Review of the IWW Freelance Journalists Union’s campaign against Outside magazine
On May 1, 2020, the Industrial Workers of the World Freelance Journalists Union
announced its latest victory: an agreement from Outside magazine to pay
$150,000 in overdue invoices from freelancers. A review of this
campaign shows much can be learned and it is the IWW FJU’s hope that
other organizing workers can benefit from this report.
Much of the FJU’s organizing for this campaign was recorded in the
project management system Trello, the communications platform Slack, and
collaborative online documents in Google Docs, creating a detailed
record of the campaign, rather than just collective memory and
anecdotes. While this review is organized in phases, in reality, the
process was dynamic. Fellow Workers on various committees took on
different roles as needed during different moments in the campaign.
Phase One: Research Committee
In June of 2019, the FJU’s Research Committee (RC), with the aid of
the IWW’s Survey and Research Committee (SRC), designed and released a survey,
collecting information about problematic publications. Disseminated
through the FJU’s listserv and social media channels, the survey was
completed by 160 respondents. Among the responses, Outside magazine was
identified as the outlet with the most late invoices.
The RC followed up on this insight by scraping Outside magazine’s
website for the names and contact information of all the publication’s
contributors from 2019. This raw data was analyzed by nine volunteers
with the RC, and the end product was a contact sheet of 212 freelance
Outside contributors and their email addresses. The RC also conducted
corporate research on the publication, which included compiling a list
of its executives and senior staffers, their titles, and contact
information.
Phase Two: Outreach Committee
Beginning with the survey respondents, the Outreach Committee
conducted one-on-one calls with as many Outside contributors as
possible. The first of these calls followed a guide produced by the FJU
for Outreach Committee volunteers, which followed the strategy advanced
by the IWW’s Organizer Training 101: asking contacts about their issues,
ideas for collective action, and concerns with organizing. The Outreach
Committee then created a guide specific to one-on-ones with Outside
contributors, which included questions about late invoices. All of the
responses were recorded in a spreadsheet.
Altogether, 15 volunteers with the Outreach Committee conducted 56
one-on-ones with Outside contributors. The contact sheet produced by the
website scraping was used by the Outreach Committee to send out a
personalized mass email via Yet Another Mail Merge,
a Google App. Of the 224 recipients, there were 64 individual
respondents — almost all acknowledging Outside’s history of late payment
and expressing support for the FJU’s organizing, with some explicitly
agreeing to speak with an organizer. The 56 one-on-ones with the email
respondents offered an incomplete but valuable picture of Outside’s late
payments: 31 contributors reported having overdue invoices for a total
owed of $85,212 which were anywhere from three months to four years
late.
Phase Three: Legal Committee
These figures obtained by the Outreach Committee were used by the
Legal Committee to draft a collective demand letter insisting that
Outside pay all of its overdue invoices from all of its freelancers
within 30 days. This letter was reviewed by a lawyer specializing in
wage theft who offered further ideas for pursuing the overdue invoices —
filing complaints with the New York City Department of Consumer and
Worker Protection under the Freelance Isn’t Free Act, which can be confidentially filed by freelancers outside of the city against publications also outside of the city.
Phase Four: Outside Committee
Once it was determined that a campaign against Outside had both merit
and potential, a motion was made to the FJU membership formalizing a
committee to lead the campaign. The Outside Committee is currently
co-chaired by two former contributors to the publication and, as with
all other committees, primarily lives on its own channel in the FJU’s
Slack workspace where updates are shared, tactics brainstormed,
volunteers solicited, and more.
The Outside Committee reviewed the collective demand letter to the
publication and planned for escalation. The letter was sent to
executives and senior staffers at Outside on April 24; six days
later, the FJU received the publication’s response, committing to
paying $150,000 in overdue invoices within the week. The Outside Committee will be following up with contributors to ensure that commitment is met and, if not, continuing this campaign.
The Next Battle
With the Outside campaign settled for the moment, the FJU must decide
where to direct its energies next. It would be relatively simple to
begin the process detailed above once more: soliciting complaints via a
survey and targeting the most egregious publications for further
research, outreach, and action. But the FJU regularly learns of problems
at other publications through the routine one-on-ones that the union
conducts with new and prospective members (378 to date). It has already
begun to pursue some of these issues on an individual basis, but one
could just as likely be the source of the next collective campaign.
The IWW FJU is a union for all freelance journalists, bloggers, and other writers in the news media. Contact us today! You have nothing to lose but your unpaid invoices!
(via )
“Law applied to its extreme is the greatest injustice.”
— Cicero, De Officiis (via philosophybits)
