David Hill on Writing as Labor
Writing as Labor (via): David Hill writes about the shifting economic dynamics of writing, especially freelance writing.
At the time the NWU was founded [in 1981], $1 a word was considered a bare-minimum rate for freelance writing. One of their earliest campaigns was to try to raise these rates at alt-weeklies and magazines around the country. By the end of the 1990s, the union was maintaining a public list of places that still paid $1 a word as a service to writers. Today it is no longer considered the floor, but a ceiling. For many freelance writers, $1 a word is the highest they will ever be paid.
The piece goes on talk about how modern writers often build an income across multiple little gigs, the author themself having held several of those.
Most people, like me, either spread themselves out as thinly as possible to afford the writing life, or, also like me, rely on a partner’s income and steady paycheck with benefits.
The piece broadly draws a direct line between the gig-ification of the writing profession, the proliferation of PE companies dismantling print and journalism, and increasing costs of living. It doesn't seem like there was a golden age for writing where jobs fell into people's hands, but it does leave the reader with the impression that freelancers have to do more now because the traditional avenues---magazines, mostly, I guess---pay a lot less than they used to.
My own interest here: the larger story seems to be about the devaluing of art and writing in the eyes of the managerial class, and maybe as a ripple effect or maybe just in parallel (although the piece does not touch on this), in the eyes of the public too.
I guess it's a loop. The economics of publishing writing just sort of don't seem to work the same way when magazines and Substacks and Patreon blogs compete for attention w/ video and social media. PE firms gut publications because they've calculated that audiences won't pay enough to sustain journalism, which further normalizes free (and awful) content, which makes it harder to charge for it. But it is still labor, and effort, and its treatment as solely a calling or a passion does a huge disservice to those who engage in it.
Framing writing as a passion economy makes it hard for those people to compete with the attention economy, because it treats the work as primarily valuable to the writer rather than for the reader. If you're writing because you love it, the logic goes, then attention itself becomes your payment, and you should be grateful for whatever scraps of visibility you can get, regardless of whether it actually sustains you. This flips the labor relationship: instead of writers providing a service that readers/platforms pay for, writers become supplicants competing for the privilege of an audience, willing to work for free (or worse) just to stay in the game.
But then how do you make people value something they've been conditioned to expect for free? The solution isn't individual creatives selling their value better (that just intensifies the entrepreneurial burden on already-stretched writers). Collective organizing (unions, rate transparency, refusing exploitative terms) can create leverage that individuals don't have. But it would work better if there's some underlying cultural recognition that writing has value worth paying for, a baseline social norm that labor deserves compensation, even creative labor. And right now that norm is eroding fast, partly because the platforms that profit from others' creative labor have no incentive to strengthen it, and and partly because generative AI is being sold by these platforms as a way for anyone to become a creative, sans effort.