So what do I mean by that? Well, in the 19th century, most jobs - for those many people that didn't own a farm or a business - were contingent jobs. In fact, most work in American fields and factories was what we'd now call day labor. Workers would show up in the early morning at the gate of a farm or factory, and wait to see if work was available. If there was, and they were not on the outs with management, they'd get work for whatever the owners were willing to pay. If they were lucky, the job would last weeks, months, or sometimes years. However, jobs in those times were largely seasonal. When farms were planting, tending and harvesting crops, and when factories had orders, there was work. When they didn't, there wasn't.
Employers generally felt no responsibility for workers when there wasn't work. The dominant Protestant and capitalist ethos of the time dictated that if a person was idle it was their own fault. If there wasn't work in one place, workers should go find work in another. Of course, as industrial capitalism turned to monopoly capitalism, that was often easier said than done. Many cities were dominated by a handful of companies. Many towns by one. Often the industries in a given locality were closely related. So if there was no work in one industry there very well might not be work in another. And with constant immigration there was growing competition for jobs in most parts of the expanding nation. This led to chronic mass unemployment - at a time when government played little role in regulating labor conditions or in providing economic safety nets for working people. When workers didn't have work, they could possibly turn to religious organizations for small amounts of aid. But when such aid ran out, as it often did, people would find themselves homeless and hungry very quickly.
These conditions led to the creation of a nascent labor movement. And by the 20th century, the now-giant corporations found that they needed a more long-term and disciplined workforce in many industries. As these new corporate entities began to regularize employment - that is, as once-contingent jobs began to become long-term jobs by necessity - they created the conditions that made it possible to successfully organize workers into unions. When the economy crashed in the 1930s, it moved American politics to the left, and brought in the social democratic FDR administration - which quickly passed a raft of laws that legalized most union activity and allowed millions of workers to sign up for the union of their choice. Which they did.
While unions held sway, more jobs than ever before became "permanent" with decent wages, benefits and a new thing called a "paid vacation" (something younger readers may be unaware of, but I can assure you it was a good thing [d'oh!]). Workers in most industries in most parts of the country - except a good portion of the South and until the late 1960s for women workers, newer immigrant workers, and workers of color in general - could expect to keep the same job for the same employer for their entire working lives. And to retire with a "pension" (another thing younger folks have probably never heard of) to boot.
Interestingly, however, there were always workers who remained contingent. Some, like people in the building trades, managed to find ways to force all employers in a region to hire their workforce through a union hiring hall - which allowed the trade unions to both regulate their own labor market, and also to force employers to pay the same kind of wages and benefits that people in steady jobs (like factory jobs) had. When a series of anti-labor laws were passed in the wake of the nationwide 1946 general strike that had truly struck fear into the hearts of corporate leaders, most unions were banned from having hiring halls. But the trades managed to keep them.
The fact that many contingent workers - including, to get to my point, writers and other creative workers (with the important exceptions of musicians and other workers in the theater and film industries) - weren't allowed to form unions that could run hiring halls was not an immediate problem in the relatively good economic times from the late 1940s through the early 1970s. Writers like myself were mostly freelancers - and sold their work wherever they could. And there were enough publications, book publishers and other other outlets out there that paid reasonable sums for such work that it was perfectly possible to make a living without holding a unionized "steady job." Naturally, staff journalists for the news media and many other kinds of writers had full-time jobs, and did unionize heavily during the period in question. In the interest of brevity, I will skip over the story of the left-wing American Writers Union that was destroyed during the McCarthy era, but once it was gone freelance writers were on their own a long time.
Freelance writers wouldn't have another union until 1981 when the National Writers Union was formed. The time of its birth marked the early years of the reversal of American labor power and the beginnings of the re-contingentization (if you will) of the American workforce. Starting by about 1973, during the economic period called the "Great U-Turn" by economists, corporations began to organize heavily to counter labor influence in the political sphere even as they began to reorganize their operations to be more efficient. Part of this "efficiency" meant working hard to push labor costs down. The best way to do that was to create orgazational structures that had a small core of long-term, often unionized employees, and a larger number of ununionized workers in various kinds of contingent work relations - temps, contract workers, independent cotnractors, day laborers, etc.
In the print media and publishing industries, this meant that staff positions began to be cut and larger and larger numbers of these experienced staff people began to be forced to join the ranks of freelance writers. It was still possible to make a living as a writer, but it got more and more difficult to do so - especially because pay rates stagnated or went down over the years.
This was the situation I faced as a young professional writer in 1992 when I first joined the National Writers Union. However, right at that moment, new technologies were being developed that would drastically change the situation for the worse for writers and other creators. The most important one was the World Wide Web. This new digital multimedia soon-to-be nearly universal communications medium burst upon the global scene with breathtaking speed. By the mid-1990s, the mainstream media was creating its first websites. By 2000, it was virtually impossible to run a media outlet or publishing house without a web presence. By the middle of this decade, social media had spread to the point where legions of unpaid creators were pouring out millions of pieces of content a year on every conceivable topic in every language on the planet. And now, all creative industries are almost entirely digital.
With so much free content coming in from interactive web-based social media, and the ability of media corporations to sell advertising a significant portion of the content without paying the people that created it, and with the lack of even the expectation of getting paid for content creation by a new generation of creators, professional freelance writers and other professional freelance creators have a serious crisis on our hands.
There are fewer and fewer steady jobs in the creative industries. Fewer and fewer paying markets for freelancers. Pay rates for content creation are contintuing to fall. And the overwhelming majority of content is being produced for free by people who have no expectation of renumeration for their creative labor.
To make matters worse, copyright - which was once the main protection writers and other creators enjoyed to ensure that they retained control over their own work - is dying the death of a thousand cuts. Traditional media corporations have been trying to grab up all rights to works sold to them by creators for over a decade now, even as huge numbers of people freely copy creators' works for both commercial and noncommercial use. Far from the justly-derided music industry that uses its control over music and other rights to arrest college kids for passing digital copies of songs to their friends, the illegal copying, remixing and reuse of copyrighted works of tens of thousands of individual freelance creators by for-profit companies is blasting holes in their once important ability to make use of the "infinite divisibility" of copyright to resell their work for different uses in various media - and get paid for each use of that work. This kind of copyright theft is being carried on on an industrial scale by corporations like Google - who is literally in the process of scanning millions of books, and then making money from them online without ever asking the copyright holders permission, or paying them anything. A preliminary lawsuit mandated small sums for those book authors that demand them. But unless some of the new lawsuits being brought against Google play out, the company will get away with stealing the livlihoods of book writers that rarely make even a working-class salary for all their hard work.
These reasons, to wrap up, were why I organized the National Writers Union Digital Media Conference. In a future post I'll talk about some ideas for what the NWU and allies are thinking of doing about these problems. But I bring them up to our largely union audience on Communicate or Die; so that folks will understand that writers and other creative people - highly educated though we often are - are in the same boat as all other kinds of workers. And until we figure out a way to de-contingentize the labor markets, it will not be possible for most people to become professional creative workers. Any more than it will be possible for most workers in general to keep stable decent paying jobs with benefits.
When he's not working as Project Manager for Prometheus Labor Communications, Jason Pramas is a Steering Committee member of the National Writers Union/UAW Local 1981 - Boston Chapter. He is also Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston.
