By Caitlin Kelly

This recent column in The New York Times hit home for me:
After all, America is an open society, in which everyone is free to make his or her own choices about where to work and how to live.
Everyone, that is, except the 30 million workers now covered by noncompete agreements, who may find themselves all but unemployable if they quit their current jobs; the 52 million Americans with pre-existing conditions who will be effectively unable to buy individual health insurance, and hence stuck with their current employers, if the Freedom Caucus gets its way; and the millions of Americans burdened down by heavy student and other debt.
The reality is that Americans, especially American workers, don’t feel all that free. The Gallup World Survey asks residents of many countries whether they feel that they have “freedom to make life choices”; the U.S. doesn’t come out looking too good, especially compared with the high freedom grades of European nations with strong social safety nets.
While some Americans are convinced that life in the U.S. represents the acme of personal freedom, in practical reality, it often doesn’t. Especially when it comes to finding and keeping paid work.
When you move to the U.S. from a nation with a stronger social safety net, let alone one with powerful unions and laws protecting workers, the lack of government oversight here is shocking.
To name only one example, many states legally only offer “at will” employment: a company can fire you at a second’s notice for no reason at all, with no severance. People who’ve worked for years, or decades, can be out on the street with nothing but six months’ unemployment benefits to get them, they pray, to the next job; New York State benefits are only $1,600 a month, (taxable income), less than the monthly rent for a tiny Manhattan apartment.
Few nations are as obsessed with the words freedom, liberty and justice — yet Americans’ muscular free-market capitalism and high-spending lobby groups who fight daily on Capitol Hill to protect the wealthy and their corporate interests ensure that the playing field is very far from level.
Some of the many challenges facing American workers include:
Virtually no vo-tech training or government/business partnerships to train, or re-train blue-collar workers into well-paid and badly-needed jobs requiring technical skills. Unlike, say, Germany.
The cost of college or training is too often crippling, even out of reach. When a college degree, let alone certifications to work in technical fields, is unattainable, frustrating, dead-end, low-wage service work looms.
If you desperately need affordable health insurance for you and/or your family, you may take and cling to a job you hate, in an industry you wish to flee but can’t — because market-rate health insurance is unavailable or, if unsubsidized by your employer, unaffordable.
The three-chair hair salon I use, its self-employed owner bedeviled by ever-rising rents, Grove St., New York City
Unions are weak, and the smallest they’ve been in American history. With fewer union members than ever, amidst tremendous income inequality, no one is there to fight, collectively, for workers’ rights and needs. When every man has to fight for himself, it pits individuals against one another — a great way to distract us all from how the rich are getting richer and too many of us are getting nowhere.
Non-compete clauses. Here’s a study that found even lower-level employees are getting caught in these snares, sometimes preventing them from finding work in their field for years. Once you leave an employer, having signed one of these, possibly under duress, you’re stuck with skills and experience you can’t use. Fair? Nope.
My husband and I both work full-time freelance, self-employed creatives; he’s a photo editor and I’m a writer and writing coach. We pay $1,800 a month for our health insurance — a sum ensuring healthy profits for the company selling it since we’re both, for now, in excellent health.
It’s the cost of self-employment.

The millions of us now working without a corporate safety net — no paid sick days, no paid vacation days, no family medical leave, no maternity leave — have no public policies to address our specific needs.
Luckily, New York City has enacted a law that makes it illegal to stiff a freelancer out of their earned income. As of May 15, 2017, deadbeats can face a civil fine of up to $25,000.
We earn less than we probably would in full-time staff jobs, but we’re also free from a tiring and expensive daily rail commute into New York, office dramas or emails at 2:00 a.m. demanding an immediate reply.
Our greatest freedom is deciding who to work with — and whom to avoid.
Since most of us will spend most of our lives working, we hope to find satisfaction in it, when possible, beyond income.
Freedom has value.
im not really sure what to make of this article. I understand each one of your points but I just wanted to point out a couple of misconceptions from ‘not quite the other side” concerning your solutions. High rents can be a problem, yes but as a landlord let me point out that quite a bit of those costs are because of the many government imposed fees required of the landlord. Inspections, management fees, fire protection, water and sewer, electricity, heat, insurance, trash removal, maintenance, etc. Low wages, I agree, but what is the solution? More government? Union workshops? Unions do bring higher wages usually but at what cost? Way higher costs to the consumer for whatever good or service that is provided and those costs are passed on also, to guess who? Quite a few of those high paying Union jobs are WAY overpriced by what can be done by a vibrant open market, especially if some of the homegrown workforce could somehow be protected and trained before being inundated with cheap foreign workers that are being mass injected into our already oversaturated employee pool by an insane open border policy supported by BOTH major political parties albeit for different reasons. I am still trying to figure that one out. Basically I guess my point is that free market Capitalism has worked in this country for close to 300 years now and has produced the greatest economic power the world has ever seen and over the last 75 years or so , since the Federal Government has stuck its nose into areas that it is NOT delegated to be our economy has been a mess. Why in the world do you want the ones that messed things up be the solution to fix them? How about we turn back to what made us great and demand the Federal Government stop “helping” us? I don’t get it.
Hey there…long time, no comment! Good to hear from you again.
I agree, I don’t offer (sorry) any lucid policy solutions.
But I see so many workers really hurt by corporate greed and those injured or killed on the job get little help or redress.
I’m not the biggest fan of unions in every instance, but individuals have very little power to advocate effectively for themselves, even when we’re highly educated, speak perfect English and have the confidence to do so. It’s the lack of individual economic power that always spurs me to post and fight.
You and I have done well as self-employed people, and lucky us (and all our hard work.) Not everyone is in this situation and I want to see more/better opportunities to succeed offered to others. When private entities refuse to do it, yes, it IS the work of government (this is the place where you and I always disagree!) to step up and lead the way. Someone must!!
The US does have the biggest economy – for now. The EU is very close, even if the UK’s departure is taken into account. However, it does seem to me that the US economy has really great benefits for a relatively small number of people (I think # 45, aka forget-what-I-said-about-Muslims, went to Saudi mainly to secure personal profit – they were doing the same). The EU’s growing economy and its social safety net shows that both can be done, but the will to change has to be there. The US has always seen itself as a bastion of freedom when at times that notion has been blatantly untrue (slavery & Japanese internment, for instance). It’s good to question these accepted “truths,” no matter where you come from.
Exactly. Having a billionaire with very few scruples as President — stacking his Cabinet and staff with billionaires — does not bode well for the rest of the nation.
There is this strange tendency to see government as impeding freedom, while ignoring the restrictions on freedoms that life with a smaller government creates–such as the conditions you work in or the housing market. Interesting points.
Thanks…
It would be lovely if more Americans could shed their reflexive hatred/fear and resentment of “government” to understand this better. It’s a very specific blind spot.
I suppose it has something to do with our specific reaction to colonialism.
Americans broke free of authority to create their country — and seem to have hated it (in governmental form, although not corporate) ever since.
It’s the weirdest thing. There are the people who hate government as the authority figure and people who hate corporations as the authority figure. We are like teenagers who can’t grow up.
I hate all authority figures….:-)
Go figure!
I spend a lot of my day being an authority figure 🙂
I know! 🙂 But I suspect you’re quite a bit more humane at it than many.
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