[lbo-talk] the life of a permalancer

[Eric]

When I lived in New York I never worked for Viacom, but everyone I 
knew who did made it sound as bad as this article does. Which is 
weird, because I worked for several other huge media companies on a 
freelance basis and was treated like royalty, relatively speaking and 
for a lowly copy editor: good, timely pay, pretty light workload, 
flexible hours, and usually only spent about 32-35 hours in the 
office but got paid for 40. No benefits, but I worked just two or 
three weeks a month. I was never able to figure out how Viacom got 
away with such treatment when, in my experience, the other companies 
were pretty okay to their employees. Except for that whole 
surplus-value-extraction thing, of course.

Then again, that was during The Boom. Maybe Viacom is the industry 
standard now.


><http://gawker.com/news/evil-corporations-in-action/the-viacom-
>permalance-slave-system-329798.php>
>
>evil corporations in action
>The Viacom Permalance Slave System