Feb 27, 2015 by jgordon@unitedmediaguild.org
Writing for Scratch Magazine, Sarah Jaffe had these observations about freelance workers:
Most of the historic labor movement has been based on organizing at a workplace where the assumption was that workers would be there until they retired (with a pension). In today’s economy, though, fewer workers have permanent positions, and so new forms of labor organizing are appearing that help freelance, temporary, and other workers gain some sort of stability and support.
Susie Cagle, award-winning freelance journalist and cartoonist (and Scratch contributor), says, “I think we’re only going to see more staff jobs going the way of contracts, which almost always pay significantly less. This has been true in journalism for a while, but now that it’s happening across other industries, more people seem to be paying attention to the issue, which is great,” she says.
Now that the dust has settled from the 2008 financial meltdown, (WGA’s Justin) Molito says more and more workers are beginning to realize that the freelance and contract-based jobs they have now are the jobs that will continue to exist. “Capital has figured out how this economic design benefits it,” he says. “Labor has to figure out how to operate in this economy. All of these jobs have this precarious nature as a defining characteristic.”
But that doesn’t mean, Cagle says, that writers need resign themselves to taking whatever low wages are thrown their way. “I feel like we have an important moment now and in the next few years to redefine how ‘freelancing’ works in the media industry. A lot of that will come down to freelancers’ refusal to continue to put up with very low, very late pay from large institutions that meanwhile treat their staffers well.”
To succeed as a writer, we have been told, it is a freelancer’s job to build her brand, to cultivate a social media presence, to appear (unpaid) on TV and radio whenever she’s asked, and, many times, to write for free in exchange for exposure.
Much of this work functions as what communications scholars Kathleen Kuehn and Thomas F. Corrigan have dubbed “hope labor.” Hope labor, they write, is “un- or under-compensated work carried out in the present, often for experience or exposure, in the hope that future employment opportunities may follow.”
That hope labor, that brand-building, is mostly done individually, in competition with other writers. Writers have begun to monetize their brands directly through crowdfunding campaigns on websites like Kickstarter and Beacon as a way to fund journalism or future projects.
But, David Hill says, all of this self-promotion makes it harder to build solidarity and easier to see one another as competition for already-scarce resources. “We are hurting each other by underbidding each other, competing against each other.” More successful freelancers don’t have as much incentive to work with their lower-paid peers, both out of a lack of self-interest (“what’s this going to do for me?”) and perhaps out of fear that their wages might actually go down if other writers’ wages go up. There’s also the simple reason that freelancing means constantly hustling for more work—so the added labor of working to organize can feel like too big a burden.
Furthermore, the traditional concept of the “boss”—a single entity exploiting workers for gain—can get tricky when it comes to freelancers’ relationships with publications. Writers often don’t want to have an antagonistic relationship with the editors who commission their work, and in many cases too those editors are not the ones who set the budget. Many editors, Hill says, may sympathize with their writers but are unsure of how to do right by them.
Molito notes it’s important for the field of journalism in particular to do better by its workers. Without better labor standards, journalism will become a field that is populated purely by the privileged. Having decent pay and benefits, he notes, is essential to ensure that people who don’t come from money can have this job. Particularly in the area of progressive or movement-oriented newspapers, the excuse often comes up that low wages are part of a commitment to the cause. But, Molito says, “It doesn’t serve the movement to pay people too little to have sustainable careers. That’s actually a disservice to the movement.”
Ultimately, Hill says, the question for freelance writers should not be whether to organize, but how to do so. “How do we connect, how do we trust each other?”
What can we do about this? Check out the whole piece by Jaffe.
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