Media is an increasingly volatile industry. Unsustainable expectations for growth in terms of both revenue and reach, combined with the consolidation of wealth and power at the top, have left media workers without consistent wages or protections.
In the spring of 2018, a group of volunteers began discussing how freelancers could benefit from the gains of collective bargaining. As thousands of workers were unionizing with the Writers Guild of America, East and the NewsGuild-CWA, the question of how we could stand in solidarity with staff workers while advocating for our own rights became more urgent than ever.
Like so many other types of workers today, freelance media workers scramble to make a living from different employers at disparate rates. The precarious distinctions between freelance, permalance, staff, and contract are porous — most of us will move between these roles multiple times over the course of our careers, but only some of the categories come with the rights and privileges that all workers are entitled to.
Our solution was to create a union for freelancers. From the outset, our demands have been simple: we want to raise industry standards. As a division under the National Writers Union, we have elected an organizing committee to represent our membership. Through our membership, we continue to establish a community among freelance media workers and across the wider labor movement, while working in coalition with other unions, community organizations, and workers groups.
“We don’t need any more writers as solitary heroes,” said Toni Morrison in a speech she gave in 1981, at a caucus of 3,000 writers who gathered to form what would become the NWU. “We need a heroic writers’ movement — assertive, militant, pugnacious. That is our mission and our risk: we have chosen it. It is also our power: we have earned it.”