This morning 15 people were made redundant in the London office of the [...]]]> Despite having recently lost my job (technically I resigned, but that was really a case of rat abandoning sinking ship) and been made effectively homeless by the credit crunch, I have more reasons to be cheerful than most of my colleagues in educational publishing.

This morning 15 people were made redundant in the London office of the company I do most of my freelancing for. As the day passes more and more round robin emails with short ‘goodbye, stay in touch’ messages keep dropping into my inbox. They don’t say much but from phonecalls with various folk I gather the atmosphere is awful. Lots of managers meeting behind closed doors, lots of desks being hurriedly cleared.

For me, however, things are looking up. In fact, I’m currently working on three separate projects for three different departments of the same company. Because I don’t take up desk space, because I’m happy to work on short-term contracts with no guarantee of future work, because I don’t require holiday or sick pay, PAYE or benefits, but I’m perfectly plugged in to the company culture and know the products inside out, I’m the perfect choice in a situation like this. I know some of my freelance colleagues are suffering as publishers stop outsourcing but I wonder if this will start to reverse as more and more in-house staff are made redundant. Someone has to take projects forward and freelancers are the cheaper, safer option in this type of climate. (Of course, there’ll be a complete freeze on hourly rates, if not a drop. SfEP minimum rates? Nice idea, but not a chance.)

Image taken from here.

However, the main benefit of having been credit crunched is that I now have a perfectly legitimate excuse to look people in the eye and say grimly: ‘You know nothing of the crunch’.