The IWW’s Freelance Journalist Union on Organizing Freelance Media Workers
Interview by Joaquin Romero
We spoke with Liss Waters Hyde and Cal Colgan about their involvement in the Freelance Journalists Union. The union, which was founded through the Industrial Workers of the World and currently serves around 300 paying members, focusses not only on organizing freelance journalists, but workers throughout the media industry.
Over its short lifespan, the union has launched many actions, pushing back against companies like Vox and Barstool Sports. Its big-tent approach towards organizing means that the FJU includes many dual-card members of other media unions, including the Writers Guild of America East and the National Writers Union, and cooperates with other resources for freelancers, like the Freelance Solidarity Project and Study Hall. In addition, the union also provides press passes for members, and facilitates paid reporting on labor issues through the IWW’s magazine, Industrial Worker.
Liss Waters Hyde was one of the FJU’s co-founders in 2018, and served on its original organizing committee. Cal Colgan is a part of the union’s outreach committee, which focuses on the intake process for new members. Both of them discussed the many efforts the FJU has taken since its inception to resist unfair practices at major media outlets.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
RIFT: Tell me a bit about the FJU, when did it form, and what is its mission.
Liss Waters Hyde: We launched in September of 2018, and the initial reason was there had been interest from a group of freelance journalists through the freelance journalist resource group Study Hall. They had gotten together, and they had refused to take work from a media outlet that had fired all of their staffers and tried to replace that labor with freelance work. The freelancers weren't interested in replacing that labor. They kind of saw it as what we in the labor movement call scab work, which is when a group of workers goes on strike or has walked out, and the bosses replace that labor with new, temporary workers in order to undermine the position of the previous workers and the demands that they had. They didn’t want to be involved in that, and they wanted to form a more formal group where they could organize as freelancers.
In September of 2018, we formed the Freelance Journalists Union campaign here in New York, and we started with the goal of organizing media workers to build collective power in the industry, particularly to address the specific issues faced by freelancers, because freelancers at that time, in 2018, were not being unionized. There was a wave of media unionization for staff, but there had not been any unions that had been working specifically with freelancers.
So we took that on. But we really wanted to address specific issues that freelancers face, which is often things like nonpayment, being ghosted by editors, being treated as if you are not as good as a staff member — even though there’s very specific reasons for wanting to do freelance work versus staff work, and it’s not a matter of skill. Freelancers, this is their career, they are just as skilled.
So we’re really wanting to find out collectively what issues freelancers face and how we can work to address some of those, because it's very difficult to address as an individual. Having competition between individual freelancers wasn’t really getting them anywhere in terms of improving the industry, to really make freelance journalism a career that was sustainable.
RIFT: How do you organize freelance workers? Because obviously it’s a little different than normal organizing.
LWH: We predominantly organize digitally with freelancers, which has made it really easy for them. And we use digital platforms such an email list, a Slack that we organize all of our committees through, and video conferencing, like Zoom.
The most important part of what we do with getting people engaged with this is, you can have all the digital platforms you want, but that doesn’t mean that you’re actually getting anything accomplished and hearing each other. For every person that inquires about the freelance journalists union, we actually set up a one-on-one call with them, somewhere around an hour, where we tell them about the project, what we’re working on, what our goals are, and then we talk to them about their specific issues, and what they would like to get out of the project and what their interests are in working on it.
In addition to that we have a survey that is not only internal, with our freelance journalist members, but it’s external facing as well, so any freelancer can fill it out. And through that survey we gather a lot of data about the industry, particularly who the worst offenders are with outlets in terms of things like nonpayment or treating freelancers poorly, as well as just general industry issues. And then we take that data, and focus our research based on the answers that we get, and then we build our campaigns. Those campaigns are voted on by the membership and they are staffed with volunteers from the Freelance Journalists Union. That’s essentially our organizing model.
Cal Colgan: I would also add that the tactics that we use in our organizing, once we have done the initial one-on-one intake calls and done some initial corporate research, a lot of the escalation tactics are also mostly digital. So, when we’ve had publications in the past that have issued a gag order on freelancers from discussing the terms of their pay rates with other freelancers, we would target the publication in question on Twitter and other forms of social media, and encourage other people to talk on social media about their pay rates.
While we’re mainly focusing on organizing freelance journalists, we are interested in organizing our wider industry. There are people in the campaign, such as myself, who don’t get our main income through freelancing. So one of the things we have also been trying to do is when somebody is a staff writer and works for the FJU campaign, to try and build contacts with other staff writers who are involved in organizing.
So we have people in the Freelance Solidarity Project and Study Hall. We also have some people who are dual carders as it were, meaning more than one union. We have a lot of people in the Writers Guild East, because a lot of our initial members were along the east coast, but I think we do have some Writers Guild West people as well, and National Writers Union. And that’s one of the things we can also do in our initial intakes, is ask if the person in question has ever engaged in collective action, to try and map out the strategy of building solidarity between staff writers and freelancers.
LWH: To that point, while the Freelance Journalists Union’s predominant focus is freelancers in media, we do, under the umbrella of the IWW, also organize with staff. And that would include anybody who’s working for a media company, whether it’s a writer, photographer, administrative staff or even a janitor. They’re all welcome in our union.
RIFT: I want to ask about something you’ve touched on briefly, which is those surveys, the one-on-one conversations that you have with people who are interested in the union. What do those say about the necessity of having a union for media workers?
CC: For me personally, I was one of the people who Liss and one of the other organizers had helped bring onto the campaign. I joined when the folks in New York were seven months into the campaign and had already organized calls with about a hundred people or so. Just through talking to Liss and one of the other organizers, I had started to come to the conclusion that a lot of the problems that I had when I was coming up in the media industry — and have had for about the past ten or so years — are still being faced by journalists now, and even more so.
When I graduated it was during the great recession, and that was during the beginning of a lot of these staff writing jobs starting to be outsourced to freelancers. And now that’s sort of the norm. Freelancers make up the majority of the industry, where we do the majority of the grunt work that’s been going on.
We tend to get overly exploited and taken advantage of by these media companies, because they know we’ll accept lower rates. They think that because of the lack of experience we might have or because of the fact that it’s kind of a buyer’s market right now, that we will just accept any kind of payment that they give us or any kind of terms of a freelancing contract, so long as we get a byline.
That’s one of the reasons that I think organizing freelancers is important for me, because we need to determine a concrete strategy to organize against the neoliberalization of our industry. And hopefully in doing so we can create a model for organizing in a more holistic way for other industries. I am also personally an education worker, I work part-time as a library assistant for a university, and my industry is being highly neoliberalized, and outsourced, and a lot of permanent benefitted jobs are going away, and being subjected to mass layoffs. So the freelance journalists union model of organizing is very attractive to me, both as somebody who has been a media worker and a freelancer for several years, and as somebody who is in an additional industry who looks at it as a model to how we resist the encroaching stranglehold of the gig economy.
LWH: The most common thing that we hear back from freelancers, in terms of issues, is nonpayment for work that’s already been performed, and being ghosted by editors.
When a freelancer approaches the outlet to remedy this kind of problem, they may get a resolution, and that’s great, or they might get ignored, or they might get blacklisted and they might not be able to work for that publication again or they might not be able to work for a group of publications again. But when the union approaches that same outlet with the problem, as the union — not as an individual or a list of individual freelancers — the individuals are more protected. They’re not going to get blacklisted for asking for their pay. It’s absurd to begin with, that that might happen, but it is something that truly does happen. So it’s less risk to them, personally, working through the union to address issues. It allows more issues to be addressed, because they’re more likely to come forward about issues when they are being exploited.
I think that the real goal is lifting the industry to make freelance journalism a sustainable career, so you’re not going to get exploited, you’re not going to get burned out from it, you’re not going to have to worry about getting paid for work you already did, and that’s the real intention.
RIFT: Can you two describe some of the actions the union has taken in the last year?
LWH: We did a public pressure campaign with Vox Media to revise its freelance contracts. The freelance contracts said that freelancers could not disclose their rates, and that contract was actually changed after we launched the pressure campaign, which was predominantly on social media.
Additionally, we filed an unfair labor practice charge against Barstool Sports. One of their leaders made anti-union comments on Twitter, to the effect that they would fire anybody that was doing union organizing. So we filed an unfair labor practice charge with the Labor Department, and were able to create a settlement where Barstool had to inform all their staff that they were allowed to unionize, and it banned leadership from being able to make anti-union comments on Twitter, even if it was on a personal account. It also turned out that Barstool had made fake, pro-union accounts and were catfishing their employees, to see if they could get them to message the accounts, so that they could potentially take action against those employees, and this came out during the investigation. So we were able to shed light on that as well.
We also had a targeted organizing campaign at Outside magazine, where several freelancers had not been paid, and they agreed to pay about $150,000 in back-owed freelancer payments. So that was a big win for those freelancers.
And more recently, the Freelance Journalists Union went on strike for Juneteenth, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. And we really focussed our journalism efforts on supporting that movement and bringing attention to the protests that were going on and the underlying issues, rather than taking other paid work.
RIFT: I want to ask about the Freelance Journalists Union’s relationship to the parent organization that is the IWW. The IWW has a really long history in labor, but its numbers have dwindled over the past few decades, so it’s not the biggest union out there. Why do you feel that is the home of the Freelance Journalists Union?
LWH: So the IWW was founded in 1905, and the reason that it was founded was because the people that were founding it believed that the trade unions at the time were not serving people that didn’t have specialized craft skills. They were undeserving the working poor. And as part of creating this union, from the start the IWW was working with people of color, they were working with women, and they were working with immigrant workers — in 1905. No one else was doing this. And so the union has a long history of fighting for the most precarious workers that are out there.
Not only that, the union is really focussed on the idea of worker-led campaigns, worker democracy, and direct action. So what that means, even today, is that any campaign of the IWW is a worker-led campaign, where we teach the workers of a particular workplace or industry how they can organize with their coworkers, the skills that they need to do that, the conversations they need to have, what kinds of tactics they need to take, and then they decide what they’re gonna do with those tactics, and what direction they want to go in, and they really lead the campaigns.
And so because of that, because freelancers were not really being seen as a viable worker to organize with by unions at the time — which has since changed, there are freelance programs at major unions now, which is amazing — we felt that the IWW was the right place for them.
And to clarify, the campaign was started by the IWW. It wasn’t an outside campaign that was absorbed, the IWW started the Freelance Journalists Union.
CC: I would just add, speaking personally, I have been a member of the IWW for about a decade. I’m 32, I joined when I was 22, when I was a junior in college. In that time, almost every job that I had was a job in a subset of an industry, in which they were either not organizing, or the particular workplace was too small for the big unions to feel like they wanted somebody to advocate. That’s why the IWW remained attractive to me. I think, given the sort of itinerant nature of freelance journalism in general, the solidarity unionist kind of organizing, by which I mean sort of what Liss was referring to, that the workers themselves are the union…that’s the kind of model that I think is best suited for freelancers, because we don’t often have physical workplaces. So I think in addition to just the history of the IWW, and the structure of the organizing, the method of organizing that the IWW does really speaks to the independent nature of freelancers, and the desire for control over your own decision making.
