Reflections on Freelance Work
Toward Freedom. Truthout. In These Times. The OC Register’s annual Best of Orange County publication. The Partially Examined Life. Protean Magazine. Exploits Magazine. Alma. Parents.com. Futurism. Shadowproof.
I’ve freelanced for a number of outlets over the years, including all of the aforementioned.
I recently co-authored a feature with my sister, which should be found in The New Territory Magazine soon. And I write semi-regularly for Giddy these days, covering men’s sexual health as well as health and wellness more generally.
I’ve pitched and authored articles for commission for about a decade, but I started focusing on freelance writing in early fall 2021 after spending a few years working as an adjunct professor.
The struggles of contingent faculty work remain a subject for a future post. Probably several articles, if not exposés.
This piece, though, focuses on the world of freelance work and the freelancer experience – from the benefits of freelancing, to the struggles common to freelance media workers, to ideas about freelancer collaboration, organizing and direct action included to show how people are acting to transform unconventional working conditions and relations.
To Freelance or Not to Freelance?
When you author each article you write for remuneration largely determined by the organization that accepts your pitch and commissions your piece, you do not necessarily work under any given boss over the long term, nor are you usually subject to the same concentrated, top-down authority management might agglomerate in a typical workplace. Your affiliation with any newsroom, physical or virtual, is often minimal, if you have any such enduring affiliation at all.
Autonomy and independence are both regularly enjoyed experiences and illusions for freelancers, however.
On the one hand, freelancers can frequently set their own schedules, to a degree. They can decide what stories they want to write and which ones they’d rather not, most of the time. They aren’t answerable to an employer who has firing power, at least not exactly.
If you freelance for a living, you also tend to have more leverage to report on and write about what interests you most. If one editor or outlet doesn’t like your pitch, you can shop it around elsewhere. Even if you receive regular story assignments from an editor, you likely have greater liberty to decline those that don’t appeal to you when the editor isn’t formally your boss and knows you have work for other publications to do.
A freelancer also does not have to deal with what workers face within many customer service industries, which in certain respects unfortunately includes higher education today, given the predominate business model that converts learners (students) into consumers who, understandably, as a result of the ever-increasing cost of tuition and fees, come to feel like they should determine the shape and delivery of education, the ‘product’ or ‘service’ they or their families are coughing up a lot of dough or going into debt to acquire. Likewise, someone who works at a fast food restaurant not only has to appease an employer; that worker also has to comfort (sometimes entitled, irate or simply rude) customers who complain about service or who have issues with an order.
Now, readers no doubt influence a freelancer’s success. Reader comments at the bottom of articles can reflect a certain toxicity or vitriol, and social media screeds might make one feel worse about their own work and about humanity more generally. But as a freelancer, you need not treat every annoying or ill-conceived criticism or every fiery fulmination as ipso facto accurate or worth addressing – not in the way you might have to if a person doesn’t like how you made their burger or frappuccino or how you bagged their groceries. You are far less concerned about customers who have no bones about telling a manager you work under every workday about the failures they attribute to you because you’re not beholden to a manager or employer the way customer service employees are at conventional capitalist workplaces.
Freelance labor engenders a minimum level of independence from overbearing employers, authoritarian managers and overly entitled consumers.
On the other hand, meaningful autonomy and independence are also illusory for many in the freelance world.
A freelancer might encounter organizational press contacts who are overworked themselves and unable to help put you in touch with a source. Or, media contacts, intoxicated with a modicum of power, just become obstinate or elect not to assist freelancers not affiliated with widely read or viewed corporate media, thereby narrowing the spectrum of media content writ large while impeding freelancer work in the process.
Sources themselves are of course under no obligation to do interviews – sessions arguably amounting to wholly exploited unpaid labor undertaken pro bono by the interviewees. In her 1990 New York Times Bestseller, “The Journalist and the Murderer,” Janet Malcolm explored the debt journalists owe subjects they write about, and as Gottfried Heuer recounted in his 2017 book, Malcolm went so far as to claim the following: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”
Ouch. It stings because it’s proved true enough too many times. Movement journalism and similar approaches help redress some of those wrongs.
Despite the ethical and strategic problems inescapable in the craft, a lot of journalistic work can, I contend, still be justified on a number of grounds – whether the justification has to do with informing the public or specific sectors of society so they can exercise greater agency over their own individual and social lives and against objectionable institutions, or whether it simply has to do with the contributions to culture and enrichment of intellectual life the work affords readers, listeners and viewers.
But just as journalists would do well to reflect on ethical obligations to sources and communities they cover, sources would also do well to consider how they actively obstruct freelance journalist labor at times.
Ironically, in my experience, even academic projects and programs explicitly designed to publicize research, analysis and critique in a given field will weirdly erect barriers to writing about the knowledge they presumably wish to propagate. You would think they would enthusiastically offer up sources to further promote their work, to help make it publicly accessible and to ensure it becomes socially significant and thus worthwhile. But that’s not always the case, as multiple experiences attest.
It can come back to determinations made about the quality or nature of the individual freelancer’s work and that worker’s reputation, or the lack thereof for those ‘wet behind the ears’ and without the requisite clips to show off or the bylines on stories for prestigious news entities needed to impress. Those leading or making decisions for a given academic or think-tank project or program or center might just be dismissive of a story idea or of the outlet poised to publish it.
Apart from that, sources themselves can impose conditions when it comes to interviews. They might only be granted if you read the would-be interviewee’s book first. I’ve had more than one potential source request that. It’s a mixed bag.
Personally, I’m usually keen on reading the work anyway, especially if it can inform the interview and the article I’m trying to write. But doing so also means additional labor time devoted to a given gig. That’s typically time one could spend on more individually-directed self-edification, like reading what I consider most worth reading at a particular time. Or, it’s time desperately needed away from the grind that’s taken away. Alternatively, it’s time that could be spent working on other stories to earn more remuneration so as to cut down on the number of projects a freelancer has to juggle at once or in rapid succession.
To state the obvious, you cannot operate autonomously all that well when the rates you make require you to incessantly pitch, write and publish stories. You aren’t all that independent when your workload becomes so intense that you’re always responsible for a story and to an editor – or more likely, for many stories and to a number of editors who exercise some control over the work you do and thus come to function like a motley crew of managerial voices steering the pace and direction of your craft. Prolonged delays between when you submit an article and when the editor actually responds with edits, and the occasionally even longer lag between submission and publication that extends the time between completion of work and the point at which you can submit an invoice to get paid for the work completed, add to already excessive workloads when the money doesn’t show up in a freelancer’s checking account around the time it’s expected and often needed.
A Marxian Critique Mixed with a Liberatory Reformulation of Individuality
Although he was hardly thinking about the déclassé workforce engaged in paradoxically super-exploitative yet relatively privileged gig labor performed in front of laptops – gig labor we’d be remiss not to note can also include dangerous on-the-ground reporting and precarious work under pressure and in the thick of conflict – Karl Marx addressed the apropos problem of “piece-wages” in the 19th century.
In Volume 1 of Capital, Marx wrote that employers reduce wages when paying by the piece, when compensation is based on a given item (or the number of items) produced, because of expectations associated with the quality of those finished products and expectations associated with efficiency of production which, if not met, can be cause for dismissal. He claimed paying by the piece incentivizes increased intensity of labor.
In the freelance gig economy today, a number of exploitative parallels abound. Your wages can suffer as a result of an inability to take on a sufficient number of projects. Your compensation can dwindle due to a lack of capacity to meet deadlines for all the stories you’re compelled to write to stay afloat financially. A disconnect between what editors want in an article in order for it to be on brand for their organization and what you consider most newsworthy or warranting inclusion can result in a piece submitted ‘on spec’ getting rejected, or in editorial staff killing the submitted story for a fee or (gulp) without any remuneration for all the work that went into it.
More than 150 years ago, Marx also suggested the piece-wage compensation scheme offers “wider scope” for “individuality” which, he claimed, tends to enhance a “worker’s sense of liberty, independence and self-control, and also the competition of workers with each other.” If worker competition drives increased labor intensity, wages within the scheme lower in proportion to the rise in the number of pieces produced in a given time, “and therefore in the same proportion as the amount of labour-time employed on the same piece falls.” The nominal change can lead “to constant struggles between the capitalist and the worker, either because the capitalist uses it as a pretext for actually lowering the price of labour, or because an increase in the productivity of labour is accompanied by an increase in its intensity, or because the worker takes the outward appearance of piece-wages seriously,” thinking that payment is for the products produced rather than for labor power, provoking a laborer – or, perhaps, labor collectively – to resist a reductions in wages not accompanied by a reduction in the selling price of the commodity created.
First, a word about any expanded scope for “individuality” with respect to productive activity and in regards to greater experiences “of liberty, independence and self-control” on the job, or anywhere, really. It’s here where my take differs a bit. Employer-employee relations, class stratification and the dearth of control someone has over the paid work performed are all still commonplace under capitalism, and those circumstances continue to undermine meaningful individuality.
More meaningful individuality might entail having greater say over the work-related decisions that affect you. It would likely preclude the experiences of alienation that a young Marx connected to capitalist institutions. Genuine respect for individuality would probably imply individual workers exercising the greatest possible say over the work they all do, as opposed to an alienating experience of forced, artificial separation between doing the work and the work being done engendered when orders come down from on high and workers are made to merely comply.
Of course, an individual’s independence from relations of subordination and from unnecessary external authority need not come at the expense of cooperative and collaborative decision making at work. The enhanced sense of “self-control” that Marx associated with the piece-wage regime could be developed into collective worker self-management and cooperative self-determination of communities composed of individuals who both create and “consume” – that is, use the goods and services made. It need not diminish individuality, like the institutional relations of capitalism do by denying individuals adequate agency at work and enabling a select strata to appropriate and direct other people’s labor power.
Rather, participatory self-control of the process of social reproduction wherein people work together without bosses and have influence roughly to the degree they are impacted could communalize and elevate individuality in ways conducive to reducing alienation, overcoming exploitation and simultaneously transforming the self and the social relations that shape our individual lives. Individuality, I’d argue, can be a powerful anti-capitalist force, if expropriated from the expropriators, as the old Marxian motto might suggest.
But Marx wasn’t wrong to suggest a greater feeling of “individuality” from piece-wage work could compel workers to intensely compete against each other. Individuality within unchecked capitalist contexts can take the alienating form of workers trying to out-compete each other by intensifying their own exploitation and endeavoring to make more commodities at a faster rate than other workers.
The freelancing world is now full of low-key competition like that. Freelancers have little choice but to hurry to complete as many projects as quickly as possible just to survive in an industry notorious for abysmal rates. Individuality assumes the alienating form of cultivating one’s own brand and positioning yourself over and against other freelance writers interested in pitching the same publication, for example.
That phenomenon seems less responsible for low rates, though, than does the practice of outlet-employers deliberately paying a pittance knowing there are freelancers somewhere most likely willing to work for egregiously low commission either because paying rent or bills depends upon it or because they aren’t organized or part of a movement fighting to change those conditions.
The low rates for freelancers in turn subsidize paid full-time and part-time media staff, including editors, who might make a living wage operating in managerial fashion doing what is and ought still be recognized as work essential to making media.
Moreover, editorial freelancing is not uncommon. A contracted editor worked with me and my sister on that piece we co-authored for The New Territory, for example.
Nevertheless, editorial staff and writing staff are indirectly subsidized by the shitty commission their media companies offer the freelancers responsible for what’s frequently a not-insignificant portion of the content they publish. If nothing else, this highlights an area where greater evaluation of disparities and of partial complicity in depressing freelancer earnings, as well as exploration of opportunities for stronger solidarity, could work wonders.
Meanwhile, the hedge funds, conglomerates and billionaires (e.g. Jeff Bezo, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Pierre Omidyar) that own most media enterprises remain, in the main, far more interested in maximizing profits for owners and shareholders than in creating quality media content.
“An injury to one is an injury to all!”
Shared struggle and collective action offer attractive alternatives to unending competition among workers, freelancers included. Instead of focusing primarily on building one’s brand to garner better individual compensation, workers who act in concert with one another can force the hand of employers to pay better rates across the board and to treat the freelancers they contract with far better in other respects.
I joined the Industrial Workers of the World Freelance Journalists Union this past fall. I had previously paid dues to the IWW as a member of the Education and Research Workers Industrial Union 620 in the union’s department of public service.
The FJU is part of the IWW, an anti-capitalist labor union with a storied history of taking direct action against employers and fighting for industrial democracy dating back more than a century. The FJU is also partially autonomous from the IWW and from the technical, at times borderline bureaucratic structure of the greater union. At its best, that autonomy enables FJU to focus on freelancers, full stop, without sacrificing solidarity among working people.
As freelancers interested in joining the union often learn, the IWW FJU unveiled a Twitter campaign encouraging freelancers for Vox to email the union their rates when word got out Vox had contributors sign contracts forbidding them from openly discussing rates received. Almost a hundred freelancers disclosed how much they made per piece contributing to Vox, and the FJU published those anonymously recorded rates.
In response, Vox removed the gag order provision from freelancer contracts and acknowledged the importance of rate transparency, which is needed for writers and creators to make informed decisions about where to devote their time and energy.
The union also filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board after members and other freelancers rebuked Barstool Sports for engaging in union busting on social media, trying to intimidate workers on Twitter in an effort to thwart unionization. The Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) complaint with the NLRB led Barstool Sports to delete the threatening content and to remove a fake union account on social media the company created as part of an erstwhile anti-union agenda effectively countered by collective action.
More recently, in early March 2022, when the Gizmodo Media Group Union representing workers at outlets including Gizmodo and Jezebel declared a strike, the FJU released a supportive statement the next day. As mentioned in the statement, the FJU donated to the GMG Union strike fund – a fund the GMG Union created to buttress both full-time and contract workers.
The FJU publicly endorsed a GMG Union request that freelancers honor a de facto virtual picket and refrain from contributing to GMG publications during the strike. To avoid burdening our own members, the FJU offered compensation internally to anyone in the union who could show they had a story commissioned by a GMG outlet but who would also commit to not filing until the strike ended.
After four days of picketing, on March 6, the GMG Union and management reached a tentative agreement amenable to workers. The employer agreed to raise minimum salaries, make annual increases, boost severance and further support parental leave, according to a GMG Union press release disseminated that day.
Collective direct action ‘delivers the goods,’ as they say, bolstering the common good at the same time. Solidarity helps make that possible.
Freelancer solidarity with workers doing the same sort of labor, albeit with less precarity and with superior compensation and benefits packages, also illustrates what can be accomplished when divide and conquer strategies are overcome.
The IWW FJU ended the March 2 GMG Union solidarity statement with the old Wobbly adage, “An injury to one is an injury to all!” That pithy, time-tested snippet of radical popular wisdom included in the Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World reflects the critical insight that any undercutting of attempts by people to better their working lives backfires, making it harder for workers throughout an industry or in the same occupation to improve their own lot and democratize economic influence. The onus remains on media workers hired on as staff to demonstrate comparable solidarity with freelancers whenever possible, especially given that their freelancing friends frequently find themselves in extremely vulnerable positions working at the whim of what’s commissioned.
For its part, the FJU militates against the narrow, exclusionary aims too often embraced historically by trade unions – the “business unions” who have been guilty of pitting one set of workers against another and aiding employers by persuading working people their primary interests are largely aligned with the companies exploiting them rather than with others enduring equivalent levels of economic exploitation.
To the point, the IWW tries to put rank and file members in democratic control of industrially organizing against class society. In the same vein, the FJU aids freelancers even when they aren’t affiliated with the union.
I’m part of the FJU press pass committee. Before I joined the committee and the FJU made waves by hooking freelancers up with free press passes, regardless of union membership status. The press pass committee continues to assist freelancers, including international workers whose on-the-ground reporting gets routinely interrupted by repressive authorities claiming freelancers aren’t legitimate journalists if they do not present official media credentials, despite press badges being hard to come by for many not directly employed as staff by news organizations. Freelancers in need of a press pass can still request one from the IWW FJU. If you do, just be sure to complete the entire form and include the profile photo that will be displayed on the badge you’ll receive in the mail from the union once your request is processed.
We also have a legal committee in the FJU that’s worked to address policing and arrest of reporters at public demonstrations.
What is more, the committee counseled workers about why filing a Freelance Isn’t Free Act complaint with the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection might make sense if a publication fails to issue payment within 30 days of an assignment submission. Although the Act might only apply if a freelancer or publication is based in NYC, given the IWW FJU’s original basis in the Big Apple, even those outside the city could put pressure on a publication to pay up with a complaint that could potentially prompt the New York City Office of Labor Policy and Standards to reach out to the outlet for a response in under three weeks.
The FJU also hosts semi-regular virtual socials so freelancers can get to know each other in an informal setting and cultivate the camaraderie, along with the social bonds, indispensable to transforming work and the broader society within which it takes place. If you’re interested in attending one, just shoot an email to freelancejournalists@iww.org.
After The Onion posted a satirical story last year plugging bomber jackets Teamster union members wear, and after the NewsGuild followed suit, offering their own union bomber jackets, FJU members, myself included, started looking into new swag and apparel options for ourselves. Whether we get dapper jackets or instead go with union-made hoodies, t-shirts, patches or something else entirely remains to be seen. Stay tuned for developments in this department!
If you freelance yourself, the decision is yours as to whether to become a member and participate in collectively directing FJU actions and decisions. If you know people who freelance, you might mention the IWW FJU to them and let them know FJU folks would like to hear from them and, if mutually agreeable, include them in organizing efforts.
Shane Campbell, an IWW FJU member active in the union’s outreach committee, told me on Slack, the online communications platform used by FJU members and many other workers in the latest wave of digital media unionization drives, that he joined the FJU soon after he started out as a journalist and came to need a network as well as guidance.
“I did find those things, but I also found camaraderie and friendship,” Campbell explained. “FJU has given me an opportunity to dive into organizing and building connections with other people in similar situations to me. I finally feel like I am doing important and impactful work.”