sent them a link to this ancient Tumblr post I wrote regarding another freelancer who blew up about late payment—much, much, much later payment—not as a rebuke, but to illustrate that I really did understand, I really do agree, I really will try, and I do consider it my responsibility ethically and personally to get my freelancers paid even when I’m not the one signing the checks.

As I have done in the past when a freelancer gets simmering about late payment, I dutifully explained to my employer the potential for reputational damage when freelancers start complaining about late payment privately, publicly, and/on social media. Not to mention other freelancers declining to work with you, since who wants to work for a deadbeat? Highlighting this possibility is one of my many tactics for inspiring action from colleagues who mean well, but who are overburdened with responsibilities or distractions that may cause them to de-prioritize processing payments.

I felt it was my responsibility to pass along that warning to avoid such bad publicity coming as a surprise, but I also feel it’s best not to pass up the chain everything an angry freelancer says. A media boss, unaccustomed to experiencing firsthand the rage of the unpaid, may direct an editor not to work with such a person again for fear of a repeat performance. This is perhaps understandable in terms of minimizing risk, but I don’t feel it’s particularly fair to the freelancer. We’ve all gotten mad and said stuff, and an unpaid freelancer has every right to be mad! So you can say mean stuff to me about payment, if it helps you vent. I won’t hold it against you, professionally speaking.

BlackBook, my home at the time of that Tumblr post above, had a years-long terrible record with accounts payable. That was probably the worst place I ever worked as the face freelancers metaphorically wanted to punch for late payments. The CEO was notorious for maximizing the “float” between sending and receiving payment among other dodges. He loved to play me off versus the accountant, assuring me he had authorized payment, while telling the accountant that not only were payments not authorized, but the accountant wasn’t allowed to tell me that. This resulted in a psychological death match to see which of us would run out of patience first, as I mercilessly trudged back and forth between their offices, attempting to wear them down with bland patient implacability. It worked about half the time, eventually.

The best place for payment, oddly enough, was Serious Eats, which was the only job where I was actually given control over pressing the button to pay people. It was glorious! And so simple, transparent, and straightforward. We worked from an agreed budget, and the CFO connected a payment service to a bank account where he deposited enough to cover that budget. I signed up freelancers to the service, scheduled their payments in lockstep to their contracts and relevant dates, and everything worked flawlessly. No mistakes, no delays, and everybody happy. Paying people on time was one of the most gratifying aspects of that job.

The reason everyone doesn’t do it this way isn’t the system, of course. It’s the predatory advantage gained by paying late, which you can only remove by removing the predators, or in the case of maladjusted priorities, beating the drum all the time everywhere that on-time payment is fundamental to ethical and sound media business. It may seem great so hold on to a few bucks a little longer, but that thinking snowballs into an endless timesuck for the whole organization to manage communications with freelancers looking for their dough. Not to mention dealing with fallout when one of them goes nuclear.

I haven’t had a chance to try it out, but I really like the idea of Outvoice, a payment system that removes most of the bureaucratic excuses for paying people late. Paying people what they’ve earned feels good! And it feels even better when you pay them on time.