Osman Faruqi: You've got a system where based on the way that you're employed, the publication you work for, and whether you're a freelance or an employee, there's three different frameworks around which obviously lends itself to being used, and I'll even say exploited by publications and by managers and by bosses to use whichever framework suits their commercial interest the best and that's partly why we ended up in this situation.

Izzy: Welcome, I'm Izzy Roberts-Orr Artistic Director of the Emerging Writers' Festival and you're listening to the Digital Writers' Festival podcast. The Digital Writers' Festival 2018 is an online festival exploring the unique relationship between technology and story telling accessible anywhere, anytime, by anyone with an internet connection. Join us right here in Hyperspace between the 30th of October and the 3rd of November, and find our full program at digitalwritersfestival.com. Come in, get comfortable and get curious as we hear from story tellers and artistes from across the worldwide web.

Ben Eltham: Before we begin this session of the Digital Writers' Festival, it's important to acknowledge the first nations of Australia, the traditional owners of the land which I'm sitting on right now, in my case I'm in Melbourne, the traditional owners are the Wurundjeri and the Woiwurrung people of the Kulin nation. I'd like to pay my respects to the elders, past, present and future. Welcome to the Digital Writers' Festival in 2018, my name is Ben Eltham. I'm going to be chairing a conversation on this panel where I'm going to be talking about some of the challenges and the opportunities for digital writers and particularly their rights in the digital workplace. This session is called, Hyperspace Hustle.

Ben Eltham: We understand that the work force is becoming increasingly digitized, but what does this mean for writers and storytellers working online and how do we ensure our rights as part of a digital work force. In this episode, I'm going to be talking to Osman Faruqi and Marisa Wikramanayake about the state of digital unionizing in Australia, how we can draw on digital writers unions, organizing examples from United States and how we can imagine the future of online writing as workers.

Ben Eltham: I'm joined firstly by Marisa Wikramanayake. Marisa is a writer, she's an editor and a very experienced journalist who has been working freelancer for many years. She works with words and she works with people in a range of different media to get stories out, she's written books and she does speaking gigs and workshops as well. Perhaps we can start by you telling us a little bit about your working experience and what it's like for someone who is a freelancer for a living?

Marisa Wikrama-: It's very chaotic as a freelancer because you're always having to think several steps ahead and it's very precarious and it's been nonstop precarity in that regard for so many years now, it tends to take a toll on you and you tend to get tired, but it's also exciting because there's a variety of things that I do and it changes day to day and even if you didn't have all the other things that I do do

in my business, even if you were just a journalist, you would probably be working on several different stories every single day just to keep your head above water. In that way there's always something new and something different and exciting.

Ben Eltham: Well perhaps we can unpack that a little bit Marisa, do you want to maybe take us through a day in the working life of Marisa? What things are you doing? Are you pitching? Are you writing? Are you researching? Are you editing? How does that roll out?

Marisa Wikrama-: I usually wake up and I have to listen to the news and sometimes it's a fun thing to do and very often it's not a fun thing to do. Usually I try to be up early in the morning and I try to listen to the news on my phone, sort of a podcast situation. I'll listen to about an hour of news while I'm doing other things, I have to get around to others in my day, so breakfast, just getting ready for the day, and once I have that then I can sit down and I can start pitching. Sometimes if I don't already have something to write, I edit or sort other work to do straight away.

Marisa Wikrama-: I usually I'm pitching stories, so I try to pitch a couple of stories each day. I try to find because I also am an editor, I try to find a thesis or a manuscript to edit each day and try to send those things out there, and if you do that first in the morning, then it can go do and do it's thing and people can take their time considering whether they want to hire you or not.

Marisa Wikrama-: Then you've got the rest of the day to work on it, so I try to budget a certain amount of time in the morning to quickly do that and then you spend the rest of your time doing your writing or your editing, so sometimes that involves calling people up, interviewing them, and when you do that you have appointments to interview people or appointments to go and meet people, so you work around those. If I've got an appointment or I got teamwork to do, I'll do that before I meet someone. That sort of thing, you try to organize, so each day is different, so you try to organize around what you've got to do that is set in stone for interviewing and so on.

Marisa Wikrama-: Usually I am stuck in front of my email, people email you at the last minute and everything, today a piece is going up on SBS for example and I thought it was going to go up on Wednesday, but on Friday, Thursday Alice said, “Edits." I was, “Yeah, okay, I've got some time.” On Friday they were like, “Oh no, it's going out Monday morning, can you please hurry.” Yeah, so we had to that on Friday.

Marisa Wikrama-: You get things like that last minute in the emails and it's very ... Then sometimes you can get things where I have to take a week off and go off to a writing festival. I just went to Newcastle for the national young Writers' festival, and the first day I was there I was doing 1,000 words on engine oil, I acknowledge that, so thankfully I went a day early before everything started, but instead of walking around and seeing you guys, I was in my room burning away trying to figure out

how to do 1,000 words because I had a deadline, it happened and I had to the work, so yeah.

Ben Eltham: What's that process like when you pitch to a publication? How do you go about pitching and what's that conversation like with the relevant editor or publisher?

Marisa Wikrama-: It can be ... I try to make it as nice a conversation as possibly, obviously you don't want to turn anybody offside. I am a member of various groups and quite often there'll be a pitch call out, I've signed up to various mailing lists that send out opportunities, and so I just have to take some time, and this is another thing I'm always thinking about at the back of my mind, but sometimes there's call out and I'm racking my brain going, “Oh, what can I pitch that fits what they're looking for at this moment in time?” Other times I have an idea and I'm trying to figure out who I can send it to, so that's when I have to take to fellow journalists and say, “Who can take this idea around? Who can do this?”

Marisa Wikrama-: It's really difficult, people have said before and I totally agree with them that pitching takes a lot of time because the actual email where you write the pitch and send it off is fine, it doesn't take too long, but the sitting down and thinking about whether you've got something that can be sent off. Then sometimes a lot of people I know do stuff on spec, and what that means is they'll write the whole thing out and they'll take note of the publication style, write the whole thing out, send it in and hope that they get a yes, and then change it and try to send it around elsewhere if they don't, but I try not to do that as much as possible, I try to pitch first, and I try out a good idea.

Marisa Wikrama-: Sometimes it doesn't work out, I've pitched several times to Audrey Daybook for example and Audrey Daybook didn't like any of my ideas, but I was the first person they thought of to ask when they wanted to commission a piece, so I was able to write that piece for them. Sometimes it works out well because they just know your name.

Ben Eltham: When should you mention money? When should that difficult conversation about the dollars and cents happen?

Marisa Wikrama-: From the start, so we get a lot of pitch call outs, we ask them if they're posting in the groups and everything to post a rate. I usually, if they're commissioning me and they've asked me, it's either in their email to me or I will ask in the reply to them, I will be like, “By the way, can you-” I just say it like, “Hey, let me know the deadline, pay rate, etc, anything else we'll count, all of that.” That nitty gritty, just give me a brief if they haven't mentioned it in the first email, so, “Happy to take on commission, deadline, word count, pay rate."

Ben Eltham: Do you have a pay rate that you won't work for unless you meet that rate? Is there a level of money that it's not worth getting out of bed for?

Marisa Wikrama-: Well, sometimes I work from bed because I can just-

Ben Eltham: Don't tell anyone.

Marisa Wikrama-: The electric blanket is on, and it's the middle of winter, I don't want to get out, so I have the laptop on and I do the stuff, but I usually say to a lot of freelancers starting out, try to get between 50 cents to a dollar per word as a reasonable figure, but there are places that for various reasons, some of them good, some of them bad can only offer you a certain amount per piece, per article and then you have to wait up and decide if it's worth doing, Overland for example, that's 200 bucks per piece, and that is all that they can reasonably afford and they understand that it is not a proper rate, but that is all that they can.

Marisa Wikrama-: You take it on, you have to think of it as an honorarium and that maybe it's part of your rent, so I try to think of it as, “Is this going to be enough for me to hit my monthly goal and my own personal financial goals?" Have I got anything else on that's going to pay the rest of my goal? I can get $200 from a place like Overland, but I can get so much more from here, and I've already done that, so I only need $200 to reach my goal or whatever for this month.” That's the thinking process. I don't say no to things straight away, but if somebody is asking you to do something for 10 bucks an article and it's 800 words, it's not worth it then.

Ben Eltham: In your newer time as a freelancer, has it got more difficult, not just in terms of pitching, but have the rates of pay been declining or have they been growing?

Marisa Wikrama-: I don't think they have been growing, the number of places that can offer a reasonably good rate like say $200 per piece and above definitely decreasing because publications have been closing over the last ... God, how many years have I been in this? Since 2008, but I've kept an eye on this so we've had lots of places that used to do a dollar per word, The Bulletin for example, I never got to write for The Bulletin and I'm so sad.

Ben Eltham: Me neither [Laughs].

Marisa Wikrama-: Yeah [laughing]. Those sorts of places shut down and so online publication started and folded and they didn't have the budget and a business model I suppose that would help support that rate.

Ben Eltham: My next question, given the difficulties of being a freelancer, why is it that you think that freelancers have such a difficult time? What is it about the industry that makes it difficult for freelancers?

Marisa Wikrama-: The industry is changing, and look, I'm a freelancer partly because I love it and I'm very happy that I love, but I'm very lucky that I love it because the main reason I became a freelancer was that it was really hard for me to get a job, I graduated at the end of 2008 in the middle of the recession, so that's partly the reason a lot of people who want to be involved in journalism and publishing and writing are freelancers because they want to be involved in the industry but

they don't often get the opportunity to work in house, there are not enough jobs going around.

Marisa Wikrama-: Every other day we hear of more people getting made redundant especially in journalism, the industry changes ... Right now there's an inquiry into the APN system and how that's going to function, and they want to change how people apply for it, how the people have to renew, whether there should be a renewal fee, whether people have to prove that they're not using for fraudulent purposes, all of this stuff that could heavily impact freelancers who don't have a lot of time and money and that resource to go through any system that requires them to pay to go through all those checks and things for APN, whereas previously it's been really easy to sign up and get started, and I think that's really important to not have that barrier to freelancers getting started.

Marisa Wikrama-: There's those obstacles, but then there's also this whole thing we are seen as small business by their work and so we cannot be collectively bargained on behalf of, so we can't actually legally have a situation where a union for example can go up to publishers and say, “Every freelancer you hire whether they're a union member or not has to be paid a certain rate, a minimum rate at least for their work or this is the word rate that you have to adhere by.”

Marisa Wikrama-: We have those issues, we do have conditions under Fair Work, about conditions in the work place, that you might be harassed and so on, so that's still there. Issues like pay rates and the issue of do people pay for super for freelancers, if they hire freelancers for example, those things are really difficult in the industry. The fact that we're all isolated is a huge issue, we're trying to solve that because we now have a lot of online groups springing up where people try to network online so that some of the isolation is taken off, they organize meetups and things. I ran a group like that of WA union members and MEAA members while I was on the WAMEAA media section committee, so that we could all meet up, we could all chat and they really valued that even though it was mostly done by email, they really valued being part of a group, knowing that there were other freelancers out there, knowing that if they needed a question answered they could just quickly fire off an email and somebody would answer it.

Marisa Wikrama-: It's that really connection because that's huge, when you're a freelancer, you can't just turn to your colleague at the next desk and ask a question, and I think people don't realize this but a psychological aspect to it as well, you really do feel you're alone when you're handling an issue. It might not even be a journalism issue, it might be a business issue, a lot of the problems sometimes around personally I had to think about things to do with running a business, what do I do next sort of thing? There's no one to bounce it off.

Ben Eltham: It can be a lonely profession, so what have your sources of support been as a freelancer?

Marisa Wikrama-: I've had to rely on friends, and this is really strange as well because I don't have a lot ... I have a lot of colleagues that I would consider friends now that are really close friends that do the same thing that I do, not really. It's really weird to have to turn to your best friend and try to explain something about the business and journalism for them, you have to give them the back story before you can tell them what your problem is, whereas you can just turn to another journal and you'd be like, “Oh this happened.” They'd get it straight away, so that's frustrating quite often, I'm lucky that my current partner is a journalist, so sometimes he gets it, but he works in house, so sometimes he doesn't. It's really hard.

Marisa Wikrama-: My support has been ... Actually, a lot of my colleagues in the union, I'm quite happy that I joined the union and that I chose to not just be a member but to be active and become a delegate and sit on committees and things because those are the people that I actually email now and say, “Oh, I'm having this issue.” It doesn't have to be a major issue or anything that the union officially has to do anything on, it can just be, “Help, just talk to me about this problem.” Or, “This happened to me today and as a journal what do you think?” That's been really useful and they give me advice.

Ben Eltham: Have you run into some problems in your freelance business? For example, have publishers not paid you or have you had trouble with articles being spiked or things like, have they happened to you?

Marisa Wikrama-: I've had a few articles get spiked, yeah, but that's always been ... I've been very lucky and it's because I have been very upfront about the way I want to work, what I want to happen, kill fees and things like that. So because I've been upfront about it and I haven't shied away from it, it's worked out in my favor, so I've never really had any of the late client payment issues, usually when someone is late there's a reasonable thing, we can usually sort it out by email, I just send them a nice email and they send me an email back apologizing. Someone goes and talks to the people in accounts and they find out that they filed it in the wrong place or something like that or missed a number of the form or something. It's usually a reasonable reason why it happened.

Ben Eltham: We're probably running up against our time limits here, but just before we finish up Marisa, I was just wondering if you had any advice for younger writers starting out?

Marisa Wikrama-: You have to really know your rights and you have to understand that it's not just about journalism, you have to know the business side of things as well. You have to know things about tax and how you file, you have to know about super, and I would advise you to set up for direct debit transfers for things like super and savings and if you think you're going to need to pay tax and have that come out automatically, so you set it and forget it. Create financial goals, keep to them, but yeah, join your union if your union is awesome, and then you get to have me as a delegate to talk to which is amazing.

Ben Eltham: Marisa Wikramanayake, thanks for talking to the Digital Writers' Festival.

Marisa Wikrama-: Thank you so much for having me.

Ben Eltham: That was Marisa Wikramanayake, a freelance writer, journalist and editor, we were talking about some of the challenges and opportunities of freelancing as a digital writer. I also have the opportunity to talk to Osman Faruqi, a well known writer, journalist and broadcaster who has worked as the political editor for Junkee and is currently a broadcaster for the Australia Broadcasting Corporation. I spoke to Osman while he was in transit on a trip to the United States in a hotel in Los Angeles. Os, welcome to the podcast.

Osman Faruqi: Thanks so much for the introduction Ben, really looking forward to chatting through these topics.

Ben Eltham: Absolutely, now you're someone who has written online for a number of years now, you were a former editor at Junkee and you've written for probably most of the major Australian publications online. Have you always been a digital writer primarily?

Osman Faruqi: No actually, it's probably the third iteration of my career, I had a very failed start early on in my life as I attempted to become an environmental engineer, found that that wasn't really the right gig for me, worked a few years in federal and state politics for the Greens doing different kinds of things. Then when I didn't really find the satisfaction I was looking in that industry turned my hand to writing, primarily about politics first but now I work as a lifestyle editor at the ABC as part of the new Lifestyle Online website ABC, before that as you said I had worked at Junkee and written about pop culture, social affairs, current affairs, views and politics.

Ben Eltham: Now when you were at Junkee, were you a freelancer or were you paid salary there like a regular worker?

Osman Faruqi: I've done both, the last couple of years I was the news and politics editor at Junkee as a full-time staff member, but prior to that I was freelancer with them filing copy on mainly news and politics stories and I was also freelancing at that time for the Guardian, for Vice, for the Australian, a few other publications like SBS and ABC as well.

Ben Eltham: It would be fair to say that like most freelancers that that experience it can be quite precarious from time to time, it can be quite insecure. Would it be fair to say that you were waiting on each invoice in order to pay bills and things like that?

Osman Faruqi: Absolutely and you've been freelancing for a while as Ben, you would totally understand what that can be like. What's interesting in terms of my career is in the last probably four or five years I've gone from freelancing exclusively to

working at a digital youth publication which gave me some better rights and a guaranteed income, but it was a unionized work place, now being somewhere like the ABC which has a situation where it's a media organization that both has a union EBA, but it's also a public sector organization, so it has the benefits of public sector unionization as well. I've gone through all those different phases of media experiences and I can see the clear benefits of organizing as a result of them.

Ben Eltham: Yeah, it's fair to say that for those of us who are relying exclusively on freelance writing for our income, times can be pretty difficult. I know that when I was paying the rent exclusively as a freelancer that was pretty tough because unlike for example a salaried job, the money wouldn't necessarily arrive every two weeks, it would definitely be a case of having to hound publication to pay those invoices, follow up and sometimes people wouldn't pay you for months and months.

Osman Faruqi: Some publications unfortunately rely on the fact that a lot of freelancers who are busy, stressed out, don't have the time or energy or the people to advocate on behalf of them to get that money might end up giving up, and that's something that I've done myself, I regret it but I just decided it wasn't worth my time and energy at points in the past to keep hounding these people to pay invoices, and I have no doubt that that's a deliberate strategy to just try make the bucks where you can and it's disappointing because having been both a freelancer at Junkee and then being an editor commissioning freelancers, I do understand, I sympathize with editors who are managing a lot of freelancers and their own full-time jobs, and it can be stressful, but there's no excuse in not paying someone once you've commissioned them, that's part of your job.

Osman Faruqi: I get that editors are busy and everyone is under more stress than they've ever been before, but if you're getting labor from someone and if you're working for a commercial media publication that is then profiting off that labor, there's zero excuse not paying those invoices on time.

Ben Eltham: We talk about not paying invoices on time, but it's a factor for some publications that are still not paying people at all, are they?

Osman Faruqi: No, that's absolutely the case, and I'm actually interested in perspective on this Ben because I have been thinking about it for a while, I haven't really talked to that many different freelancers about it, the term freelancer in the media industry is in someways maybe become a bit of a misnomer. There was certainly, it seems like an era before I was a writer where you'd have a culture of freelancers, people would choose rather becoming a salary full-time journalist, I'm going to freelance for magazines, I'm going to be an international affairs reporter whatever, and that suited your lifestyle. Whereas now, freelancer is short hand in the media industry for basically a gig worker or a hyper casualized worker where they would love to work full time, but publications rather than paying and bring on more full time salaried staff, they

just rely on an army or freelancers who they either don't pay or pay really small sums of money in terms of when you compare what they'd be getting if they were a full-time staff member.

Ben Eltham: Yes, well that's absolutely great. I remember when I started out, and I'm showing my age a little bit here, but when I started out in the early 2000s as a freelance writer, the rates were pretty good. If I was writing for Fairfax or a news corporation, rates were often between 50 cents and a dollar a word, so if you filed a couple of articles a week, you could absolutely pay the rent off that. Freelancers were paid pretty well because they tended to be the cream of the crop, they are the people who could actually make it as freelancers whereas the big publications were largely salaried work forces and of course they relied on those salaried workers to churn out copy as part of their 9 to 5 day job.

Ben Eltham: What's changed really completely in the time that I've been around is that we've moved from large work forces, large news rooms of salaried journalists to really as you say hyper casualized gig economy where really the bulk of the work force is now writing from piece to piece, and it is a piece rate, that's the other interesting thing. That's been a very big change, and the other big change has been the fall in the rates, so when I started out as I was saying, a typical piece, if you filed a feature piece for a major newspaper, you might make a couple of thousand dollars of that, and now of course that money is unheard of in the industry now, we've got a situation where the average journalist filing for an online publication might be getting paid $200 for that piece, even if it is a 1,000 words, and even if a lot of research and interviews has gone into that.

Osman Faruqi: Yeah absolutely, what we're talking about in terms of the hyper casualization of the work force and the flat lining or even declining of wages, it's obviously not unique to journalism or media, but this industry as people have been talking about for years has been particularly smashed apart for various reasons of the past decade or so, so it's facing financial pressures while the number of people seeking entry into this sector hasn't really changed, so it seems we've got a situation where the whole economy is casualizing and the media sector in particular is doing that at a faster rate because there are fewer jobs and opportunities before but more people attempting to crack in than before. It seems on one hand, there's partly a labor supply issue that seems to be underpinning a lot of the staff that we're talking about, do you think that's fair?

Ben Eltham: Definitely, we've seen an expansion in journalism schools at universities around the nation, and just individual people who just seem as interested as ever in working in the media and working as journalists. I think that's great, it's important that people want to tell stories, they want to research our democracy, that's important for the health of our society, but of course the problem is that a couple of society where people are largely paid by private sector organizations that mismatch in supply and demand of creative labor has led to a huge oversupply of creative labor, particularly at the bottom end, people starting out and trying to get a foot hold in the industry. The problem there of course is that people are all too willing to work for free.

Osman Faruqi: No that's exactly right, and at the end of the day, I'm sure we'll probably expand on this in a bit in terms of how to maybe push back against some of these issues that we've discussing, but yeah, as long people are willing to work for free and what they're producing is making money for the companies that are commissioning them, why would anything change, right? What's going to compel a commercial publisher to start paying someone if they can get copy for free and make money off that? That's just not in their interests to do it. Unless workers decide collectively, the media decides collectively to take a more serious and organized approach to not just people working for free but people working for low rates, then I just don't understand why we expect commercial publishers to magically double, or triple or quadruple their rates out of the goodness of their hearts?

Ben Eltham: Yeah absolutely. It also gets to an issue of regulations and the legal framework, it's worth pointing out at this point that in Australia, freelance journalists are not considered workers according to the Fair Work Act, the dominant federal industrial relations legislation, so because of that they're not considered to be covered by things like the minimum wage for example when they work, and as a result of that as it has been pointed out by a number of people, including by the Media Arts and Entertainment Alliance, there are no established freelance minimum rates, so there's no award or no industrial regulation around the minimum amount of money that you can pay someone for writing online in Australia.

Osman Faruqi: Yeah, and the whole industry is like a patch work of different regulations, even when you look past freelancers to staff that work for digital publications for example or even work for the digital sections of established print organizations, the Print Journalist Award which is effectively the journalists award doesn't apply, all the clauses within it don't apply those stuff, so all certain things like minimum wage and pay band supply, other provisions around leave do not, so you've got a system where based on the way that you're employed, the publication you work for and whether you're a freelancer or an employee, there's three different frameworks around which obviously lends itself to being used and I'll even say exploited by publications and by managers and by bosses to use whichever framework suits their commercial interest the best, and that's partly why we've ended up in this situation.

Ben Eltham: Yeah, there's no doubt that digital writing is undervalued compared to print writing, and part of this is a legacy issue in the old days of course when print advertising was very lucrative for many publications, there was some commercial rationale there which is that if you were writing for the Glossy Magazine that could pull in very lucrative ad rates for display advertising in that magazine, then your writing was in that respect more valuable than digital writing where advertising was pulling in cents on the dollar really of what print was. As the entire media has moved online, there's less and less justification for that argument.

Osman Faruqi: That's right, a lot of people are willing to accept or at least buy this argument that all the print media industry has been slammed, so we've all got to accept little pay for a little while, we're beyond that now. Fairfax has faced it's own particular unique series of crises over the pas few years and culminating now with the known takeover, but Channel 9 is an organization, Channel 10 is an organization where they have made ... Maybe Channel 10 is a bad exmaple, let's take Channel 9 which has a number of print online digital outlets. Channel 9 has posted profit after profit, year after year, what's their excuse for paying low, if at all, freelance rates?

Osman Faruqi: Look at News Corp, look at places like Buzzfeed, Vice and Junkee, all newer digital outlets that make money, and in Junkee's case has been bought out by huge ASX listed media companies that post profit in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, organization like Buzzfeed and Vice are still trying to find their profit model, but their valuation is in the tens of billions, they're not companies that can say, "Oh print media has been smashed, we're not really sure how to deal with this." They exist in the digital framework. They don't have an excuse to pay low rates, for them it's just the way that they do their economics, "We can make X amount of dollars by only paying Y amount of dollars in wages." The approach there is not to accept that the media has been disrupted, it's to organize and say, "You guys are making a hell of a lot of money out of us, and it's time you gave a bit of it back."

Ben Eltham: Yeah, okay, well let's talk about that. In the United States, there's been a very interesting phenomenon happening over the last couple of years which is there's been a wave of unionization in the digital newsroom, so we've had a number of high profile American publications move to unionize in recent years, are you across any of that Os?

Osman Faruqi: Yeah, it's been really interesting places like Vox, who are one of the most prominent examples of unionization. Places like Gawker as well unionized, but that's a bit more complicated because they fell apart a few years after that. It's been a really interesting trend to observe because in terms of ... I'm not a super close observer of industrial relations law internationally, but the general perception would be that US labor rights or labor organizing is much weaker than it is even in Australia which is in a bit of a slump. For whatever reason, the US seems to have, in the media sector particularly, in the digitaL media sector, the Writers' Guild of America has figured out an organizing model there that works for them. Again, I'm not an expert, but part of it has to do with their frameworks within you can organize in the US versus what you can organize in Australia, and my understanding is that in America if a majority, so 50% plus one of employees sign up to join a union, then the employer has to recognize that union's authority in negotiating.

Osman Faruqi: It's a very clear message to send, it's like if half of you sign up to the union, then the employer is going to have to negotiate collectively and it's such an obvious and long example, even in America of collective organizing, delivering better paying conditions for staff and employees and individual organizing. In Australia,

we can encourage as many employees as we want to sign up to the union, but there's still a complicated arrangement of getting employers to negotiate and enterprise bargaining agreement, getting that enterprise bargain agreement launched and recognized by Fair work Australia, you already start to lose, you can see how it's a more complicated message to sell to your colleagues and to work in the industry.

Osman Faruqi: I'm sure that's not all, I've probably over simplified it, but that difference in how you can benefit from unionization in America versus Australia so directly is perhaps part of why we've seen it increase in the States, but we haven't really seen that organizing in Australia outside of The Guardian Australia and Crikey who've unionized in the last couple of years. The vast majority of digital outlets in Australia, most employees are on individual contracts is my understanding.

Ben Eltham: Yes that's also my understanding, although I believe we've had a recent development which is that The Conversation newsroom has unionized and that's a really interesting development because that's been a growing publication and that's one where ... As far as I understand, unionized really in response to employee disaffection with the management, the employees who are disappointed with the pay off that they have been given and with the enterprise agreement that they were offered and they decided to join the union basically in response so that they could have a better negotiation with their bosses.

Osman Faruqi: No, that's really interesting and it's a good trend and the places like The Conversation and The Guardian perhaps what helps there is having staff who have worked in places like Fairfax or at news or at ABC where the benefits of unionization have been clearer for a long time and helping the younger colleagues understand that. My experience in the youth media sector, one of the challenges is that their age of staff on average is quite low and you've got people often it's their first job out of university, and so trying to get them to understand the union framework, even though everyone's concerns are the same, at lunch, at Friday beers, employees across the digital youth sector are talking about the same things, “Where is our overtime? Where is our long service leave? Why did we only get four weeks when our colleagues in the print industry get six weeks leave?”

Osman Faruqi: We're tending to leave all the same issues that workers talk about without that experience of what a unionized workforce can bring, it doesn't automatically occur to young workers that joining the union and collectively organizing is an option available to them, and hopefully through things like the Conversation where you've just described and what we saw Crikey, private media which is the owner of Crikey and the Guardian that that message might start to seep through to the rest of the sector, that's something that I'm optimistic about.

Ben Eltham: I think so, as people realize the benefits then they are more likelier to act. Of course there are problems there again with the regulatory framework, one of

the big problems is that unions can't collectively bargain for freelancers, so unions are actually not allowed under the law to try and strike deals for freelancers, so if you're not a salaried employee in a newsroom, then it's a lot more difficult really for the union to campaign on your behalf.

Osman Faruqi: That's really interesting, I wasn't actually aware of that and as you'd identified that's an extra challenge and it seems a union can offer an enormous amount of support when it comes to organizing in terms of knowledge, resources, connections, networking, all that sort of stuff, and it seems in relation to freelancers there needs to be an attempt to organize outside of that framework, but at the same time, one of the challenges that we need to overcome in the industry is this idea that there's a battle between freelancers and salaried staff, and in my experience it's sometime been reduced to that lazy dichotomy that salaried staff feel threatened by freelancers in this industry because they are willing to work for less and they're taking jobs and there's a bit of sometimes professional jealousy from freelancers towards their salaried colleagues because they want to get in some of them but they haven't able to.

Osman Faruqi: From my perspective, both groups are being let down and being exploited by commercial media publishers, and they're being played off against each other quite deliberately and it's in the interest of salaried employees to get the best conditions for their freelance colleagues as possible because if freelance conditions and wages are depressed, then it's obviously an incentive for commercial media companies to rely more and more on freelancers, does that make sense?

Ben Eltham: I couldn't agree more there, if freelance rates were to increase again, then there would be a clear incentive for employers to start offering salary positions because ultimately it's cheaper to employ someone as a salaried employee if they're churning out good content than it is to pay them high freelance rates per the piece. The problem at the moment is that the freelance piece rates are so low that they're effectively undercutting their colleagues in the industry.

Osman Faruqi: Exactly and it seems ... You've put it much more articulately than I did and it seems so clear to me that freelancers and salaried media professionals, it's in their interests to work together to drive up the rates and conditions in both sectors. If there are those freelancers who want those salaried positions, great, and if the freelancers want to maintain their flexible lifestyle, that's great too, they benefit from higher rates, and salaried media start benefiting by not having their jobs effectively outsourced, casualized to cheaper freelance staff willing to write a piece for $200 because that's the best thing on offer.

Ben Eltham: Yeah, well maybe this is the time for me to issue my call for this campaign, this is something close to my heart, I've been trying to organize and encourage people to campaign on for some time which is that we need a campaign in Australia about minimum freelance rates. We need to actually as an industry and as a workforce talk about what the minimum rate for someone writing an

article for a publication for profit should be and whether that's $200, or whatever the rate should be, there should be a minimum rate and that we should campaign for that in order to put a floor under these paying conditions.

Osman Faruqi: I think that's a great idea Ben, and not only does it put a floor under it, it sends a signal to the community about the value that we think the work generated by writers and journalists has in society, and it also sends a signal to future media entrepreneurs that this is what the cost is, this is the investment if you're seeking to grow a business in this industry, that's what you're going to have invest to get there, and if you can't pay that then sorry, try something else, buy Bitcoin or whatever. You can't start a media business and hope to pay people $15 for 200 word reviews of gigs, and hope to profit off that, there's a standard, it's a no brainer.

Ben Eltham: It's never easy organizing creative people, they're often people with diverse viewpoints politically and socially and a whole other bunch of other dimensions. It's not going to be easy to do this thing, is it Os? How can we actually connect with our fellow digital writers?

Osman Faruqi: Yeah, it's so right not only is not easy in any sense to organize, the media industry is a particularly insular one where people are very tribal and they align very closely with the brand or the masthead or the organization that they work for. What's changing a bit is that movement between organizations or between freelancing to full-time and back again is so much more common now that it seems quite obvious to me that we all benefit by lifting each other up rather than taking pot shots at each other.

Osman Faruqi: One thing that MEAA has been organizing for the past few months or for the past few years really, are social events geared around these discussions and I've been involved in helping organize some of them in Sydney, and they do two things, they firstly help journalists meet each other, journalists that might have admired each other's work, might have traded barbs on Twitter or traded friendly comradery comments but have never met before, it helps break down some of those silos and barriers, but it also creates a space where we can talk about our experience as journalists and what you find out is that whether you work at Junkee or Buzzfeed, or the Australian or Fairfax or the ABC or whether you're a freelancer, we're all dealing with very similar issues, and it makes a lot of sense for us to work collectively to do that. I don't think having kiss ups in bars is going to fix this stuff at all, but it can be a starting point.

Osman Faruqi: This sounds like a cliché, but in my experience in organizing union staff, and it's not super involved, it's mainly been at Junkee, it's just talking to colleagues about what the union is and what collective organizing is and what you can gain from that. It seems so simple but it is the starting point for this change, and the more of us who have the experience and the insights, we understand what can be gained. The more that we share that with our colleagues and help them understand the benefits so that they can become ambassadors or get their

hands a bit dirty, that's ultimately all that's going to be needed to get this change.

Ben Eltham: I hope so, even just knowing your rights, a lot of people don't realize exactly what they're entitled too, a lot of freelancers don't realize that many of them are entitled to superannuation for example. If you're more than $450 a month, even as a contractor, you're entitled to superannuation in Australia, and superannuation of course for freelancers is a massive issue because many of them don't get paid superannuation and many of them therefore have really far lower superannuation balances than their colleagues in salaried employment.

Osman Faruqi: Unfortunately, often media publishers don't want to point that fact out that if they're earning $450 a month, they're owed superannuation, they put the owners back on the freelancer to have to chase that up that.

Ben Eltham: It's a massive issue, I had a fight with Crikey about it several years ago, I had to actually really basically insist that this was the law, that they had to actually pay me superannuation because I was writing a regular column and it was being paid more than $450 a month, they just thought that they didn't have to pay me. These are the things that a union can help with.

Izzy: The Emerging Writers' Festival brings you the Digital Writers' Festival again in 2018, and you can find the full program live online now. Check it out at digitalwritersfestival.com and join us to listen, learn and play right here in Hyperspace from the 30th of October, until the 3rd of November. Our theme music is by the magical Huntly's, Please from their EP, Songs in Your Name, find them on Facebook as Huntly Music. This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, we acknowledge that First Nations Peoples are the first storytellers of this land and that their sovereignty has never been seeded. We pay our respect to Elders past, present, and emerging and to the elders of the lands this podcast reaches.