I was the federal government’s unpaid serf; I once serfed as an unpaid contractor for, of all places, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Naturally, they ripped me off!

Thankfully, The Donald recently shuttered the incongruously named Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which apparently was a sort of slush fund for Dems and Unipartiers. The federal agency appears to have been throwing away money, hurting taxpayers rather than helping people. Thank goodness our president has the taxpayers’ interests in mind.

A moral of this story, for freelance creatives, is never allow a prospective employer to wheedle free “work samples” or the like out of you. It’s like a baker giving a customer a blueberry pie to sample -- he eats the whole thing and digests it, and the baker waits in vain to be paid as the customer walks away.

Or, as the inimitable Judge Judy would delicately put it: “Ya can’t eat half the steak and decide you don’t like it and don’t want to pay for it! You ate the steak!”

That’s the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for you, in my experience. They’ll eat the pie, not pay you, and not even compliment your work, from what I learned nine years ago while partnering with about a dozen other very experienced creatives (including some former federal contractors) vying for years of project work with the CFPB.

And believe me, it was lots of work just trying to be considered for this federal work, which I went along with because I was so impressed with the leader of this group’s credentials and those of others in the group that I thought we stood a great chance of getting this project. She’d worked for CFPB before, and it seemed this project could be a lock. We had to do all sorts of preliminary work including providing writing “samples” for a branch of the federal government that is ostensibly dedicated to protecting consumers from fraud.

The problem is, they ate the steak and the pie, and didn’t pay for it. Depending upon how you view that behavior and what context it is in, it is either theft, or fraud.

Once I give you, a current or potential employer, written material with actionable insights that you can use to inform your decisions and communications, and you read it, you just ate the steak. There’s no un-eating the steak, and there should be no pretending that I didn’t just work for you and provide you with actionable insights. That is the CFPB -- thieves who steal freelance creatives’ work products without even offering a kill fee.

The disgusting practice of expecting creatives to provide free work samples in order to be considered for work -- i.e., forcing them to work for free first to be considered for paying work later -- is becoming more common in the communications industry as digit-head autocrats find ways to squeeze inhuman amounts of copy out of freelance writers.

They are even using job applications as a means to refine their technology by asking applicants to answer questions and write about aspects of writing that are precisely what the tech company’s platform does. In other words -- “Please do this work and refine our technology for free and maybe you will be considered for a job.” Thanks for nothing.

Perhaps some tentacles of the federal government -- like the CFPB -- are responsible for the increasingly greedy machinations of companies looking to steal free work from creatives. Even if they aren’t directly responsible for this trend, CFPB must go completely.

A reporter for 30 years, Jonathan Barnes is an award-winning freelance journalist and tech writer living in Pittsburgh.

Image: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau