I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger recipe today [update]
By 
This truly is an amazing job offer from Epicurious:
. @epicurious is looking for a sharp, organized, cooking-obsessed Editorial Assistant to join our small corner of @CondeNast. The right candidate will thrive while performing both creative editorial tasks and detail-oriented production tasks.
What will duties would Epicurious assign to someone who just starting out as a writer? Based on the description that follows, they’ll be running Epicurious:
- Newsletter Production (Roughly 20% of the job)
- Recipe Production (Roughly 15% of the job)
- SEO Maintenance (Roughly 15% of the job)
- Writing (Roughly 40% of the job)
- Various Administrative Tasks (Roughly 10% of the job)
The successful applicant will also get a nifty new title.
This is a full-time freelance position based in New York City. Candidates should ideally already live in the NYC area. Relocation funds are not available for this position.
There are plenty of people who work as a freelancers full-time, but a company can’t hire someone to run their company as a full time employee and then call them a freelancer to avoid providing benefits and dodge any other labor laws that it deems inconvenient. And to the surprise of no one, the man making this amazing offer ended his pitch by pinging several organizations for minority journalists.
As an aside, if the leadership at Epicurious is dimwitted enough to tap a bunch of journalists on the shoulder and ask if they’d like to take part in a new form of exploitative labor, I don’t think it is long for this world.
Basically, Condé-Nast — a multi-billion dollar international company that’s been around for more than a century so it can’t even claim to be a meek an ‘umble start up — has come up with an employer/employee model that is worse than Uber’s and I fully expect it to spread like measles in Washington.
The average employer resents having to pay its employees. Employers are always on the lookout for a way to get more labor out of people in exchange for less. The ultimate goal for large employers is to get away with it long enough that they can buy a law that legalizes whatever labor extraction scam they’ve come up with. But even if they’re eventually forced to stop, they’ll still make enough money to make it worth while. Smaller employers will try it too and at the end of the day it will be down to the employee to fight it, endure it or try to find another job for a company that isn’t as exploitative.
Update:
