Underpaid, exploited, revolutionary: how freelance writers in Australia battled the pandemic

Robbie Mason investigates the dire state of freelance writing.

When COVID appeared like a chemical leak at an insecticide plant, Jinghua Qian, a Melbourne-based writer who traverses an arts beat, was close to the disaster zone. They had only just begun freelance writing. 

When the government botched the clean-up, chemical runoff soon contaminated the groundwater in a media region dependent on bore water. “Advertisers were pulling out, particularly in lifestyle media, which normally pays better than other kinds [of writing]”, they explain. “I had stories which I had pitched and filed in February, March and April [2020] which kept getting delayed and delayed and I wasn’t getting paid for them.”

Freelance journalists who specialise in the arts, sport, theatre reviews, live music appraisals and school visits have particularly struggled. When Jinghua estimates that they wrote seven performing arts reviews in the month before theatres shut, they laugh at the strangeness of that pre-pandemic world.

Freelance writer Vivienne Pearson, meanwhile, had planned to travel in April 2020. “Early COVID times were bamboozling for me as a writer, like it was for everyone… My pitches for overseas travel stories obviously came to nothing,” An inaugural recipient of the Walkley Grant for Freelance Journalists in 2019, Pearson had a publication not proceed with two stories which came out of her Walkley-funded research. The publication had instead decided to focus on COVID reporting.

While Pearson had first-time appearances in some big publications in 2020, commissions were ultimately “few and far between”.

Declining income for Australian writers is a long-term trend tied to the rise of the gig economy. But this process has accelerated during COVID.

Besides a lucky few, Australian writers scrape together a living from odd writing jobs and part-time or full-time work, often in industries completely unrelated to their writing. For freelancers, who lack many of the industrial protections of their in-house peers, this position is even more precarious. Cassie Derrick, Deputy Director of Media for the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), is frank when she says that freelancing is “a really tough field to go into.”

Estimates from 2017 suggest that the median annual income from creative work for professional writers in Australia was around $4500. The average income was $19,900 – still well below minimum wage. A Macquarie University study, published two years earlier, proposed that the median annual income for Australian book authors specifically was $2,800 and the average $12,900. The disparities between median and average incomes signal a concentration of writers on the lower end of the scale.

It’s highly unlikely the situation is any better today. Findings last year from an Australia Society of Authors (ASA) survey suggest that COVID has cut a gaping hole in the wallets of Australian writers. Roughly 32% of the 1400 respondents indicated that their income has decreased due to COVID. Half earn less than $2000 per year from their writing and 80% earn less than $15,000 from their creative practice.

Furthermore, freelance writers have largely had to fend for themselves during the pandemic. That same ASA survey illuminated the difficulties writers have had in accessing Centrelink benefits and satisfying mutual obligation requirements for JobSeeker – something Jinghua echoes on the phone. Jinghua’s job service provider did not recognise the usual paths for obtaining work as a freelance writer – pitching to editors and applying for grants and residencies – as legitimate. “I did manage to get exemptions [from mutual obligation requirements] at some point. But I know not everyone was able to do that as a freelancer”, they explain. “It’s at the whim of whoever you’re talking to and it depends upon how good you are at navigating bureaucratic systems.”

As gig workers toiling away backstage, freelancer writers rarely enter the limelight when it comes to social security and minimum rates of pay. It’s like they fall into a void – either ignored, misunderstood or exploited. It’s a vocation, not a job, some will say.

Jinghua suggests that they have been “lucky”. Their lifestyle as someone without dependents and any health conditions has allowed them to be “quick and responsive” to the pandemic. Many of their peers have not been so fortunate. “Parenting has been so tough in this time. A lot of women have left the industry altogether.”

Luka Osborne, meanwhile, moved away from a writing career several months into the pandemic. After a series of internships, the odd bit of freelance writing, a soul-sapping full-time job as a tech writer and a full-time job offer that was below the award rate, Luka felt it better to hedge his bets elsewhere.

As a warning to future freelancers, Luka recounts his experience working for an Australian arts publication. After being offered a full-time content writer position with a start-up company called OpenAgent, Luka approached the arts publication with which he was then interning for free to try negotiate a paid role. He had been an unpaid intern with this publication for six months. Hoping to secure a similar salary to what OpenAgent was offering, Luka was unsuccessful. Instead, the publication begun to pay him as a contract worker to an Australian business number (ABN). “No payslips. Nothing”, he says. “I came to learn that many of the people in that office were paid in a similar situation – to an ABN.”

Luka’s manager brushed off his concerns throughout his term with the publication. After talking to Fair Work Australia and the MEAA, representatives told Luka that this was a case of sham contracting – where an employer attempts to disguise an employment relationship as an independent contractor arrangement. “I had a Tuesday that looked the same for six months on end. A Wednesday that was the same. I did a bit of social media, activated the articles, news in the morning, started writing a feature – the same shit. I was doing regular work and sitting in the same spot, yet I was being paid as a contractor.”

After a mediated chat with Fair Work involvement yielded unsatisfactory results, Luka ran out of steam. “It was taking up a lot of my mental energy”, he states. “If I had been paid the award I should have been, including holiday, sick pay and superannuation, I was owed something like $9000 by the end of my employment when I was dropped with no thank yous. Dropped on my ass essentially.”

Today, the publication has over 500,000 followers on Facebook.

The ecosystems surrounding freelance writing seem to breed a mutated form of capitalism – a capitalism on steroids. According to the MEAA, within Australia’s creative industries, the gender pay gap is especially wide in newspaper publishing (19.1 percent) and magazine and book publishing (23.5 percent). The only area with a higher gender pay gap is radio broadcasting (28.1 percent). By contrast, the gender wage gap in creative and performing arts is only 7.5 percent.

Cassie of the MEAA points out that the lack of standardised minimum rates of pay for freelance writers exacerbates the gender pay gap. “No one knows what someone else writing the same piece for the same employer is negotiating. We know through data that men will ask for more money than women.” According to a 2019 survey of Australian media freelancers, the biggest challenge (50 percent of respondents say) is knowing how to quote and what rates to charge. 86% of those respondents are women or gender non-conforming.

In Australia, the writing industry outsources labour not only to freelancers but to unpaid interns. The 2015 Interns Australia Annual Survey found that internships were more common in media and communications (23.43%) and the arts (15.7%) than in any other industry. Just last year, Fabian Robertson [FTR1] exposed in Honi Soit the exploitation of unpaid interns working for the Australian lifestyle magazine Offspring.

Luka bemoans the fact that “you have to do so much shit-kicking and then when you still get paid it’s bullshit. You have to fight your way just to get what you should get paid.”

You can hardly blame him for feeling despondent. Take a stroll through the submissions to the Parliamentary Inquiry into Australia’s Creative and Cultural Industries and you may feel like you’re staring into dusty glass cabinets at a museum exhibition for an already-extinct sector.

“As someone in their early 50s who has worked in other industries, I cannot believe some of the practices that others see as an inevitable part of being a freelancer in media”, Vivienne says.

*  *  *

Using COVID as an opportunity to reassess the landscape, many freelance writers in Australia are radically reimagining the arts sector.

All the people I interviewed asserted that there is an unequal power dynamic between freelancer and media organisation and suggest that organising collectively is a key solution. They want to see more editors and freelancers fighting alongside each other.

Many view the MEAA’s advised freelance charge-out rates as a pipedream still, but momentum is slowly building in favour of the freelancer. The MEAA suggests that publications pay freelance writers $1028 per day, or $1045 for a piece of writing under 1000 words and 96 cents for every word over that. Most publications pay nowhere near that golden $1 per word rate, even big media outlets like Guardian Australia, where in-house staff are currently supporting freelancers for better working conditions. In September this year, after sustained pressure, Guardian Australia increased its pay rate for all writing exception opinion and reviews to 70 cents per word. Following this victory, the MEAA published an open letter to Guardian management with demands including superannuation payments, timely payments following submissions and annual rate increases for freelancers. 

In their writing, Jinghua has highlighted an “undercurrent of revolutionary rage” among artists in this pandemic time. While some freelance writers have come through the pandemic relatively unscathed, it’s the writers like Luka – those fresh out of uni or new to the game, without networks in the insular OzLit scene, without established reputations and without the time or energy to apply for grants – who undoubtedly represent the majority. Little wonder freelancers are a fired up bunch.

“I don’t want to tinker with this system, shifting the priorities and massaging the language”, Jinghua writes. “I’m not excited about heralding a new cohort of gate keepers. I’m not interested in diversity and inclusion. I just want to overthrow capitalism already.” They’re not the only one.

Recognising that grants and prizes – and the meritocracy they create – do not provide adequate sustenance for the roaming hyenas of the freelance writing world, Lauren Harris recently argued in Kill Your Darlings that cultural institutions should incorporate artists themselves as payroll staff. As it stands, it is easier to get paid by an arts institution as an office administrator, a partnerships manager or a marketing officer than as an artist. We value those who administer arts funding but not those who create the art itself. It’s farcical.

Government benefits during COVID have become a litmus test for the viability of a universal basic income, and many Australian writers have found these benefits liberating – or at least those able to access them. “JobKeeper was amazing. It was a total saviour both financially and psychologically”, says Vivienne. In the later part of 2020, while on JobKeeper, Pearson was able to redirect her energy towards neglected projects and learning. She undertook courses to improve her content writing, developed and pitched a non-fiction book to publishers and established an opinion writing course – now available through the Australian Writers’ Centre. 

JobSeeker and JobKeeper are some of the most effective arts funding programs this country has ever seen. Maybe it’s just the kind of support freelancer writers needed to realise what they’re missing.

At the end of our interview, Jinghua steers the conversation back towards the most pressing material questions, such as stagnant wage growth. They suggest that other ethical and political issues surrounding the practice of journalism, while important, can sometimes obscure the primary conundrum of labour: are freelancers being paid a living wage?

Appalling pay rates are probably the single biggest obstacle to the democratisation of journalism as a profession. JobKeeper and JobSeeker have been a lucky break – an unintended temporary solution to the chronic underpayment of writers. The creativity and passion for change is there, but so far it seems few are listening.

“It’s as if we’re asking for the world, when actually all we’re asking for is something very simple”, Jinghua says.

Jinghua Qian’s work can be viewed here.

Vivienne Pearson’s work can be viewed here.

Luke Osborne’s work can be viewed here.