An article written by Tim Langford about the life of a freelancer in the industry: it was originally published as a thought piece by EVCOM as part of their Executive Directors Digest.
'Ken Loach’s passionate and excoriating film Sorry We Missed You exposed the exploitation and human cost to a debt-laden family where Mum Abby and husband Ricky toil, like latter day serfs, in a service-economy based on zero-hours contracts.
The premise for Loach’s story is ‘the gig economy’ - which metro.co.uk recently defined as 'an economy where organisations and businesses rely more on freelancers and independent workers, contracted on a short-term basis’ - and although those of us who work freelance may not be delivering parcels (though I did once have a temporary Christmas job with the Royal Mail tramping Dudley’s impoverished Wrens Nest estate where I suspect the gig economy is now a way of life) a significant part of our industry relies on freelancers to fill temporary jobs or provide short-term services to companies; the BFI’s employment survey of 2017 found 49% of those working in film and video production were freelance.