12 minute read
Passion Projects
What’s the difference between freelance writers and gig workers?
by Maya Binyam
Illustration by Richard A. Chance
Nearly forty years ago, in the fall of 1981, more than three thousand writers gathered at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel for the American Writers Congress. They had traveled from as far away as Florida, California, and Texas, and had arrived at the opening ceremony so early and in such great numbers that the event’s organizers, fearing overcrowding, linked arms to deny them entry. Panelists included Edward Said, Kurt Vonnegut, Andrea Dworkin, and Philip Agee, who phoned in from exile. Toni Morrison delivered the keynote address. Her speech served as the bellwether of a shifting labor force: something, in her estimation, was “very wrong.” A culture of individualism had inculcated in writers a false sense of imperviousness; although they were treated by publishers as “toys, things to be played with by little kings who love us while we please, dismiss us when we don’t,” writers believed themselves to exist outside of market logic. “We may be dreamers or scholars, we may need tranquility or chaos––we may write for posterity or for the hour that is upon us,” Morrison said. “But we are all workers in the most blessed and mundane sense of that word. And as workers we need protection in the form of data: Who are we? And how many? What do we earn? What is earned off us? What are we entitled to?” Morrison’s questions had no obvious answers, but her message had been clear: writers would need to take stock. During the final days of
the assembly, a group of delegates vowed to endorse the National Writers Union, which would take up the mantle of defending writers’ rights.
Over the next two decades, freelance writers achieved a great deal of autonomy, in part because the NWU so effectively advocated for them as a collective. At high-circulation general interest magazines, alt-weeklies in most major cities in the country, and a number of book publishers, the NWU brokered agreements that enhanced and protected the working conditions of freelancers, including stipulations for minimum rates, schedules that described how those rates would increase over time, and guidelines to ensure that writers were given additional pay for changes in the scope of the assignment or excessive rewrites. Although they were self-employed, the journalists took up the methods of collective bargaining to ensure they
were protected as workers. Writing for the New York Times, Albert Scardino described the eighties as “an era of high-style, high-gloss consumer publications,” and rates rose to the occasion. Under Tina Brown, Vanity Fair adopted a standard rate of $2 per word, and The Atlantic was known, on occasion, to pay more than $50,000 for a single article (the equivalent of two or three times that today). The industry was flush, and its fictional representations were flusher––in the final seasons of Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw, the problematic patron saint of a pre-digital media economy, trotted out Vogue articles with titles like “Men: The Newest Neutral?” for a rate of $4.50 per word.
These successes, however, were short-lived. By the early aughts, the NWU’s original administration had been voted out, inducing a fallow period. Membership dwindled, and the publishing agreements expired, becoming vestiges of a lost history. (There exists no record of these agreements online; most are housed within New York University’s Bobst Library.) Despite inflation, freelance rates stagnated, even as the first decade of the new millennium ushered in the big-buying power of digital media, which manufactured a constant state of crisis to justify chaotically reshuffling the industry’s staffing infrastructure. Between 2008 and 2019, US newsroom employment dropped by 23 percent, with jobs at newspapers cut by 51 percent. From 2004 to 2019, more than one in five newspapers shuttered completely. Journalists were excised, companies snatched up like candy: Vice Media acquired Refinery29, Vox Media acquired New York Media, and BuzzFeed acquired HuffPost. Mergers stoked the fantasy of better jobs—“If BuzzFeed and five of the other biggest companies were combined into a bigger digital media company, you would probably be able to get paid more money,” BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti told the New York Times two years before the HuffPost acquisition—but instead of materializing with higher salaries, those apocryphal jobs were dissolved and shunted to contractors. (In early March, Peretti laid off 30 percent of HuffPost’s US staff.) Meanwhile, work essential to the production of journalism––fact-checking, copyediting, Web production––reemerged as tasks assigned to “permalance” workers, freelancers who provide contract labor for regular, ongoing, and sometimes full-time positions, but who nevertheless aren’t granted benefits. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 63 percent of writers worked freelance in 2019.
Even as the industry continues to swap traditional employment structures for contract labor, freelancers persist in the belief that our status as independent contractors provides us with a high degree of choice. Technically, we are self-employed. As independent contractors under law, we can control the conditions of our work. And as contractors engaged in creative thinking, we are often believed to own the means of production, because the means of production reside within our imaginations. But the fact that we can work at any hour eclipses the fact that we often work at all hours, and the possibility of exponential pay veils the growing reality of no pay at all.
While media companies have been assigned the qualities of an ailing populace, freelance media workers have been cast into go-getting enterprises. When their plights are made public––and sometimes go viral––they tend to be presented anecdotally, with solutions taking the form of better business management: smarter pitching, shrewd contract negotiation, and industrious follow-up. “I was owed about $5,000 from late paying publications. I tried to hold them all accountable. Here’s what happened,” begins freelance writer Wudan Yan’s widely shared step-by-step quest to chase down an income. But even the most indicting testimonials maintain a do-it-yourself attitude. Freelance journalists, thrust into shared employment conditions, have banded together as a creative class but rarely as a working one. As isolated instances, their predicaments are often chronicled through the bootstrapping rhetoric of diligent entrepreneurship. But as a collective set
of problems belonging to a labor force that provides an increasingly significant share of the industry’s market surplus, they’re best described in blunt terms: exploitation.
Since the heyday of the NWU, grievances have been so individuated in part because journalists, many of them freelancers, have published stories touting the assumption that independent contractors are legally precluded from collective bargaining. Under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which originated as a “comprehensive charter of economic liberty” aimed at preserving free trade, attempting to monopolize a market is a felony punishable by law. Because freelancers are self-employed, some fear that collectively setting minimum rates would constitute price-fixing and could carry penalties of up to $1 million in fines and a prison
sentence of up to ten years. Despite the fact that there exists little precedent for freelance journalists being criminally charged for collective bargaining— and that there does exist a precedent for collective bargaining among freelancers in the eighties- and nineties-era NWU contracts—this interpretation of the act is peddled as common sense.
Freelance workers occupy a vexed position within labor law. Should they be understood as having the capacity to engage in price-fixing, they must first be understood as small-business owners who control the means of production and therefore maintain a share of the market’s surplus value. But, as Nicole S. Cohen, a scholar of communication, points out in Writers’ Rights, most freelancers are in a “position of disguised or misclassified dependent employment.” Unlike traditional businesses that sell a service (e.g., internet providers), freelance media workers sell labor that might otherwise be completed by full-time––and sometimes unionized––employees. Like shop owners, they are said to experience a high degree of self-control, arranging their work environment, hours, and clients as they please. But as artists engaged in a creative process, they’re also presumed happy being compensated in units of personal growth. As the economist Fritz Machlup wrote in 1962, the “psychic income” experienced by artists is “so large that [the artist] continues to supply his services at earnings rates far below what persons of similar qualifications could obtain in other occupations.”
In the past three years, however, a growing body of freelance journalists have been attempting to renegotiate their place within the industry. In the spring of 2018, following a wave of unionization among staff writers in digital newsrooms, a group of around twenty media workers—many of them former staff employees who had recently been laid off—began discussing how the principles of collective bargaining could benefit freelancers. They subsequently formed the Freelance Solidarity Project, a division of the NWU that has injected new life into the organization’s long-lost publishing agreements. This past December, The Intercept and Defector announced a set of principles for freelance contributors, including commitments for timely pay. Pipe Wrench, an online magazine launched this year by former editors of Longreads, followed suit.
These announcements aren’t legally binding, unlike the NWU agreements of previous eras (though they were never actually challenged in court—publishers abided by them willingly). But despite their modest provisions, they mark a significant shift in the collective capacity of people who are self-employed by law. “We shouldn’t accept as a given the idea that, as freelancers, we don’t have certain rights: that we can’t collectively bargain, that we can’t have unions, that we can’t have contracts,” David Hill, NWU’s vice president, told me. As far as Hill is aware, “nobody ever had any real legal fight to decide once and for all whether we’re truly independent small businesses engaged in price-fixing, or whether we’re temp workers who are being fucked over, and who are collectively trying to improve our lot in life via the people who are exploiting us.”
Disagreement over the classification of freelance work continues, including among workers themselves. In January 2020, California enacted Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5), known as “the gig worker bill,” which required companies that rely on independent contractors to reclassify those workers as employees. The bill was designed to target tech companies like Uber and Lyft, but it also applied to media concerns: publications would be limited to commissioning thirty-five articles per year from a single writer, or else would be obligated to hire that writer as an employee. In response, Vox cut about two hundred California-based freelance sportswriters from its site SB Nation, which was already engaged in a class action lawsuit over unpaid wages: freelancers had been tasked with finding contributors, assigning stories, and breaking news in return for a monthly stipend of around $600. Nevertheless, writers
opposed AB 5 in droves. “Freelancers never asked for relief from the ills that AB 5 purports to cure,” Kim Kavin, a cofounder of Fight for Freelancers, wrote. “Most of us aren’t being exploited, and most of us aren’t ride-share drivers. We are hardworking people who are trying to live the American Dream.” Alexander Lewis, writing for The Startup, put it more bluntly: “Sorry, California, the gig economy is not the same as being a freelancer.”
The NWU supported AB 5—and was besieged by aggrieved freelancers in California who believed their income would be immediately jeopardized. As a tool for curbing exploitation, the bill was imperfect. The specific conditions of freelance media work weren’t fully represented in its provisions—which were better suited to the nature of app-based gigs— but supporting it gave those same media workers the opportunity to advocate for their inclusion in a rapidly evolving arena of labor law.
Perhaps the most significant drawback of AB 5 was that it existed in isolation: without similar regulations in other states, companies that hire workers across the country could simply cut Californians out of their labor pool altogether. But freelancers have been quick to oppose federal legislation as well. In early March, the House voted to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would revise the National Labor Relations Act to protect the rights of contract workers to strike and collectively bargain. Because the pro Act classifies employees using the same distinctions outlined in AB 5, many freelance writers are asking their senators to vote no when the pro Act reaches the Senate––even though it would not immediately change their employment status.
“We want to be a union that’s in solidarity with labor unions,” Hill said, “but the folks that we represent are people who have been conditioned to not see themselves in solidarity with not only the rest of labor, but even with staff writers in their own industry.” As a class of laborers, freelancers had effectively been turned into a temporary workforce, but they simultaneously contested their resemblance to gig workers, who, like them, were paid piece wages that bore minimal correspondence to the time they’d spent laboring. Presented with the prospect of a collective, many carved out an exception that was becoming increasingly niche. What they won in personal passion, they’d lose in protections, even as they continued to indulge the fantasy that it was enough for them to love their jobs.
Last November, after companies like Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash spent over $200 million in a campaign to protect their profits, California residents voted to pass Proposition 22. The law effectively stripped laborers of the protections won in AB 5, reclassifying app-based workers as independent contractors and relieving their would-be employers of the obligation to pay them employee benefits, such as sick leave or unemployment. It had no specifications for freelance media workers—though a previous bill had exempted writers, editors, and copy editors from the article limits imposed by AB 5—but nevertheless serves as an omen of our contested fate. According to liberty-first advocates like Kavin, the bill was a victory for freelancers, who had “demanded the freedom to keep their careers.” Within unions in California, though, there was a sense, Hill said, that they were writing their “death sentence.”
Like all artists, freelance writers see ourselves as special. But so long as we see ourselves as uniquely special, we will fail to win the protections we are entitled to as workers. It will always be to the financial advantage of media companies to treat employees as proprietors and our service as a labor of love. But passion projects aren’t designed to pay the rent, even if they pay the landlord. cjr
Chapter 4: When
A day in the life of news
There comes a point when a journalist’s work is done, and news enters the view of its audience. Sometimes people follow coverage deliberately and purposefully; just as often, we engage haphazardly or inattentively. There is a sense of mystery in how information is received and how what we learn influences our thinking. To clock the ways journalism informs us, I asked six Americans to log their news consumption over the course of a day and, in doing so, to probe their habits and perceptions. In many cases, participants viewed outlets as representing opposing political “sides” that ought to be sampled in equal measure; they made an effort to find the center and avoid the “extremes.” All shared a general sense that every news source is, to some degree, untrustworthy. And all believed—as most of us do—in their own power of critical thinking, arriving at six distinct conclusions. —Lauren Harris
