professorblind:

Some of these occupations, like artists and writers, are creative; some straddle the line between creativity and (more often) straightforward corporate production (translators, editors, and copywriters); others perform “noncreative” tasks like child care, sex work, surrogate childbearing, or housekeeping.

The reason the creative, media, and tech sectors are so often identified with freelancing is that these industries adopted the casualized freelance model much earlier and much more thoroughly than other industries. As Cohen points out, the shift to precarious forms of employment was pioneered in cultural industries, which have “serv[ed] as a model of flexible, project-based work for other industries.”

That model is now reproduced everywhere from universities to health care to hair salons. But working freelance doesn’t “mean an escape from exploitation or labor-capital antagonism,” as she notes — “corporations that rely on freelance labor have developed alternative methods of extracting surplus value from workers … including an increase in unpaid labor time and the aggressive pursuit of copyrights.” That unpaid time includes everything from researching and pitching articles to invoicing, project management, marketing and sales, and administrative work, all once the responsibility of the employer.