Compensation

I’ve made it a point throughout my career to never know what anyone else earns. It’s never helpful, and often terribly destructive. I don’t know how the folks in payroll can stand it. Every two weeks it stares them in the face -- the gross, outrageous, unjust inequity in the salaries of a company’s employees. As a creative director, I was unable to avoid this issue, since I had to hire people and give them raises now and then. And now again, as a freelance writer, I find myself knowing far more about what other people make than I care to. It can really do a job on your brain.

In fact, the whole subject of compensation in all its aspects is confounding. Many of us who freelance are compensated according to the hourly rate we set for ourselves, which is limited by what the market will bear. For some jobs, I think, an hourly rate is appropriate. Not, however, in the case of art directors, writers, music composers and the like. I don’t have an hourly rate, for one reason. The work I do is simply not susceptible of being divided into hourly chunks. Whether I’m thinking, like when I’m trying to solve an advertising problem, or doing the actual writing of copy, I work a little, then I do something else, then I work a little more. But even when I’m not clearly, obviously and exclusively focused on the thinking or writing, I’m often working on it, in fleeting moments over which I have little control, while I’m driving or riding the “el” or almost asleep or out for a run or reading or showering or any of a million other activities. How do I go about charging that time in an hourly way? It’s all a fiction, the notion of “an hour of work.” At least it is with the work I do.

Aside from the hourly rate issue, compensation for writers, art directors and their ilk is also crazy and arbitrary and groundless because you’ve got to factor in experience, talent, speed, prolificity, temperament and other intangibles. How do you quantify all that stuff? Light, medium and heavyweight only scratches the surface of one plane -- experience -- in this complex construct.

So how do you determine your professional worth? Obviously, the market dictates the parameters. Day and hourly rates only come in certain sizes. If you place minimum-wage value on you’re ability, in this area, no one’s going to argue that you’re worth more. But they won’t give you any work either. At the other end of the spectrum, you could announce that your day rate is $5,000, figuring you’ll only need to scare up a couple weeks of work to make your annual nut. But unless you’re a director or something, you just won’t find any takers. So all you can do is ask around to see what other people are making, compare your talent, experience etc., to them, and take a guess. Which means you have to know what other people make. Inevitably you find yourself going down the “How can that guy get that day rate. He’s a lazy jerk who hasn’t had an original idea in years and his copy is DOA. I should be getting about twice what he does . . .” road. It’s enough to drive you wacky.

What about charging what you think you’re worth, in some intrinsic sense? Well, that won’t work either. I mean, seriously, put what you do up against the way a teacher or cop or NBA player or CEO or nurse spends his or her day. Where do you land on the continuum of worth? Talk about a way to drive yourself nuts, that’s it. Often, when I’m about to tell someone what it’s going to cost for me to do a project for them, it takes an act of primal will to snuff the voice in my head which is pointing at me, laughing and screaming “Are you insane? Why would anyone pay anyone that much just to think up an ad?”

That’s when I remind myself that our children’s future is entrusted to teachers making $30,000 a year, while Madonna hauls in more millions for less reason than just about anybody in the history of the world. There’s just no making sense of making money.