By Timothy Puko
Candy Ibarra had six jobs at the beginning of 2020. Now she has
none.
By March, with a pandemic-stricken economy in free fall, a
Target commercial in which she was going to perform was canceled,
as were at least six other Hollywood projects. Non-acting jobs she
had to help pay the bills, as a private investigator and a
translator, dried up because of travel restrictions and bans on
outsiders in courts and hospitals.
In recent weeks some translation work has restarted virtually
and she has explored customer-service work, but it pays only $9 an
hour.
"It's piddlings," the single mother in her 40s said. "It's just
really hard to stay hopeful."
Creative freelancers -- with little job protection and incomes
reliant on people leaving their homes -- have been some of the
hardest hit in the coronavirus-driven recession, according to
economists. Performers, production crews, ride-share drivers and
personal trainers were among the first to lose work and will likely
be among the last to regain lost ground in the coming months,
experts say.
"These freelancers, they suffer more because they can't rely on
the big corporation to protect (them)," said William Yu, an
economist at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
That is particularly bad news for Los Angeles, which has the
country's second-highest concentration of high-skilled creative
freelancers after Nashville, according to an analysis from Fiverr
International Ltd., which runs a website connecting freelancers and
employers. L.A. had the sixth highest unemployment rate among major
metropolitan areas in April, according to the most recent update
from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. State figures for May put
Los Angeles-area unemployment at nearly 21%.
Some freelancers in L.A. say they are thinking of leaving
entirely, raising questions about the future of a city long full of
creative workers who pay the bills with second, third, and fourth
jobs.
Nashville and New York, the other cities with highest
concentrations of creative freelancers, are also outpacing national
unemployment.
The San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego have high
concentrations of freelancers, too, but many work in technology
jobs like software development that have been largely unaffected by
social-distancing restrictions, economists said.
Workers say the freelance market is flooded with people who have
lost jobs and that employers are asking them to do more for lower
pay -- or just to pitch their services -- because competition is so
fierce. Profiles for Los Angeles-based freelancers doing music,
audio and video-editing work nearly doubled on Fiverr between
February and March, the company said.
The federal emergency aid package from March gives state
unemployment programs latitude to pay freelancers and gig workers
unemployment benefits. California is giving them roughly the same
as those with full-time jobs, up to $450 a week, through the end of
the year. An added federal boost to those payments, $600 a week,
ends in the last week of July.
The trouble for those workers has been part of a wave crashing
the Los Angeles region's economy. Along with film and the arts, it
is driven by hospitality, high-tech manufacturing and international
trade, all industries devastated by the pandemic and likely slow to
return, according to economists.
Its unemployment has far outpaced other California cities.
The number of coronavirus infections in Los Angeles has been
rising sharply. There have been just over 100,000 cases of Covid-19
in the county, according to the department of health, the second
most in the nation behind New York City.
On June 12, Los Angeles County allowed several types of
businesses to reopen, including film and TV production, hotels,
gyms, museums and zoos. But that move came with new capacity
restrictions and cleaning rules that freelancers say make doing
business difficult.
Fitness coach Sophia Dalton, 37, said none of her clients are
willing to train in person at the gym she uses in Santa Monica,
which has reopened, due to fear of catching Covid-19.
She is down to 14 clients training by online video from a peak
of 54. Several who quit are writers and performers who lost their
own jobs and asked for refunds.
"I feel kind of pushed out, and like we're never going to be
able to get back in," she said.
Stephanie Hoffman, 32 years old, a voice and piano teacher, lost
most of her students when the pandemic forced people to stay home.
One third have returned, but she fears they won't stick, due to
frustrations with virtual training. She had to cancel a live
recital for her students, further damping their motivation.
Her savings and federal assistance have helped cover rent, but
she has been denied extended unemployment benefits so far and will
soon face a financial reckoning.
The stress is building. Some nights she doesn't sleep. She has
been having back pain and tightening neck muscles, bad for a
singer. She says she can hear her voice deteriorating.
Her younger sister is an actress and already left the apartment
they shared to move in with their parents after losing her job, Ms.
Hoffman said. They have near-daily, often tearful, phone calls in
which Ms. Hoffman says she tries to cheer her sister up and avoids
talking about her own future.
Write to Timothy Puko at tim.puko@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 30, 2020 05:44 ET (09:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.