Time to get hitched or just a one time thing?
Time to get hitched or just a one time thing?
Unions and organising
Hi! Lucy Harley-McKeown here, with the latest from the New Power Review.
The last issue looked at three people who are organising in different ways to fight for fair pay and conditions in their respective industries. This issue builds on this theme, with a look at what industry-watchers think the difference is between this, and more formalised ways of unionising workers.
Thank you to everyone that responded to and shared the last newsletter. As always, if you have a comment, a question, or an idea of something we should be covering, hit reply!
Pay and Journalism 💸
It’s considered bad practice for journalists to make themselves the story, so forgive me for writing about my own experience of navigating the labour market for a second. My career has been coloured by ubiquitous short-term contracts in both publishing and journalism, confusion about my rights and, initially, a lack of good information about what it means to be self-employed.
When I first went freelance, I had had my contract terminated with two weeks notice, thrust into one of the deepest recessions of my working lifetime. It was pandemic pandemonium without any rights to redundancy pay. Despite being in the National Union of Journalists, which has been useful for helping navigate legal rights and contracts, I spent a lot of time wondering what the correct amount to charge was, whether I had undervalued myself and whether negotiating would ever get easier. (Many people reading this will know that pay is a taboo subject, and a lot of people get their foot in the door in journalism through low-waged positions or working for free -- something that wasn’t an option for me when I began to freelance. Plus, I already felt my foot was in the door.)
That said, over the last few years multiple resources for freelance journalists and people in the creative industries have popped up. One of which is a rate spreadsheet, whose idea was to close the freelance pay gap. It is a rolling sheet where you can submit information about yourself, how much you were paid for a particular project and whether the work was commissioned out due to a pre-existing relationship. It now has more than 800 entries and was a lifeline and a living resource that I felt was more reactive than some of the work the NUJ has done since I have been a member.
Alongside this, like the groups mentioned in the last issue, there are a plethora of facebook groups dedicated to calling out bad employers, giving tips on negotiation and sharing resources.
One such mine of information is Journo Resources, a website started by journalist Jem Collins out of frustration that there wasn’t a place in existence that collated things such as job opportunities, pay and advice in an accessible format which also spoke to modern journalism.
“For me it felt like the simplest thing to do was create resources, rather than try to restructure a whole organisation such as the NUJ, which sort of felt like it catered to an older demographic.”
Journo Resources has just had its fifth birthday, and managing the website has recently become Collins’ full-time job. Funded through donations and a paid-for jobs board, the site runs a highly-regarded jobs newsletter and has amassed nearly 20,000 followers on Twitter.
There’s clearly a need for places workers can pool their information outside of more formal structures as potentially slower-moving unions begin to try to adapt to new ways of working.
📚🔎This week, we’ve been reading this 'week in work’ twitter thread, by journalist and organiser Emiliano Mellino and this policy paper on ‘full stack’ approaches to public media by Sanjay Holly and Ellen Goodman.
Crowdworking, Mechanical Turk and a bill of rights 💻
Ever wondered who makes sure all the links on your bank's website are working? Mechanical Turk is an app created by Amazon where people can get paid to do “Human Intelligence Tasks”, small repetitive tasks such as testing websites for bugs, writing descriptions of images, or answering simple questions. Businesses routinely outsource this kind of work to anonymous workers across the globe, who are paid just pennies for each task.
As an employment practice, it has been widely criticised. Computer scientist Jaron Lanier even noted how the design of Mechanical Turk "allows you to think of the people as software components" that conjures "a sense of magic, as if you can just pluck results out of the cloud at an incredibly low cost". By its nature, it sets out a worker-employer relationship where workers have no ability to negotiate on pay or conditions.
In response to this, a group developed a third party platform called Turkopticon which allows workers to give feedback on their employers allowing other users to avoid potentially unscrupulous jobs and to recommend better employers. Turkopticon says it “helps the people in the 'crowd' of crowdsourcing watch out for each other—because nobody else seems to be.” These workers organise through subreddits, too. The group wrote a Bill of Rights which demanded protection from employers who take their work without paying.
Another platform called Dynamo was also mobilised for a similar purpose, allowing workers to collect information anonymously and organise campaigns to better their work environment. These campaigns produced the Guidelines for Academic Requesters, which gave parameters for people allocating the work to do so fairly, and the Dear Jeff Bezos Campaign in 2014, where mechanical turk workers wrote to Amazon’s CEO to protest their conditions.
“I am a human being, not an algorithm, and yet [employers] seem to think I am there just to serve their bidding,” one of the letters stated.
The campaign aimed to flood CEO Jeff Bezos’ email -- which he is known for checking and responding to employees from -- with a range of demands. These ranged from asks for a more modern website, to recognition that the workers Amazon uses are skilled and educated.
Amazon has since made it more difficult for workers to use Dynamo. It closed the account that allowed workers to get membership to use the plug-in the platform uses to collect information and installed updates meant to prevent future plug-ins from working, too. Additionally, there were also worker complaints that Amazon's payment system will on occasion stop working - a major issue for workers requiring daily payments.
So what’s the problem with an unofficial union? Unions 21’s take 💒💍
Unpicking the differences between what official and established unions can bring, the organising power of the projects described so far and how these can work together seems to be a vital part of the relationship to work out going forward.
Unions 21 is a think tank focused solely on the challenges that unions face, and is a space that helps create a dialogue to improve practical projects that will build tomorrow's unions. The organisation currently has the ear of 23 unions and is compiling a research paper on the future of the sector to be released later on this year.
“All the people that work at Unions 21 have a background working for a union. So we know what the challenges are, we know what it means to do really difficult recognition deals, to negotiate with employers to communicate numbers and all that kind of stuff.”
The organisation takes a broad look across Europe -- from what Spanish unions have implemented for the traditionally un-unionised financial sector, and what Dutch unions have done to challenge Amazon, to how Danish unions have been negotiating agreements with FinTech employers.
“I think what we have to do is kind of almost separate the difference between campaigning for pay and having a collective bargaining process at work,” says executive director, Becky Wright.
Wright compares the difference between established and official unions' relationships with employers and unofficial unions, to the difference between getting married and dating someone.
“In an unofficial union, there's not necessarily any compulsion for either party to commit, to change, or to deal with something.
“When you have collective bargaining and a union in place, by nearly any measure that results in actual proper long term reduction of inequality. And I think that there is a real challenge for unions to talk about, convince and explain exactly what those differences are,” Wright says.
The issue for Wright is that organising workers via a google spreadsheet or on facebook means they're not guaranteed anything in the long-run, even if the critical mass of a platform feels powerful in the moment.
“It's also really dependent on the social capital that people have in the profession, in the occupations and backgrounds that people have,” she says.
“The one thing that makes a difference is having agreement with the employer to negotiate long-term.”
So, how can one translate the temporary and empowering action of newer forms of organising into more established organisations which are around for the long term?
Next time: We talk to the TUC and United Tech & Allied Workers