The Perils of Freelance, Part One: Non-Paying Clients

Working as a freelancer can be very rewarding, for a great many reasons. Working from home, avoiding silly office politics and pettiness, setting your own schedule, picking what look to be the best projects – both in terms of interest, as well as profit – all of these things add up to what can be a great job. There are, however, significant potential disadvantages.

Probably the foremost among these is the non-paying client. You’re contacted for a job, do the work (in some cases, rush jobs, overnight, giving up sleep and stressing out, in general), submit the invoice and…the rest is silence. As the payment deadline hits, then passes, you send a polite reminder – still nothing. Then, perhaps a slightly more terse reminder. Still – nothing but the chirping of crickets.

At some point, you come to the very unpleasant realisation that the “client” has no intention to pay. In other words, you’ve been scammed. “Rankles” is an understatement of what it does to you. This is your job, your living and, when people don’t pay, they are taking money out of your pocket. So, what are your options? Is there any way to get them to pay? If not, is there some way you can gain at least satisfaction?

Unless you have a contract with the “client”, the chances of getting them to pay are few and far between. So much of the freelance translation business is based on trust and, with deadlines often impossibly tight, contracts seem to get forgotten. Particularly if the “client and the freelancer are located in different countries, the chances are slim that you’ll be paid for your work.

That leaves only the second option. For lack of a better word, let’s call it “revenge”. Frequently, these job contacts come from freelancer job aggregation sites, allowing clients to find freelancers and vice versa. One thing you can do is post a message to the other freelancers (as well as the site administrators), to the effect that “Client X” is a non-payer. At the very least, you’ll be doing other freelancers a service, by helping them to avoid the pit you’ve fallen into.

Also, despite the fact that the freelancer will usually have no direct contact with the “end-user” (assuming the “client” is an agency), it’s often clear from the text just who the “end-user” is. For example, the work I did for a recent non-payer was clearly from a very well-known Russian anti-virus software company. If you know who the end-user is, why not drop them a line, informing them that you have not been paid by the agency in question? You can’t expect the end-user to pay you – they won’t and they shouldn’t: they have no relationship with you whatsoever. You might, however, want to remind them that they may find deadlines being blown, as freelancers drop the agency like a hot rock. It may help the end-user to make a decision to look for a new agency.

Again, unlikely you’ll see your money, but – if you’re like me – you’ll get a little bit of satisfaction from the fact that you have made their lives somewhat more difficult. After all, why should they sleep easy, when you’re not?