“AS-IF UNIONS”: 

RISE OF THE AMERICAN MODEL OF FREELANCER 

UNIONIZATION 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Thesis 

Presented to the Faculty of the Industrial and Labor Relations School 

of Cornell University 

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of 

Master of Science   

 

 

 

 

by 

Deepa Kylasam Iyer Sundara Rajan 

August 2024



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© 2024 Deepa Kylasam Iyer Sundara Rajan 



 

 

ABSTRACT 

 

In this study, I explore how a hybrid union of freelance media workers in 

New York was successful in maintaining union membership compared to 

other types of unions operating in the same space. I use an inductive 

approach to gather and analyze data in the form of 39 semi-structured 

interviews with union members, leaders, and legislators. I argue that 

hybrid union has structures and processes that interact with each other to 

drive the freelancer focus of the union, gain meaningful workplace rights, 

and regulate the industry. The contribution of my work is in uncovering 

the mechanism of hybridity and its many dimensions that might be helpful 

to further class interests within organizations.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

Deepa Kylasam Iyer is currently a PhD student at the Department of Global Labor 

and Work in Cornell’s ILR school. She was born and raised in Kerala in southern 

India in a multi-generational family and is a first-generation college graduate. Prior 

to joining the PhD program, she completed Master of Philosophy degree in 

Development Studies from University of Cambridge, United Kingdom and Master 

of Public Policy degree from National Law School of India University, Bengaluru 

India. Besides academic research, Deepa has presented her paintings in several 

exhibitions in India and the US and has published two books of poetry titled 

Turning Thirty and other Poems [AuthorsPress, 2016] and Zodiac [Writers 

Workshop, 2022].  



 

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to 

Ellen David Friedman 

for showing us how to build and belong in a “beloved community”  



 

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

Eli Friedman, the chair of my dissertation committee, read every sentence in this 

dissertation and before that, pruned every idea that popped into my head during the course of 

this work with due diligence. Through his inimitable style, he encouraged rigor in thought and 

writing, tolerated my creative rambling, and cautioned me against intellectual excess. I owe my 

biggest thanks to him! 

Adam Seth Litwin, my committee member, introduced ideas that I would not have 

otherwise pursued, made some uncanny observations about my interpretations, and added the 

much needed second, but significant opinion. That he did it with delightful humor and warmth 

made office hours easy, even fun! Working with him, I learned not only how to think better, but 

write well with flair and flourish. He also taught me through his own example how to love what 

you do with an indulgent passion.  

Sarosh Kuruvilla made several important interventions over lunches and dinners with 

trenchant questions and gave me signposts to relevant fields of inquiry. Attending his doctoral 

workshop on quality and productivity in University College Dublin in the summer of 2023 was 

a crucial turning point in my intellectual journey as it demonstrated how an inductive approach 

to research could yield exceptional results.  

Francis Kuriakose, my long-time collaborator, helped me think through the first ideas 

for this work and was generously present for the last draft, always giving me the big-picture 

view of the thesis and its place in my overall intellectual journey. He talked me into weaving the 

fabric of my intellectual journey one idea at a time, never differentiating between verse and prose, 

melody and brush strokes, and for that I am deeply grateful. 

Ellen Friedman came into my life serendipitously and infused it with humanism and 

perspectives about building and belonging to a “beloved community”. Her wisdom provided me 

with a renewed orientation to the people and communities I was studying and encouraged me to 

think about how my research could organically seep into the intellectual world of everyday 

practices.  



 

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In the first year of my graduate school, when I was navigating life and academics in a 

new country, Virgnia Doellgast acted as a source of enormous resources, information and advice. 

I am very thankful for her time and thoughts, the endless opportunities she shared with us over 

emails, and the opportunity to work with her using her dataset.  

Suzanne Cohen, development coordinator of the Catherwood library helped me with 

using the Cornell library systems in the best manner possible. The John Olin library’s doctoral 

students research workshop in January 2023 shaped my understanding of the library systems in 

conjunction with the processes of research and publication. I also used the vibrant Tompkins 

Public Library in Ithaca and the Alternative Library in Ithaca for my intellectual edification.  

Out in the field studying the United States for the first time, Jeff Graebelsky generously 

gave me the necessary introductions that got my work started in New York. Ellen Friedman 

introduced me to several union organizers in the media industry. Michelle Chen, over several 

cups of coffee, gave me access to her friends and her story. Alicia Dattner opened her heart once 

again and her contact book of writers and artists that snowballed into several spectacular 

interviews. Monica Boleli introduced me to European scholars who gave me a contrasting yet 

comparable perspective to the American context. Tom Hegeman introduced me for the first time 

to the American reality of precarious working life through his family, most of whom worked as 

freelance media workers.  

Several courses in graduate school helped me think through the problem of the freelance 

workforce and among the teachers who conceptualized those courses and patiently gave me 

helpful feedback on my graduate papers are Virginia Doellgast, Isabel Perera, Tobias Schulze-

Cleven (Rutgers University), Stephen Hilgartner, Eli Friedman and Maite Tapia (Michigan State 

University). For the understating I have of researching social sciences with methodological rigor, 

many thanks to the excellent statistical courses of Martin Wells, Samuel Yang and Jim Booth.  

An earlier version of this dissertation findings was presented at the annual British 

Sociological Association conference in April 2024 and at the first Graduate Symposium at Cornell 

University in May 2024. Ideas that built into this thesis such as mutualism were presented at the 



 

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8th Regulating for Decent Work Conference at the International Labor Organization, Geneva, 

Switzerland in July 2023 and that of freelancers’ unionism at the Work 2023 conference at the 

University of Turku, Finland in August 2023. The comments and suggestions I received at these 

conferences have immensely enriched my thesis. 

The MS dissertation award by the ILR School helped me cover part of the expenses in 

the course of this work. The Labor Action Tracker that offered the role of research assistant and 

later project coordinator was a source of financial stability over summer months and for this my 

thanks are due to Johnnie Kallas, Eli Friedman and Alex Colvin. The Einaudi Center for 

International Studies granted me a Global Impact Graduate Fellowship in Inequalities, Identities 

and Justice in Spring 2024 that helped me think through precarity and its relationship to 

inequality. The ILR international travel grant helped me attend the research workshop in 

Dublin.  

The administrative assistance I received from several departments as I navigated 

paperwork was made far easier and humane thanks to Mary Garin, Zac Balance, Heather 

Lacombe, and Theresa Woodhouse. 

Justine Modica coordinated a community organizing group in Ithaca that gave me 

access to resisting communities of workers while Jeonghun Kim facilitated the process of 

democratizing the Cornell Graduate Student Union through intellectual arguments and 

practices. These groups constantly reminded me how ideas can effect social transformation and 

provide profound meanings and purposes in human lives. I am deeply indebted to my brothers 

and sisters in these groups who created a space where these ideas could live and breathe and 

make a difference.    

To those who helped me rest and recuperate in the middle of this lonely venture, I owe 

my gratitude as much as those who helped me work. Francis Kuriakose gave me wise counsel 

from time to time and helped me settle with a fitness routine. Stefan Ivanoski reached out without 

fail with offers of lunches, dinners, game nights and bowling tournaments. Or Shay and Ashwin 

Kumar co-founded the fellowship of bad movies with me to keep some of the weekends 



 

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interesting. George Wang’s excellent idea of plein air painting gave me great enjoyment in the 

summer of 2023 as I tried painting landscapes on canvas for the first time. Sasha and Ramsey 

Lilley hosted delightful salon talks where I encountered radical ideas and people.  

Megan remained the exceptional barista in Ithaca by making me diverse combinations 

of hot chocolate that would give the French and the Swiss a run for their money! Mark and 

Daniel, my house keepers were logistical wizards whose uncanny observations and timely actions 

pre-empted several infrastructural nightmares and kept me safe and productive at home. Last but 

not least, Sunny with his unending love and joy showed me what it means to have a good life 

through his canine wisdom as did Sahara, the money plant, who exemplified what quiet 

persistence looked like. 

To all the fifty odd people who generously and eagerly gave me their time and stories, 

and even allowed for me to come back a second time with clarifying questions, I owe my deepest 

gratitude. This is a slice of your story and hopefully though this work, I was able to return you 

something useful in some measure for the time and pain it took for you to share the very difficult 

business of being a freelancer. 



 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 

Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 12 

Literature review ................................................................................................................ 16 

i. Freelancers in creative industries ........................................................................ 16 

ii. Union revitalization ............................................................................................ 19 

iii. Caucus and unions ............................................................................................... 21 

iv. Hybrid organization ............................................................................................ 22 

Methodology ........................................................................................................................ 23 

Data ........................................................................................................................................ 25 

i. Setting the context .................................................................................................. 25 

ii. Case description ................................................................................................... 28 

iii. Case history .......................................................................................................... 33 

iv. Case selection ....................................................................................................... 35 

Organizational identity ...................................................................................................... 36 

i. Restructuring the industry .................................................................................... 37 

ii. Organizational challenges ................................................................................. 38 

iii. Worker misclassification .................................................................................... 40 

Union strategies .................................................................................................................. 42 

i. Grievance redress and litigation .......................................................................... 42 

ii. Legislation ............................................................................................................ 47 

iii. Unilateral announcement and minimum standards agreement ................. 53 

Findings ................................................................................................................................ 55 

i. Caucus and Organization ....................................................................................... 57 

ii. Caucus and Strategies ......................................................................................... 59 

iii. Unionization vs. class engagement .................................................................. 60 

Discussion ............................................................................................................................. 62 

i. Contribution to theory ........................................................................................... 62 

ii. Limitations ............................................................................................................ 64 



 

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iii. Policy implications .............................................................................................. 65 

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 67 

References ............................................................................................................................. 69 

 

 



 

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LIST OF FIGURES 

 

Figure 1Types of labor organizations among freelance media workers ................. 28 

Figure 2 Freelancers by employment share .................................................................. 29 

Figure 3 Freelancers by type of work ............................................................................ 30 

Figure 4 Sectors of cultural and creative industry ...................................................... 31 

Figure 5 Grievance redress process ................................................................................ 47 

Figure 6 Unilateral agreement and minimum standards agreement ....................... 55 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

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LIST OF ABBREVIATION 

 

Communication Workers of America 
(CWA) .............................................. 25 

Cultural and Creative Industries 
(CCI) ................................................. 29 

Department of Labor Standards 
(DLS) ................................................ 48 

Freelance isn’t Free Act 
(FFA)................................................ 48 

Freelance Solidarity Project 
(FSP) ................................................ 34 

Freelance Solidarity Project-National 
Writers Union 
(FSP-NWU) ................................... 33 

Grievance and Contract division 
(GCD) ............................................... 43 

Institutional Review Board 
(IRB) ................................................. 23 

Internal Revenue Service 
(IRS) ................................................. 11 

National Writers Union 
(NWU) ............................................. 33 

United Auto Workers 
(UAW) ............................................. 26 

United Nations Educational Scientific 
and Cultural Organization 
(UNESCO) ...................................... 29 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 



 

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Introduction 
 

The media sector in the United States has historically used the freelancing system to cut 

down labor costs and access specialists in niche areas of interest. In the United States, a freelancer 

is essentially an independent contractor who gets paid on a per-job basis without an exclusive 

contract with the client. A freelancer pays income taxes and the self-employment tax mandated 

by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Since the 2010s, the financial model of the media sector, 

that relies on advertising revenue, was severely challenged by new forms of competition like 

digital platforms. This led to further cost-saving measures and layoffs, pushing full-time staff 

into freelancing. Consequently, freelance media workers face labor market risks associated with 

finding work, scheduling, and getting paid as well as social security risks such as absence of 

health and retirement benefits. Additionally, their status as contractors as per 1099 of the IRS 

code prevent them from accessing many forms of labor protection given to employees. The 

writers’ and screen actors’ strike of 2023 was militant labor response to the precarity fueled by 

the elimination of full-time jobs and benefits, and the use of technology to replace workers.  

As workers are contracted into freelance arrangements, a diverse set of grievances around 

wages and working conditions are voiced by them worldwide (Shevchuck and Strebkov, 2012; 

Shevchuk et al., 2021; Millán et al., 2020). Studies have shown that this freelancer response could 

be a call for regulation of the industrial sector or enforcement of freelancers’ contractual rights 

(Shevchuk et al., 2021; Fersch, 2009; Avdikos and Kalogeresis, 2016; Dol and Boomeester, 2018; 

Kroos and Gotschall, 2003; Wynn, 2015). In some cases, freelancers are going beyond these 

measures to organize collectively to provide mutual aid, advocate for laws and their enforcement, 

sue their employers in a court of law and even pursue militant labor action (Kroos and Gotschall, 

2003; Avkidos and Kalogeresis, 2016; Shevchuk et al., 2021). The summer of strikes in the United 



 

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States demonstrated the collective labor grievance of media workers through their insurgence 

(Litwin, 2023).  

The union revitalization literature among atypical forms of workers such as freelancers 

is an emerging field of research. Prior research argues that unions working with freelancers have 

either been traditional unions trying to formulate a strategy for these new types of workers or 

grassroots unions who organize around common and collective grievances (Shwartz, 2018; Marà 

et al., 2023). Surprisingly, the mechanism of new models of union action among freelancers is not 

well researched.  

In an inductive study of freelance media worker unions in New York, I found that multiple 

types of labor organizations such as mutual aid organizations, guilds and industrial unions were 

present to collectivize freelancers even in the absence of their legal status as employees. However, 

all of them were struggling to retain them as their members because of churn of freelancers in 

the industry. In this milieu, I found a “hybrid union” which was more successful in maintaining 

freelancer union membership than the other labor organizations. I ask: “how does a hybrid union 

perform better than a non-hybrid union in the case of freelancers? 

By hybrid, I mean an organization that confronts the “combination of identities, forms, 

logics, or other core elements that would conventionally not go together” (Smith and Besharov, 

2019). The union was hybrid in two ways. First, the union had both full-time staff and freelancers 

as members with competing demands for their welfare. Second, among the freelancers there were 

two competing demands of gaining workplace rights and setting industry standards. It seemed 

counterintuitive that a union that was hybrid and navigating competing demands would be more 

successful in retaining membership than others who did not face this challenge. This puzzle drew 



 

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me to explore how the hybrid union maintained membership levels despite the competing 

demands placed on it.  

I argue that the union managed its hybridity by formulating its identity as a member-

driven union through a freelancer caucus-like structure and employing diverse and unique 

strategies that resemble collective bargaining processes of an industrial union to gain workplace 

rights and set industrial standards. By caucus, I mean “mechanism to address the multiple, 

sometimes overlapping, and sometimes conflicting, agendas of various equity-seeking groups” 

(Briskin, 2006).  

Through this study, I uncover how a freelancer caucus facilitates an interplay between 

the organization’s identity and strategies. Consequently, the freelancers’ causes are taken at a 

national level and the union expends time, effort, and resources in planning state-wide actions 

with other partners. Strategically, the union makes efforts towards unilateral announcements, 

collective grievance redress, minimum standards agreement, legislation, and litigation as 

mechanisms to forefront freelancers’ interests.  

With these findings, I make three contributions to theory about union models for atypical 

workers. First, I integrate the mechanism of how caucuses work in the freelancer union to the 

broader theoretical landscape of hybrid organizations. A large body of existing research has 

shown how hybrid organizations navigate the logics of duality of purpose by integrating or 

differentiating their plural identities (Smith and Besharov, 2019). Less attention has been paid to 

the actual mechanisms through which the integration and differentiation occurs. Through this 

study, I illustrate how caucus can be conceptualized as a mechanism through which organizations 

navigate hybridity.   



 

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Second, I argue that a caucus facilitates an interplay of structure and processes that drive 

the hybrid union’s stability and relative success in maintain membership. Organization behavior 

has a long-standing debate that either structures or processes lead the other in navigating 

organizational goals. In this study, I show how the structure of caucus and the strategies work 

and fortify each other and contribute to the organizational identity. Thus, I also take the debates 

in organizational behavior beyond the claims of structures and processes leading each other and 

point to an interplay at work here.  

Third, recasting the freelancer union as a hybrid organization has implications far beyond 

its effectiveness with regard to union membership to organizational performance. My study goes 

further: The presence of caucus that works in freelancer interests also signals ways and 

conditions under which other similar special interests can become prominent and steer the 

organization. There are further dimensions to hybridity such as class engagement of interest 

groups that can be explored in other contexts. The examples of teachers’ union caucuses in the 

United States and women workers’ caucuses among technical media workers point in this 

direction. Where there are high skill workers involved in a sector that is poorly regulated, there 

is an opportunity for this type of a structure to take roots. 

I develop theory about the effectiveness of freelance union model using an inductive 

fieldwork in New York. Qualitative data that includes 39 semi-structured interviews with union 

members, leaders and legislators are used in this study. Quantitative data is sourced from archival 

materials, external databases, and union reports. Triangulating the data reveals that the success 

of maintaining union membership rests on the freelancer focus of the union. I then discuss the 

structures and processes that enable the freelancer focus and its implications for union models of 

atypical workers. 



 

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Literature review 
 

I examine four strands of literature for this study. The first is to explore how freelance workers 

operated in creative industries that include the media sector. The second is to navigate the union 

revitalization literature to situate hybrid unions. The third is understanding how caucus could 

facilitate our understanding of hybridity. The fourth is the examination of the theoretical 

framework of hybridity.  

i. Freelancers in creative industries 

 

The creative industries employ freelancers twice as much as any other sectors (Mould, 

Vorley and Liu, 2014). In the creative industries such as fashion and designing, high skilled 

freelance workers along with independent contractors and temporary workers belonged to the 

same category of employment that were dubbed as “techies, creatives and suits” (Neff, Wissinger 

and Zukin, 2005). There were five characteristics that were common to these categories of 

workers. The first of them was project-based work. Career pathways that involved project-based 

work had a pyramidal structure with a few high wage earners at the top and a lot of low wage 

earners at the bottom with intermediary agents populating the middle. In these types of work, a 

portfolio of previous projects often conflated job skills with the prestige of clients. 

The second characteristic was the notion of the creative worker in which the role of the 

freelancer was partly productive and partly consumptive. There was also a tension present 

between freelancer’s own notion of creative work and the clients demand for more standardized 

market-tested outcomes. The low wage earners shared a symbolically democratic space with high 

wage earners in which everyone could partake of the same environment without having access 

to career pathways. Examples of these spaces included a writing room or working studio.  



 

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The third characteristic of the high skilled freelance work was the sense of autonomy 

especially with scheduling. The sectors that predominantly employed freelancers like the media 

and cultural industries also had a flat career ladder with fewer posts in between that gave the 

appearance of a democratic set up where high-income earning positions were seemingly 

accessible to low wage earners.  

The fourth characteristic of the high skilled freelancer in the creative industry was the 

notion of skill that denoted work competence rather than formal skill building through degrees 

and certificates. Freelancers were also responsible for their own working conditions and skill 

building.  

The fifth characteristic of freelancer in the creative industry was the initial capital outlay 

that was required to make a mark in the industry. Freelancers were required to heavily invest in 

making their own portfolio of work and brand themselves as distinct entities similar to a business 

enterprise and this feature excluded several aspirants from choosing the field. Only individuals 

belonging to a certain income level or social class could enter these professions in this mode of 

work. That these individuals were responsible for creating and perpetuating elements of popular 

culture was noteworthy. 

The creative industries were also marked by explicit risks. Risks were of two kinds- 

continuous and periodic. Continuous risks were those activities that compelled freelancers to 

invest in their careers perpetually. For example, non-standard workspaces engendered risks 

associated with safety and productivity. The jobs were intentionally left undefined leading to 

opaqueness with respect to job expectations and quality of work, productivity, and permanency.  

Periodic risks were those that freelancers faced when out of work. Features such as 

compulsory socializing were enforced on freelancers to get new work by “understanding the 



 

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scene”. Networking was additional labor that entailed being beautiful, pleasant, and 

demonstrating “favorable energy” to encourage prospective clients from giving them work. The 

other strategy that freelancers used was constantly selling oneself with the help of portfolios and 

tear sheets which were proofs of previous work. Adaptability was a quality that was deemed 

desirable in creative freelancers and was defined as an ability to work confidently and deal with 

uncertainty.   

An exploration of how freelance writers viewed their own positions in the publishing 

industry in the United Kingdom highlighted the role of “ideology of enterprise” when full-time 

jobs were casualized (Granger et al., 1995). The removal of direct supervision of work resulted 

in limited control of work hours and spatial arrangement of work and yet this resulted in three 

types of employee response categorized as refugees, individuals who traded off stability for 

flexibility and missionaries who bought into the entrepreneurial spirit of the risk.  

Similarly, in a study of freelance journalists in Norway, low wages, job insecurity and 

excess supply of labor resulted in high risks while the low wage was justified with creative 

satisfaction (Elstad, 2015). The industry also underplayed the risk appetite of the workers by 

claiming that those who are risk averse do not choose the career trajectory underplaying 

structural impacts and uneven work standards. 

Precarious employment conditions of Canadian freelance journalists revealed reasons 

why their unions were not successful in collectivizing these groups of workers mainly because 

precarity was still not considered a condition of high skill employment that requires collective 

action (Vosko, 2003).  

In the American context, an examination of freelance media workers highlighted work 

and non-work implications of precarity (Higgins-Dobney, 2021). The work-life implications 



 

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included low income, less stability, and irregular schedules whereas the non-work implications 

were absence of work-life balance and health issues. This study was limited in its exploration of 

how individuals navigated these risks. 

While these studies on the creative industry highlighted implied risks masking behind 

autonomy and its relations the creation of culture, the assumptions do not exactly translate into 

media as a sector of creative industry. This is because media has a type of public accountability 

due to its relation to the democratic project. Therefore, the importance of training and 

accreditation, access to expertise and standard setting in jobs are distinct from the other sectors 

of the creative industry. Secondly, media has had a long history of employing the freelance model 

and is able to provide an overview of how this model was introduced and transformed due to 

structural changes. This study brings out these aspects of the media sector and adds to the 

literature on creative industry. 

ii. Union revitalization 

The second strand of literature I explored was the union revitalization that empirically traced 

the presence of reforming structures within industrial unions in action in various sectors in the 

United States. While the correlations between reform and successful industrial action is 

tangential to my study, the relationship between internal reform and diversification of strategies 

is of interest to what I observed in the hybrid union.  

 Uetricht (2014) unearths the history of the Chicago teachers’ union reform that successfully built 

militant action into the union strategies and gained important worker rights. His argument is 

that the reform union caucus built a grassroots movement to educate the union leadership while 

simultaneously reorganizing the union membership. At the same time, they also battled external 

stakeholders such as legislators and corporate sponsors by teaming with communities. This 



 

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union model of reforming the internal structures and processes of union and navigating the 

external stakeholders who are relevant demonstrates how a democratic and fighting union can 

emerge by systematic grassroots action.  

Blanc (2022) argues that successful union reform might involve union members 

highlighting a common good that is relevant for the broader working class and community. Using 

the Chicago teacher’s union and their militant strategy as an example, he underpins the aspects 

of  a discourse against corporate reworking of  the system, the systematic education of  the 

stakeholders and the threat of  strikes and militant action as the axes on which reform caucus 

worked across the red and blue states to gain significant results. This led them to win major 

sectoral level gains like seventeen percent pay raise and increased resources for students while 

making the agitation a national affair. 

An earlier historical example of  the Teamsters’ fight against the United Parcel Service 

in 1997 is taken as an illustration in Parker (1996). He argues that a democratic reorganization 

of  the union was a crucial element that allowed it to fight with militancy against the corporation 

while maintaining unprecedented popular support.  

These empirical investigations argue that militant strike action of  the union and wide 

popular support result from internal democratic reform of  the unions. While the relationship 

with internal reform and militancy in industrial unions is interesting, the possibility of  internal 

reform to diversify strategy of  a union into internal and external stakeholders is of  interest to 

me. I extend the literature on union revitalization to the previously understudied group of  

freelancers.  

 



 

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iii. Caucus and unions 

 

Caucus is the theoretical concept that I use in this study to explain how the hybrid union 

works. The concept of separate organizing that subsumes caucus has been analyzed as a strategy 

that minority groups use to build political constituency (Briskin, 1999). Constituency building is 

a strategy to avoid marginalization, encourage diversity, promote autonomy and integration with 

the larger political movements and enable coalition building with partners (Briskin, 1999). 

Several equity seeking groups such as women, indigenous communities, migrant workers, 

disabled and queer communities have successfully used separate organizing as a strategy that 

involves conferences, workshops, committees and educational programs that have a single 

objective running through several iterations (Briskin, 2006).  

Separate organizing of equity seeking constituents can occasionally come together in a 

“caucus of caucuses” that brings multiple equity seeking groups to comparatively assess their 

structures and processes (Briskin, 2006). Traditional union structures in many different national 

contexts have examined the presence of caucuses steering important political goals within the 

organization. For example, equity seeking groups can advance issues of representational 

democracy and justice for such groups as demonstrated by women and aboriginal people in 

Canadian unions (Briskin 1999, 2006; Briskin and Newson, 1999) and women’s cause in European 

unions (Braithwaite and Byrne, 1995). The caucuses can also steer militant or insurgent action 

in the face of moderate leadership as in American unions of airline workers (Cloud, 2011) and 

revival of public sector unions in the United Kingdom (Holgate, 2021).  

The case of specific equity seeking groups have also resulted in demonstrating how new 

forms of non-trade union organizing such as community unionism become important while 

dealing with minority ethnic groups and migrant workers (Perrett and Lucio, 2006; Lucio and 



 

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Perrett, 2009; James and Karmowska, 2012). In the cases where community unions are 

prominent, traditional trade unions collaborate with these organizations to explore union 

renewal opportunities within these groups and provision of services outside the workplace 

(Perrett et al., 2012; Horowitz, 2016).  

Precarious workers and their unionization have received attention in this organizational 

context of separate constituency building (Simms et al., 2018). Prior research calls for innovative 

unionization strategies to be used in bargaining structures, occupational identities, labor market 

conditions, and leadership. Specifically, the notion that “precarity breeds innovation” (Tapia and 

Turner, 2018) has been demonstrated in several contexts (Dörre et al., 2009; Benassi and 

Dorigatti, 2015).  

Although previous research highlights the importance of separate organizing for equity 

seeking groups and the notion that innovative strategies are required to rope in precarious 

workers, not much attention has been paid to the presence of caucuses of precarious workers 

within unions. Furthermore, the mechanisms by which caucuses operate to bridge the duality of 

the hybrid union has surprisingly not been theoretically explored. In this study, I examine the 

case of a freelancers’ union to demonstrate how caucuses operate to retain membership.  

iv. Hybrid organization  

 

In this study, I argue that caucus is the mechanism through which hybrid organization 

operates. I use hybridity as defined by Smith and Besharov (2019) to refer to the “combination of 

identities, forms, logics, or other core elements that would conventionally not go together”. Their 

empirically grounded model of hybrid organization also highlights the structured flexibility of 

organization that enable them to navigate hybridity in the long term.  



 

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Smith and Besharov (2019) unpacks structured flexibility as a combination of stable 

structures and adaptive enactment processes. They identify the stable structures as composed of 

leadership’s understanding of hybridity as contradictory but interdependent. They argue that 

stability also call for guardrails that are put in place through formal structures, leadership 

expertise and stakeholder relationships. 

While the framework of hybridity that I use in this study is to signify the union’s 

competing and contradictory demands placed on it by virtue of dual stakeholders such as full-

time workers and freelancers who are incompatible and demands such as workplace rights and 

industrial regulation which are competing, my arguments significantly depart from their 

framework. The use of a bottom-up process like caucus to explain hybridity and the interplay of 

structures and processes are the ways in which I depart from and add to this literature.   

Methodology 
 

I employ an inductive approach to data collection and analysis. At the first stage of 

research, about eight individuals who were experts in the field were interviewed to understand 

the ideas of risk prevalent in the media sector in the United States. These included researchers, 

journalists, publishers, and union leaders. These interviews were semi-structured and lasted 

approximately an hour and was held in person. The state of the affairs of the sector and academic 

literature were reviewed after these interviews and a tentative research proposal was developed. 

The Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval was obtained for the research proposal and field 

investigation at this stage. An initial field visit revealed four different types of unions at work in 

the freelancer space and the relative success of the hybrid union in maintaining membership level 

compared to others. The research question was reformulated to understand how the hybrid union 

succeeded in retaining its members. 



 

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In the second stage of research, 25 semi-structured interviews were conducted with 

freelance media workers who were non-union and union members to understand how the hybrid 

union worked. The interviews were held in person or via zoom depending on the availability of 

the participant. Each interview lasted approximately an hour. The participants were selected 

based on snowball sampling. A few interviews took place in each field visit, and I debriefed the 

findings with my committee to examine the ideas that were emerging. The literature was 

consulted at this stage to modify and define the questions for the next set of interviews and to 

expand the interviews to union leaders and legislators. For example, in the first stage, ideas about 

collective strategies of navigating risks came up. Before going for a second set of interviews, the 

idea of collective strategies and power dynamics within union was added as a question of interest. 

Similarly, 14 more interviews were performed until the responses reached theoretical saturation. 

All interviews were performed in English. The interviewing period lasted for seven months 

between April and October 2023 and were done in Ithaca, New York city and over Zoom. The 

location of the interview was chosen according to the preference of the participant and included 

office spaces, workstations and public venues such as restaurants, recreation clubs and cafes. 

I maintained daily field notes in addition to the audio recording that was obtained at the 

end of each interview. At the end of the third round of interviews, a field memo was written to 

capture the main findings of the field work. This was followed by a detailed engagement with the 

existing literature following which, a draft of literature review was created. The audio records of 

the interviews were transcribed, and the transcripts analyzed using the qualitative research 

software atlas.ti. The analysis of the interviews progressed with the writing up of the results. At 

this stage, the interesting findings that emerged was how the hybrid union had unique strategies 

that made it advantageous over others. Uncovering the reasons for this finding became the main 

focus of the study.  



 

25 
 

The transcripts were open coded to bring out categories of interest. This was followed 

by axial coding to figure out relationships between categories identified during open coding. This 

step was followed by selective coding in which the axes of categories were combined to form core 

overarching categories. Categories that did not fit into overarching concepts were dropped and 

the texts and codes revisited again to make sure the categories were connected in a meaningful 

manner. Using the overarching concepts, I formulated a grounded theory. 

Data 

i. Setting the context 

 

I set out to study why the hybrid union, Freelance Solidarity Project which was affiliated 

with National Writers Union, was more successful in maintaining membership level than the 

other types of labor organizations. I define “success” in terms of as maintaining the number of 

union members since the inception of the union. The labor organizations associated with 

freelancers struggled with maintaining membership because freelancers went in and out of jobs 

and also of their freelancer status frequently. Maintaining membership in this context would 

require the union to have adequate replacement ratio that evens out the departing members. I 

argue that this is possible if the union is more than a service-delivery organization and acts as a 

force of worker identity formation and mobilization. In turn, such a union is possible only if the 

internal processes are democratic and union strategies are diverse. This study is an attempt to 

understand the “success” of the union and the role its internal processes and strategies 

contributed to the outcomes. 

To understand the comparative context of the hybrid unions, it is important to map the 

other three types of labor organizations that were working with freelance media workers in 

different capacities. The first type of labor organization was guild-type labor unions like the 



 

26 
 

Communication Workers of America (CWA). These unions admitted their members based on a 

membership fee and catered to full-time staff and freelance media workers simultaneously. 

Freelancers were offered new projects through the guild, received helped in contract negotiation, 

and mediation in case of dispute with the employer. There was high turnover in freelancer 

membership. As freelancers went in and out of project-based work and some of them viewed their 

working condition as temporary work status where the cost of union membership outweighed 

the benefits. Furthermore, collective bargaining was not possible for freelancers as they were not 

legally employees. With declining overall membership rates and competing demands on 

resources and capacities, guilds prioritized full-time union members over freelance workers. 

Incidentally, it was former guild union members who formed a hybrid union to cater to 

freelancers’ specific demands.  

The second type of labor organization was mutual aid groups like the Freelancers Union. 

These “unions” admitted members without a membership fee and was exclusive to freelancers. 

They positioned themselves as service delivery organizations for health insurance and retirement 

benefits at group rates, providing office space for freelancers to work, and advocated for laws to 

address the issues that freelancers were facing. The major threat mutual aid groups faced was 

the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2015) that made it illegal to provide group 

insurance to freelancers and forcing them to replace actual service delivery mediation with 

information and counseling. Furthermore, it was a multi-industry labor organization and was 

not able to address industry and sector specific worker issues effectively. The membership was 

organized along geographical units. These groups worked with other unions for advocacy. 

Traditional unions were also present for project-based technical media workers such as 

the United Auto Workers (UAW). These unions admitted members based on a membership fee 

and had union wages, health insurance and retirement benefits. They also bargained collectively 



 

27 
 

at the sectoral level for their members. These unions operated in a context where there were 

many non-union workers who had worse wage rates and working conditions for doing the same 

work. Industrial unions in other sectors who had media worker members were particularly averse 

to freelancers joining their membership.  

The hybrid union operated in this milieu. Hybrid unions had a membership fee but offer 

many services to non-union members as well. They positioned themselves as a member-driven 

union with committees for different focus areas. They performed advocacy work in collaboration 

with mutual aid groups and guilds.  

The context is laid out in figure 1. The underlying axes that differentiate the labor 

organizations are the extent of flexibility of employment relation and the organizing capacity of 

the union. Flexibility of employment relation refers to non-standard forms of contract such as 

freelancing and part-time work. Organization capacity refers to how much the union is member-

driven with the capacity for collective labor actions of diverse kinds. At any given point, 

freelancers moved in and out of unions as well as between unions. Hybrid unions were 

strategizing to merge into guild- type unions while maintaining a distinct identity of their own 

to expand their capacity and access to resources.  

 

 

 

                                                 



 

28 
 

Figure 1Types of labor organizations among freelance media workers 

                                                high 

 

Flexibility of employment 
relation 
 

                                                                                                                              

                                                                                                                                  

                                                 

                                                       low                                                     high 

                                                             Organization capacity of union 

 

ii. Case description 

 

The term freelancer refers to own account workers which are typically business without 

employees in particular occupations or sectors (Kitching, 2015). There are competing concepts 

such as independent professionals, contractors, self-employed or interim managers used in the 

literature (Bögenhold et al., 2014; Barley and Kunda, 2006; Goss and Bridson 1998). In the 

United States, the legal definition of the freelancer is an independent contractor or self-employed 

individual depending on whether the payer has the right to control or direct only the result of 

the work and not the processes (IRS, 2023). I use the term freelancer in this study because in 

creative industries, that is the term the workers use to refer themselves.  

Freelancers have remained a significant part of the American economy in terms of average 

earnings and employment. Freelancers contributed 1.27 trillion dollars to the economy in 2023 

and constituted 64 million workers that represented about 38 percent of the total workforce 

(Upwork Research Institute, 2023) The annual data on freelancers show a steady increase in 

employment in the past decade in the country as shown in figure 2. 

Non-union 
workers 

Guild             

Mutual aid 
groups 

 
 
Industrial 
Union 

Hybrid union 



 

29 
 

Figure 2 Freelancers by employment share 

 

Note: We have the year of data collection on the Y axis and the percentage of workforce employed 

in the year on the X-axis. 

Source: Upwork Research Institute (2023) 

 

Disaggregating the employment by sector, nearly half of the freelance workforce engages 

in skilled work in knowledge related services as figure 3 depicts. The media work that I study in 

this research falls within the scope of the high-skill knowledge workers. They are also the group 

of freelance workers who are inclined to collectivize or join a union more than influencers who 

also work in a form of media work.  

 

 

  

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

Employment share



 

30 
 

Figure 3 Freelancers by type of work 

 

Source: Upwork Research Institute (2023) 

 

United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) defines 

cultural and creative industries (CCI) as any work that engages in production, reproduction, 

distribution, promotion and commercialization of goods and services that are derived from 

artistic, heritage, cultural or intellectual work (UNESCO, 2015). CCI is composed of several 

sectors that is given in figure 4. The creative industries remain the largest employer of 

freelancers historically and contemporaneously. That is why I have chosen to study freelance 

media workers as it is the largest segment of high skilled freelance workforce that remains 

precarious.  

Media work is a capacious term that convers a plethora of occupations from figure 4 that 

includes newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and books. By focusing on one union, I limit 

the type of freelance media workers to writers, editors, graphic designers, videographers, 

47

34

27

23

16

Knowledge services Low wage work Selling goods Influencer Others



 

31 
 

audiographers and podcasters. There are individuals who have shifted occupations in the course 

of their working lives. I have included those who have done any of these jobs that I am interested 

in at least once in their lives. There are individuals who do more than one type of role 

simultaneously. For example, a videographer could also be a small business owner if they have a 

studio that may or may not employ others. I have included them if they worked as a freelancer in 

the media work occupations that I was interested in.  

I spoke to more than 50 individuals in the course of eight months in 2023 for this study. 

From the sample, I have used 39 audio recorded interviews for the purpose of this analysis. The 

interviews were either conducted in person or virtually as per the preference of the individual. 

The interview lasted an hour on average and were semi-structured. Most of the individuals 

worked in New York State, but some worked in multiple states. I had 19 women and 20 men in 

my sample.  

New York became my site of study for a number of reasons. New York is the “media 

capital” of the United States employing the largest number of freelancers within the country. 

Second, it was also the site where the four unions I began to compare worked and the union I 

finally focused on operated in. This is not to say that freelancers are not dispersed nationally or 

that union does not work in other states with comparable results. But the inference from my 

study applies mostly to New York but may have resonances to the condition of freelancers and 

their union response in other states. The findings of my study certainly have implications on how 

freelancers operate elsewhere.  

Figure 4 Sectors of Cultural and Creative Industry 



 

32 
 

 

C
re

at
iv

e 
an

d
 C

u
lt

u
ra

l 
In

d
u

st
ry

Advertising

Architecture

Books Physical and digital books

Movies
Production, post-production and 

distribution

Music
Recording and publishing, live 

music

Newspapers and magazines

Performing Arts Dance, theatre, live music

Radio and TV
Programming, production, 

broadcasting

Visual Arts Photography, design

Video games



 

33 
 

Source: Freelancer talk, 2021 

The individuals that I interviewed were freelance workers, union members, union 

leadership and legislators. In the cases where a freelancer was also a small business owner, I 

queried about their perspectives as an employer. In a few cases where the individuals permitted, 

I followed up with clarifying questions either through emails or another interview. The sampling 

technique I used was snowballing.  

iii. Case history 

 

The freelance media worker union that I focused on was the Freelance Solidarity Project-

National Writers Union (FSP-NWU). The National Writers Union (NWU) was established in 

1981 and represented writers, editors and translators. The writers included creative and 

academic sectors as well as print, broadcasting, and digital media. The NWU had the three-

pronged objectives of organizing writers through collective bargaining, advancing their 

economic wellbeing, and providing professional services. In 1981, NWU organized 3000 writers 

as a result of the Nation Writer’s Institute’s Congress themed “Why a union?” that advocated 

for better pay and treatment of media workers against the Raegan-era repression of free speech 

(NWU, 2024). The union was officially chartered in 1983 with several local chapters under the 

affiliation of UAW. This relationship lasted till 2014 and was productive as UAW provided the 

resources to further NWU objectives.  

During this period, NWU mastered the strategy of taking employers including big 

publishers to court over non-payment of wages. It was also successfully targeting freelancers 

with health insurance options and had over 7000 members at its organizing peak in 2008. The 

NWU had an uneasy relationship with its parent affiliate over the issue of freelancers because of 

their status as independent contractors as classified by the Internal Revenue Service. As per law, 



 

34 
 

they were 1099 workers who did not have the legal right to organize or collectively bargain. The 

UAW was wary of freelancers on anti-trust issues and pressurized NWU to give up its freelance 

union members. 

The NWU felt keenly opposed to this stance as several of their core members moved 

between full-time staff and freelance status. Furthermore, after the financial crisis of 2008, the 

media publishing industry was consolidated under big players and massive layoffs since the 2010s 

resulted in a majority of media workforce freelancing. From NWU’s perspective, freelancers were 

soon becoming the mainstay of the sector and deserved a strategic response of organization under 

union membership more than any time before. Matters came to a standstill on this issue and 

NWU walked out of UAW over a difference of strategic direction that included incorporating 

freelancers. 

The Freelance Solidarity Project (FSP) meanwhile was formed in 2018 by a group of 

freelancers who had been full-time staff before. Conceptualized as a solidarity type union, this 

group organized freelancers for the first time around a workers’ union model breaking free from 

the service organization model that was prevalent in the field. In particular, the most common 

response to freelancer organization was as a union that provided health insurance. The FSP 

etched out its core mission as organizing freelancers as a workers’ union and setting industry 

standards through collective bargaining.  

The FSP joined NWU and merged into its digital division in 2018 and began catering to 

a number of workers who were independent contractors. Thereafter, the hybrid union positioned 

itself as a workers’ union model for freelancers with diverse strategies to achieve their objectives. 

They maintained their union membership since their inception as other unions for freelancers 

were struggling with retaining members. Several of my interviewees remarked about the 



 

35 
 

consistent union membership including those from other unions. I reproduce one such remark 

from a core union leader that set me on the research question: 

Last year we probably had something like 250 members leave the union either because they said 

they couldn't afford it or they no longer freelancing or they got another job. But the membership 

didn't actually go down, it maintained itself, because others had joined. 

                                                                                      Interview 38 

 

In this study, I explore how this union maintained membership among freelancers and 

remained more successful by looking into the internal and external functioning of the union.  

iv. Case selection 

 

The hybrid union FSP-NWU was the most recent of all unions in the media sector for 

freelance workers and started off as an independent solidarity project in 2018. It was established 

by former guild members, who were once full-time media workers. It was organized by the digital 

media division of the NWU. Within a few years of its formation, it was absorbed into a larger 

labor organization with 1300 members and spread across 12 local chapters. This transition 

enabled the project to access the resources and capacity of the larger organization and to further 

freelancers’ causes and act as a union. The union represented freelancers including writers, 

editors, videographers, audiographers, graphic designers, photographers, social media producers 

and other media workers.  

The formation of the hybrid union was partly in response to the failure of the other types 

of unions to address the changing dynamic of the industry in terms of work contracts, and its 

impact on an increasing number of freelancers. Increasingly, employers were resorting to 

freelance contracts for short-term projects over full-time in-house staff members to reduce costs. 



 

36 
 

In the decade since 2010s, the media sector experienced massive layoffs of full-time staff members 

and their transformation into freelancers. Traditional industrial unions and guilds did not pay 

attention to the new forms of work and workers that came into existence because of digital 

technologies. These workers were set up in precarious work contracts and were looking for some 

kind of collectivization. The rules set up by traditional unions and guilds prevented workers from 

accessing jobs and making a living. This resulted in members voluntarily leaving the unions. As 

one of the interviewees remarked: 

The strength of the union really weakened due to the internet because they didn't have jurisdiction 

over the internet. And so many jobs, became internet-based and the union couldn't protect or offer 

those jobs and if you were in the union, you couldn't work a non-union job but people were finding 

ways to get around that. Eventually, I had to give up my union card in order to be able to work. 

Especially actors and models had to, basically voluntarily allow their union card to be revoked, but 

continue paying union dues in order to work a union job, and a non-union job.  

 

Interview 8 

Organizational identity 
 

The hybrid union was more effective than others in maintaining membership because it 

influenced the organization’s identity and strategy distinctly. This section examines how the 

hybrid union positioned its organizational identity. The hybrid union articulated why its 

presence was necessary by tracing three main reasons – structural changes within the industry, 

organizational challenges and worker misclassification and its consequences.  

 

 



 

37 
 

i. Restructuring the industry 

 

The restructuring of the sector with the technology companies heading media production 

was flagged off as a reason for the ineffectiveness of existing unions and guilds. For example, 

television writers were increasingly working for shows produced by digital platforms. 

Consequently, television writers, videographers and audiographers faced a two-tier employer 

relationship where the main employer, the tech company, wanted severe cost cutting measures 

because they had very little understanding of a television writer’s room culture of teamwork and 

skill building. With the technology companies investing in media and entertainment industry, 

more jobs were created under non-standard work contracts creating tiers of employees who 

worked the same tasks.  

With this reorganization of the industry, firms began to offload risks onto the workers and the 

rationale for employing freelancers shifted from accessing niche expertise to a cost saving 

strategy.  Most of the freelancers who were interviewed for this study described this as “the crisis 

in the industry”. As a result of all these transformations, freelancers were becoming a prominent 

class of workers who were made to lift the heavy burden of risks that the industry had unleashed 

with its unsustainable financial architecture. The companies were increasingly relying upon gig 

work and precarious labor in place of in-house staff.  This shift became the reason for companies 

to offload risk on to workers such as health care, benefits, paid sick leave and all of the albeit 

meager benefits that American workers with more standard employment agreements received. 

Firms were unwilling to provide even those meager protections Freelance workers, seen this 

way, are cheap labor that allows companies to save money.  as is described here:  

I think there's a complicated needle to thread when acknowledging that the media industry is in 

crisis. And it has been in crisis, for a long time, you know, ever since massive tech companies like 

Google and Facebook started gobbling up all of the ad revenue, it has made media and 



 

38 
 

unsustainable industry. We've seen thousands and thousands of publications fold. It is very difficult 

for publications to financially survive right now under any circumstances. And unfortunately, one 

of the solutions that many publications have pursued is making use of the some of the most 

vulnerable workers in the industry even more vulnerable, by pushing more and more people into 

freelancing, you know, obviously this year we have seen wave after wave of layoffs in the industry 

and many of those are publications who are laying off workers cost more money than freelancers 

do.  

                                                                                                                     Interview 31 

More recently, these conditions were exacerbated by the mass layoffs in the industry in 

the 2010s. More workers were compelled to work as freelancers and were looking for a way to 

solve the issues of wages and benefits, but also collectivize and demand better protections for 

them as a class of workers. That is why, despite these challenges of churn in the membership, the 

hybrid union was able to attract new membership on a continuous basis so that there was no 

serious drop in membership levels. 

 Organizational challenges 

 

The second issue that paved way for the rise of the hybrid union was the organizational 

challenge of collectivizing freelancers. The traditional unions and guilds responded to the double 

threat of technology induced precaritization and employer tiers by creating union drives targeted 

at freelancers which drew membership in the short term. As freelancers were not legally 

employees and collective bargaining was not an option that was available to them, the strategy 

was to litigate against the employers for non-payment of wages. The unions had the financial 

resources to file legal cases and get a few victories. These events were expensive and time 

consuming.  



 

39 
 

The everyday existence of freelancers that depended on pay and health insurance was 

never fully addressed by the guilds or unions. Consequently, these union membership drives were 

unsuccessful in catering to the specific needs of freelance workers such as timely and full payment, 

health and retirement benefits in the long run. The rebuilding process of the unions had its mixed 

outcomes in the long run, but this moment was the peak in the discourse that freelancers were 

“unorganizable”. 

Around 2009 we began to rebuild the big process, a serious rebuilding process and we started 

representing groups of freelancers, in non-payment grievances against publishers, and these are 

companies that we had no contractual relationship with at all, but we organized. We were affiliated 

with a union which was able to help us and finance the legal cases. The union was pretty big. It picked 

out about 7,000 freelancers, mostly journalists but also technical writers when Silicon Valley was just 

starting to explode. Then we couldn't offer health insurance anymore. A lot of people joined for the 

health insurance and you know, the medical system in the US is probably one of the most backwards in 

the world and certainly in the industrial world and so the union membership plummeted from that and 

from some other factors. 

                                                                                                    Interview 28 

As unions were negotiating the challenge of unionizing freelancers, the workers 

themselves faced challenges of maintaining union membership. There was a trade-off between 

high costs and restrictive rules and regulations of the unions against the anti-union retaliation 

from the employers. Among freelancers who chose to position themselves in a flexible 

employment relationship, the perspective of union as costly and restrictive was widely prevalent.  

The benefits [should] outweigh the expenses and practically many times, that's not what 

happens. The burden of joining a union for a freelancer is two-fold - you need to pay a lot and follow 

the rules and regulations to maintain the relationship with the union and [the] pressure from the 

employers to quit the union is also very high. So a freelancer is in the middle getting hit on the head 

from the employers as well as the unions. 



 

40 
 

                                                                                                        Interview 2 

ii. Worker misclassification 

 

The third reason that made traditional unionization prohibitive to freelancers was the 

limitation of the legal definition of not being a W-2 employee and its implications for collective 

bargaining. In the face of the ineffectiveness of existing union response, many freelance media 

workers felt that they were unorganizable because of the structural conditions of the sector. This 

inference would motivate the hybrid union to not just attempt to amend the law, but also view 

freelancers as workers within the union context. One of the main challenges in this regard was 

that American labor law was very old and not amended to reflect the changing workforce like 

freelance workers.  

The hybrid union would think through the definition of a worker and union and the 

challenge of organizing freelance workers that the unions were unsuccessfully grappling with 

for a few years. On the question of workers and unions, freelancers were still negotiating their 

identity as workers and their collectivization as “union”. Many members described their labor 

organization as a “solidarity project” that focused on the immediate needs of freelancers. 

The 1099 workers obviously don't have the right to be in a formal union in the United 

States. It's a sort of solidarity union type project. Right now, we're going to lobby for a piece of 

legislation in Albany. I still consider what I'm involved with right now as a union, but it's not a 

formal union. 

Interview 14 

On the question of organizing, the hybrid union was dealing with a high turnover of 

membership due to the nature of freelance work. The traditional “union shop model” was not 

feasible as a membership drive strategy for them. Even though hybrid unions emphatically 



 

41 
 

articulated their identity as a members’ union, the difficulty in accessing members and 

maintaining them was described as a “struggle”. It is worth contrasting how traditional union 

membership works with that of the freelance workforce.  

In a traditional union job, every member has full rights from the moment they join. A 

member would join at their shop and would be a member there as long as they worked there. The 

union dues automatically came out of the member’s paycheck. In contrast, freelancers do not 

work in one place. Their membership is completely voluntary, and it is month-to-month. So, 

maintaining membership, especially with the precariousness of freelance work, is a real struggle. 

The hybrid union attributed this maintenance of union membership primarily to their 

union building activities that used strategies of collective action that resulted in significant gains 

over wages and working conditions. They differentiated their work with those provided by 

traditional unions who prioritized employees.  

They're traditional unions and that they represent W-2 employees in, you know, in NLRB 

union context. We don't have those rights under the National Labor Relations Act. And so we do 

things other than collective bargaining. We tried to negotiate [and] recommended standards with 

outlets for their treatment of freelancers. We advocate for legislation like we're going up to Albany 

tomorrow to try for a second time to pass a statewide freelance isn't free act, which we already have 

passed in New York City, which requires certain contractual norms and payment standards for 

freelancers in journalism and media. 

           Interview 10 

The short-term strategy of the hybrid union was to take care of the wages and working 

conditions of freelancers that traditional unions had previously neglected. They attempted to 

realize these objectives through a diverse set of strategies. The hybrid union also engaged with 

the long-term strategy of expanding their capacity and impact among freelancers. They were 



 

42 
 

actively pursuing the path of affiliating with a large guild while maintaining their distinct identity 

and autonomy to pursue freelancers’ interests. 

Backing the freelancers was existentially threatening to the union. For example, they had 

to leave their parent union over freelance membership because there were threats of anti-trust 

violations. The hybrid union took a stand to stay with the freelancers and quit the union. Their 

motivation to join a guild-type parent organization rather than a traditional union stems from 

this historical experience.  

These strategies become important tools that the hybrid union would use to draw new 

members and gain legitimacy among existing members by achieving tangible outcomes. In the 

next section, I examine the diverse strategies used by the hybrid union that distinguishes its 

organizational rationale from the other unions and partly explains why it became more effective 

than others. 

Union strategies 
 

This section examines the union strategies that the hybrid union used to effectively cater to 

freelance workers’ demands. Four strategies of grievance redress, legislation, litigation, and 

unilateral announcement are discussed in detail. 

i. Grievance redress and litigation 

 

The union defined a grievance as “any work-related injustice done to the worker that they 

could not resolve by themselves and that required the aid of a union” (NWU, 2024). The broad 

term grievance could signify a range of workplace issues that included contract violations over 

payment, editorial procedures, misreported royalties, copyright ownership, unauthorized use of 

copyrighted work and other types of disputes that were generated in the course of the publishing 



 

43 
 

or production process. Non-payment of wages was the most common problem that freelance 

media workers brought under grievance claims.  

Within the category of non-payment, the grievance claim process addressed a set of issues 

ranging from not being paid the wages that the publication and the freelance worker agreed upon 

contractually, extremely late payments, partial payments, delaying the publication without due 

cause, and misreporting royalties. The union started grievance proceedings against a range of 

employers including global publishing houses, art presses, literary journals, newsletters, 

institutional house organs, local and regional newspapers, and magazines. The intermediaries 

and subcontractors involving literary agents, subsidy presses, collaborators, and work-for-hire 

employers were also often the target of such proceedings. 

The union had a dedicated team of Grievance and Contract division (GCD) where trained 

union members were employed as contract advisors and grievance officers. The first step of the 

grievance redress process was the freelancer reaching out to GCD with a problem. This problem 

was carefully reviewed and if found appropriate to be handled by the division, forwarded to a 

grievance officer. The grievance officer would then follow up with the freelancer about the nature 

of complaint and the type of resolution sought. The grievance officer also verified the claim 

through documents and additional evidence at this stage. If the issue was not found to be 

appropriate for the GCD, other options were discussed with the freelancer.  

On finding a suitable claim, the grievance officer helped the freelancer write a final 

demand letter to the employer with the explicit warning that if the issue was not resolved, a 

grievance claim would be filed with the union. Sometimes, the final demand letter enabled a 

negotiation with the employer. If the final demand letter did not elicit the expected response from 

the employer, the freelancer then made a formal grievance application with the union. After the 



 

44 
 

filing of the grievance formally, the grievance officer acted on behalf of the freelancer to negotiate 

with the employer.  The grievance officer used several tactics including educating the employer 

to achieve the goal of settlement. The grievance officer could consult with other members of the 

GCD on pursuing a winning strategy and the freelancer was regularly consulted about such 

developments. A grievance officer used emails, letters, phone calls to reach out to the employer 

that often escalated into personal visits and informational pickets depending on the level of 

response from the employer.  

If the employer did not respond to the tactics of the grievance redress officer, the union 

publicized the stubborn offender through a “writer alert” reporting system that was published on 

the union website that could also be accessed over social media. The blacklisting of such 

employers was also shared with interested stakeholders such as the Better Business Bureaus, 

Chambers of Commerce, and law enforcement agencies. The grievance officer also recommended 

that the freelancer file a lawsuit in Small Claims Courts or US District Courts if the employer 

did not settle wages through grievance claims.  

Group grievance was a special category of grievance claims. It was a strategy adopted by 

the union to recruit new members and offer an important service to existing members. The 

recourse of group grievance was open to members and non-members alike. The process of group 

grievance started out as an individual claim and grew into a collective set of claims mainly 

through the intervention of the union. Once a claim like non-payment was brought by a freelance 

worker to the attention of the union, the union made some effort to reach out to other freelancers 

with the same employer who faced the same issue.  



 

45 
 

This process of collectivization had two benefits. It made the claim stronger because of 

the involvement of many workers and enlarged the magnitude of the claim because of the 

aggregation of individual claims. Thus, collectivization of an individual problem justified the 

presence of a mediator like the union, acted as a leverage against the employer, and attracted 

more membership to the union. One of the respondents summed up the process by which an 

individual claim became a group grievance and how the union played an important role in this 

process: 

You're new, you're talking about one freelancer not being paid $800, but when the number of 

freelancers start to rack up, so does the amount of money that is owed, There have been publications that 

have owed freelancers hundreds of thousands of dollars and so the union can start by acting as a mediator 

[that] a freelancer just needs, just as it's very easy for a publication to ignore one individual, it’s a little 

harder to ignore a union. And that's why it's important to be a part of a union, to have an institution on 

your side. 

                                                                                                                                      

Interview 39 

Along with grievance redress, the union also used educational campaigns for freelancers 

that included a primer on their legal rights, the importance of keeping written communication 

records, registering original works with US copyright office, and provided model contracts as a 

pro-active measure to reduce the number of claims. The union was open to litigation including 

class action suits as a post-grievance redress mechanism if the issue was not resolved.  

Figure 5 describes the two pathways of individual and group grievance redress involving 

the grievance and contract division officer of the union. The pathway traces the steps from the 

moment freelancer reaches out to the union to the resolution of the issue. At the step where the 

GCD officer negotiates with the union several labor action tactics such as educational and 

information pickets and strikes might be utilized.  



 

46 
 

This method of progressive escalation is time consuming but has worked for the union in 

the media industry for cases of non-payment of wages amounting to $1.5 million (NWU, 2024). 

Examples of successful group grievance redress includes a single settlement with a magazine for 

$70,000 to several hundred freelancers as well as institutionalizing a fair settlement process with 

the publisher. Similarly, the union organized a strike to coerce a film director to pay kill fee to a 

writer upon non-publication of a timely article, foreign rights income and royalty dividends 

amounting to $4000, and successfully fought for compensation for a wide range of cases involving 

issues such as maligning reputation of previous work, non-publication of work citing 

overbooking and reneging on previously signed contract. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

47 
 

 

Figure 5 Grievance redress process 

 

 

 

ii. Legislation 

 

The union recognized that the main problem confronting freelance media workers was 

that most of their workplace rights were not protected in the manner of in-house staff members. 

Freelancer reaches 
out to GCD

GCD asserts if  the 
claim is suitable for 

processing

GCD helps freelancer 
draft a final demand 

letter

Freelancer files a 
formal grievance 
with the union

Grievance officer 
negotiates with the 

employer

Issue resolved

 

Group grievance 

process initiated if 

other freelancers 

with similar issues 

are available.  

Litigation in a court 

of law 



 

48 
 

The most cited freelance worker demand was non-payment of wages. Non-payment for work 

performed was both massive in terms of the amount owed to freelance workers and rampant in 

terms of the frequency in which complaints were coming in. Consequently, many labor 

organizations representing freelance workers lobbied to get the Freelance isn’t Free Act (FFA) 

was passed in 2017 in New York City that had a large number of freelance workers.  

 FFA gave freelancers three specific rights – right to a written contract, timely and full 

payment, and protection against employer retaliation (FFA, 2017). The law specifically mandates 

total payment of the work as agreed in the contract, to be disbursed within 30 days of completing 

the work. The legislation also put in provisions to prevent employers from retaliating against 

the demand for full and timely payment. The law also entrusts the Director at the Department 

of Labor Standards (DLS) to recover the amount owed to the freelancer from the employer and 

validated various types of penalty including statutory damages, double damages, injunctive relief 

and attorney fees for non-payment. If there was a pattern of violations found, the Corporation 

Counsel could bring a civil action to recover a penalty of up to $25,000. Consequently, freelance 

workers could hold the employers accountable to issues of non-payment by citing it as an illegal 

act. 

As per the FFA, the aggrieved freelancer had to submit a claim to the city’s DLS within 

two years of the grievance. The DLS adjudicated the claim and enforced a settlement after 

mediation. For example, one of the largest settlements drawn out of this law was against a 

magazine that enforced back payment of over 40 freelancers. Even though the law was a relief to 

freelancers, its major drawback was that the process took a long time to conclude. This was 

mainly because the enforcement agency was a city-based institution with limited resources.  



 

49 
 

Although the union backed the passage of law and used it on behalf of its members, it also 

argued that the strength of the law was in its enforcement mechanism. Consequently, the union 

adopted a two-pronged strategy to tackle enforcement. The first approach was to educate 

freelance media workers about the provisions of the FFA, advise them on approaching the 

employers, and sometimes prosecuting them on behalf of freelancers. The second approach was 

to coordinate the passing of such laws in other jurisdictions and transforming it into a national 

project. The rationale for this strategy was the evidence that only a limited amount of resource 

was spent by the state on actual prosecution of employers who violated the law. The union 

coordinated the passage of laws like FFA in the state of New York and engaged in city-wide 

campaigns in Chicago (Illinois), Columbus (Ohio) and Los Angeles (California). One of the union 

members summed up the strategy as: 

I think the more jurisdictions that this law is passed in, the more powerful it will be and the more 

it is publicized, the more powerful it will be to right the wrong. The more that companies know 

that there is a legal mechanism requiring them to pay, the more likely they will be to pay. It is 

certainly not a fool-proof mechanism, but it is much better than not having any legislation at all.  

                                                                                                                Interview 39 

Overseeing a larger project of legislative lobbying has enabled the union to work with 

coalition partners especially in contexts outside of New York. The union members identified 

having conversations with other local labor organizations as an important part of expanding 

their understating of the issue in diverse local political contexts. Often, the local coalition partner 

introduced the union to the political terrain, and they discussed potential partners and ideal 

strategies to get the law passed. This had led to “coalition management” as an area that the union 

had begun to increasingly focus on. An illustration of this aspect was the experience of working 

with other unions and guilds in Chicago (Illinois) as elaborated by a union member:  



 

50 
 

In Illinois, it was a little different. We [union] carried the most of it [organizing] because we had 

a lot of. help from the Council 25 of the Teamsters and the Graphic Communications Council who 

had relationships with a lot of the legislators and knew a lot about the terrain in a way I wish we 

did.  

                                                                                                                 Interview 37 

Another state, the union was spending considerable time was California where a state-

wide bill was lobbied for freelancers along with other coalition partners. Proceeding along the 

state-wide campaigns of the first four major states, New York, California, Illinois and Ohio, was 

a strategic decision because these states had a large number of freelancers and a sympathetic 

array of legislators. Legislating similar laws in other jurisdictions would give more teeth to the 

laws already passed, but that demanded a different strategic approach from the union due to 

several reasons. First, many states were not sympathetic to the cause of freelancers. To overcome 

this issue, the union was already beginning to envision what a national version of the bill would 

look like by dovetailing freelancers’ law with other classes of workers.  

A promising opening in this regard was the issue was gig workers and the problem of 

misclassification. There were competing models of legislation at work for these workers. One 

version of the law put the onus on the employer to prove that they were hiring independent 

contractors and not workers. The ability of the employers to find a loophole to deny workers 

their legal rights discouraged the legislative campaigns for such laws. For example, one 

respondent compared the Wagner Act (1935) that institutionalized industrial democracy in the 

United States, which was adopted in the case of Uber drivers in Washington and California where 

they tried to form something similar to a traditional collective bargaining agreement but ran into 

trouble deciding which workers would be part of it and how anti-trust issues would be solved. 

Consequently, the legality of the Act was appealed in a higher court in Seattle.  



 

51 
 

And then there's Wagner act approach which the Teamsters are struggling in LA and also in Seattle 

with Uber drivers. That's traditional bargaining and they ran into just a mountain of legal problems 

up around antitrust and also around defining who might fall into the bargaining unit. That was 

one of the decisions that it got appealed all the way up to the next circuit in Seattle. 

                                                                                                                 Interview 14 

The host of issues that impacted effective legislations – enforcement, employer ingenuity 

and issues with forming collective bargaining units – cautioned the union to not “spread thin” by 

passing laws across states that were not enforced or badly enforced in other contexts. The union 

membership was acutely attuned to the symbolic nature of laws and through various non-legal 

approaches to making laws more effective. One of their objectives as they were mulling over a 

nation-wide campaign was to spend adequate time and effort to ensure enforcement. This 

objective made their expansion approach gradual and incremental and upon identifying feasible 

coalition partners.   

I think we probably are gonna need to reserve a little bit of time for enforcement. I'm a little nervous 

about proceeding in a very expansion-of-way without making sure that things that we are winning 

and have [been] won, being enforced and improving people's lives in the way that we expect them 

to. 

                                                                                                                           Interview 37 

The other strategies to ensure that laws passed translated to rights won, included 

campaigns that acted as opportunities for education about laws or improvement of living and 

working conditions. Working on these campaigns also involved other types of precarious 

workers including traditional workers that helped the union decipher common interests for 

further legislative campaigns or solidarity. For example, the union was actively involved in 

setting up an unemployment bridge program in New York state that set up a fund to support 

traditional workers who were not covered under unemployment benefits. The other campaign 



 

52 
 

was being part of an open letter to the New York Times to advocate for health care for transgender 

adolescents. This issue was raised by freelance workers who were members of the union as part 

of their advocacy for others. The union argued that freelancers advocating for other issues 

brought them together as a collective and helped them strategize for themselves effectively. It 

had especially led them to introspect about the power they held to influence public opinion and 

to openly declare solidarity with other constituencies.  

We were also involved in the recent open letter to the New York Times about their coverage of 

healthcare for trans kids and that emerged from very similar conversations. A member of the union 

reached out to me to say, what if anything, can freelancers do about this issue? It got us seriously 

thinking about what are the types of power that we hold, who are the types of people that we can 

target with that? What are the most effective ways that we can engage in that gap?. And I'm really 

proud of how that has turned out and the success that campaign had. And I am optimistic that we 

will continue to be able to build on that type of exercise of power and that type of strategic thinking, 

stuff that I think does not necessarily come naturally to [us], answers, thinking collectively like that 

because people are so heavily isolated. Seeing that change and being able to be involved in some 

capacity in it, you know, helping people think a little bit differently about themselves and about their 

work, that has been extremely gratifying. 

                                                                                                                           Interview 37 

Finally, the union also reasoned that educating legislators about the issues themselves 

and how they converge with various groups of stakeholders would have benefits for the interests 

of freelancers in the long run. A former legislator that I spoke to described how freelancers 

stepped in and brought various issues to the attention of the local government when they were 

grappling with the question of how to regulate the internet workforce. A broader discussion 

around the problems of independent contractors that the freelancers facilitated a cohesive 

perspective on regulatory policies surrounding the working lives of diverse set of workers that 



 

53 
 

led to lawmakers taking the issues with some urgency and deal with these workers as a 

constituency.  

I always felt that there was room for growth around educating legislators on what the challenges 

independent worker space had and then also being able to plan and create the real thoughts around, 

how do we use policy to improve the lives of the internet workforce? It wasn't until the union stepped 

into the halls of government until which I would say that, our local government started taking on 

the issues and approaching them, that improved the lives of the independent workforce. 

                                                                                                                Interview 33 

The legislative campaigns of the union regarding freelancers present an evolving 

landscape of understanding the workforce and regulatory apparatus. Beginning with the passage 

of law, it led to strategizing for a national project, deal with competing legal models, explore 

avenues for solidarity with other workers, educating the legislators and pursuing non-legal 

approaches to strengthen law enforcement. 

iii. Unilateral announcement and minimum standards agreement 

 

The FSP-NWU approached prospective employers for unionizing the shop in a strategy 

they referred to as unilateral announcement. A non-union or union member freelance worker 

under a contract with a client approached the union with a request to unionize the shop. The 

union followed up with its own approach of reaching out other freelancers working with the same 

employer. Sometimes, the employer voluntarily provided a list of freelancers working for them if 

they were worker friendly, left leaning or explicitly leftist. If not, the union spent considerable 

time and effort scraping data from media outlets to figure out freelancers who might be working 

for an establishment.  



 

54 
 

If the union had sufficient members interested in forming a freelancers’ union, they 

approached the employer and made a unilateral announcement that they would represent the 

workers thereafter in matters of dispute with the employers. Sometimes, employers who were 

sympathetic to the freelancers’ plight and who employed a large number of freelancers accepted 

the unilateral announcement. Some employers who were ideologically aligned with the labor 

union were the first in the sector to cooperate with unilateral announcement.   

The union followed up unilateral announcement with setting up a minimum standards 

agreement. This was a strategy that was most aligned with setting the industry standard for 

freelancers. Minimum standard agreement was a document that outlined baseline standards for 

wages that included pay, kill pay, indemnity and attribution issues in its clauses. Once the union 

outlined minimum standards agreement with the help of its members, it offered to negotiate with 

the employer to agree on setting these baselines for the freelancers working with them. The 

minimum standards agreement took one or several rounds of negotiation. In matters of violation, 

the union once again negotiated on behalf of the freelancers. The minimum standards agreement 

was not legally enforceable and acted more like an article of good faith. Its violation meant the 

union had to negotiate with the employer with the threat of litigation.  



 

55 
 

Figure 6 Unilateral agreement and minimum standards agreement 

 

The union was thoughtful that unilateral agreements depended a lot on the cooperation 

of the employers. Some of the bigger establishments who were employing a large number of 

freelancers were also doing so with an explicit intention of cutting costs. The future of this 

strategy depends on how well the union was able to navigate these employers to come with shop-

level representation of freelancers. A participant summed up these thoughts as follows:  

 

Those are usually publications that are a bit more worker friendly or left leaning or explicitly 

leftist, who are more open to the idea of improving freelance rates, which is great. We're happy to 

have those partners but that obviously is just not what the entire industry looks like and the much 

bigger publication are probably not willing to sit down with us. 

                                                                                                           Interview 36 

Similarly, on the minimum standards agreement the union felt that the working 

conditions of the freelancers were so abysmal that setting the floor and continuing the work on 

improving the wages and working conditions was a strategy worth pursuing. Thus, unilateral 

Unilateral 
agreement

Union represents 
all freelancers 
with an 
establishment

Minimum 
standards 
agreement

Union and 
employer agrees 
on baseline 
standards of  
work

Violation

Not legally 
enforcable. Union 
negotiates with 
threat of  
litigation



 

56 
 

announcements and minimum standards agreements were seen in conjunction with each other 

and as work in progress. These were aspects that dealt with setting the industry standards while 

being tied so close to membership drive.  

Findings 

 

At the start of this study, I asked the question how the hybrid union was more successful 

in maintaining membership levels than the other unions. I used the stable membership numbers 

as an indicator of success particularly because unions that incorporated freelancers had a hard 

time keeping up membership more so than those of other types of workers. One reason was that 

unionization rate was overall low across the sectors of the economy and freelancers followed suit. 

The second reason was that freelancers did not have a legal status to organize and collectively 

bargain as other workers did. Finally, freelancers moved out of jobs frequently and their union 

membership rates faltered as a result. Despite this reality, the hybrid union maintaining 

membership was something of a puzzle.  

The findings of this research are threefold. First, I show that the presence of a “caucus” 

within the union was the main mechanism that enabled the union to be effective among 

freelancers in terms of unionization drive.  The group of freelancers who are acting like a caucus 

is not a formal caucus within the hybrid union but acting together cohesively towards a set of 

objectives by marshalling union resources. To demonstrate this, I focus on the hybrid union’s 

organization to illuminate the configuration of a merged identity that gave specific orientation 

and ability to the union to confront freelancers’ problems, the branding of the union as workers’ 

union in contrast to service organization, and the focus on freelancers despite opposition from 

other stakeholders. Second, I trace how the caucus effectively engineered unionization drives in 

several workplaces by focusing on outcomes favorable for freelancers. The strategies of behaving 



 

57 
 

as if there were a workers’ union, the ability to manage coalition partners and the conception of 

freelancers’ issues as a national project provided a long-term cohesive vision to the union that 

helped in focusing on goals, achieving outcomes and through that process attract membership. 

Third, I argue that while unionization drive was effective through this mechanism, the process 

of class engagement with various groups of workers was not apparent. 

i. Caucus and Organization 

 

The union I studied was a merged entity that comprised of two distinct labor 

organizations. The first was a “solidarity-type” FSP that was founded by freelance media workers 

who did not find the existing union landscape helpful to meet their needs. Particularly, the 

existing labor organizations acted either as a service delivery organization like a health insurance 

provider or acted as a union that prioritized full-time workers over freelancers. The FSP wanted 

to raise the industry standards for freelance media workers through collective bargaining. They 

joined the National Writers Union in 2018 as part of their digital media division. The NWU was 

a union for diverse media workers that was affiliated with UAW from 1981 to 2014. This was 

one of the earliest labor unions to think about freelance media workers as a separate and 

legitimate category of workers through their “Why union” conference in 1981. The NWU 

spearheaded several group grievances and court cases for freelancers before it exited the 

partnership with UAW over representing freelancers. UAW was hesitant to take the freelancers’ 

issue because of anti-trust issues whereas, NWU was determined to fight the battle. 

The merger of FSP with NWU resulted in distinct organizational benefits to the 

freelancer cause. First, the FSP combined with the digital media division of NWU reiterated a 

sectoral focus on media workers who were precarious and navigating risks offloaded by the 

employers. These included journalists, writers, videographers, audiographers, graphic artists, 



 

58 
 

podcasters and other occupational categories. The combination of freelance media workers with 

other type of digital media workers who were independent or short-term contractors solidified 

the union’s focus on freelancers as a broader category of workers and media sector as the 

legitimate site for addressing labor standards. Thus, the presence of FSU expanded and 

differentiated the category of freelance media workers to include diverse occupational categories 

and as a legitimate class of workers.  

The second outcome of the merger was the FSP’s ability to continue with its central 

mission of raising industry standards by collective bargaining within the fold of NWU. In order 

to accomplish this goal, the FSP reiterated in its organizing committees that theirs should be a 

worker-centered union and not a mere service delivery organization. The FSP achieved this goal 

by setting up working committees where union members could volunteer to get involved in 

working through specific issues. The existing strategies such as unilateral announcement and 

grievance redress were used as a method of unionization drive. Finally, the existing union 

members were directly in touch with potential union members through a regular process of 

feedback and internal grievance redress that fostered a union-feeling among skeptical freelancers 

and legitimized its role as a mediator in freelancers’ issues. 

These two features – expanding and differentiating freelance workers and branding the 

union as a workers’ union– was led by the FSP acting as an active caucus-like structure within 

NWU. These organizational commitments were crucial in sealing the unionization drive that 

ensured membership. This arrangement enabled the union to further FSP’s causes with the 

resources and strategies that were perfected by NWU towards the freelancers’ problems. I argue 

that this type of positioning of the organization led to specific and effective benefits to its 

unionization drive.  



 

59 
 

ii. Caucus and Strategies 

 

The centrality of FSP in influencing the freelancer’s cause within NWU also resulted in distinct 

strategic gains. FSP was particularly adept in furthering its core sated missions of raising the 

industry standard by collective bargaining using the resources and strategies that were perfected 

by NWU such as group grievance.  

The union members I interviewed often spoke about their intention to act “as if there 

were a union”. As 1099 contracts under the classification of the Internal Revenue Service code, 

freelancers were not legally eligible to form industrial unions or engage in collective bargaining. 

Other types of independent contractors such as gig workers had run into anti-trust issues in 

courts of law over their worker status.  The FSP was fostering a two-pronged strategy to combat 

this legal issue – remaining steadfast in their commitment to bargain collectively and battle it 

out in the courts over anti-trust litigation. Additionally, they were also teaming up with gig 

workers labor unions over cases of misclassification. The strategy of unilateral announcement 

and group grievances were particular instances where collective bargaining was adapted for the 

freelancer’s workforce with effective results. The union also ensured that these services were 

available to non-members also, effectively making it a ploy for unionization drive. 

The “as-if union” approach has to be seen in the context of the absence of regulation of 

workplace standards for freelancers. In the media industry where freelancers have been 

historically a part of the workforce, their rights were effectively protected in the past with better 

pay and control over their work. Historically, freelancers were approached as niche experts to 

deliver a particular output. With the increasing layoffs and involuntary pushing of erstwhile full-

time workers into freelancers, the objective of using freelancers became cost cutting measures 

that employers undertook. Consequently, a set of new risks were offloaded onto these workforces. 



 

60 
 

The mission to raise industry standards through collective bargaining that the FSP drafted 

should be seen in this context.  

The second outcome from the presence of FSP within the NWU was that the freelancer 

project was seen as a national problem spanning several states. The simultaneous campaigning 

of rights in New York, Ohio, Illinois, and California while aiming to reach out to Washington 

and other states ushered a long-term vision to the problem and allowed the union to commit 

resources to the cause like never before. This process entailed having dedicated expertise within 

the union for grievance redress and legal advocacy and the ability to identify and maintain 

coalition partners who were other unions or labor organizations. For example, the union 

partnered with the Freelancers Union in New York and Teamsters in Illinois for legislative 

lobbying. The union was examining anti-trust issues in California and Washington among gig 

workers to strategize on legal battles in these states and partnered with unemployed workers for 

a bridge program for benefits in New York.   

I argue that these two features – collective bargaining in the absence of law and expanding 

the freelancers’ problems as a national project – were spearheaded by FSP to attain the industry 

standards that they were after. It had the simultaneous benefit of regulating the industry in the 

absence of legal rights and attracting freelancers who were not yet members.  

iii. Unionization vs. class engagement 

 

I set out to study the union’s success in terms of its membership. However, in the 

interviews, there was constant alluding to the class positions of freelancers. Many of the 

freelancers felt that the ability to go without pay or benefits was made possible in the short term 

by personal support systems, especially family or spousal support, that ensured that they were 

still getting their health insurance covered and bills paid. This prompted the question of the 



 

61 
 

classes of people who could not be in this position because of the absence of these personal support 

systems. While the need for expanding the class composition of freelance workers were voiced 

by many, how to achieve this systemically was an open question. 

The economic condition of freelancers was so precarious that raising the industry 

standards was seen as a method to “incrementally raise the bare minimum”. The freelancers did 

not see this battle as expanding opportunities or capabilities but as a measure of justice to ensure 

a baseline was met. Seen that way, setting the industry standard was itself a giant grievance 

process against systemic wage theft and health and safety at workplace. It was not seen as a 

measure of reform that would pave way for working class people to join freelance workers in the 

media sector.  

The other type of class engagement I found glaringly absent in the union’s agenda was 

women workers’ issues. In my interviews, women media workers spoke about battling 

perceptions of competence they faced while applying for jobs in male-dominated occupational 

categories such as videography. The older generation of women spoke of a dearth of female role 

models when they entered the sector two decades ago. One of my interviewees worked through 

her pregnancy and elaborated on how she allayed fears of performance as a heavily pregnant 

woman by adopting “professionalism”. The union had women members and women working in 

leadership and organizing positions. But the raising of issues based on class or gender was not 

apparent in my interactions with them. 

I argue that while the caucus structure amplified the case of freelancers as a class of 

legitimate workers, there were issues of further class representation within the freelance media 

workforce that was not apparent at the collective level. The individual freelancers were freely 

voicing how they felt about freelance media workers being from upper classes and how that would 



 

62 
 

impact culture and democracy in this country. Similarly, women were articulating gender-

specific difficulties that they faced in hiring and performance evaluation at the workplace that did 

not translate into a collective grievance. The democratizing force of caucus is therefore an 

incomplete story with several other group interests waiting to converge and emerge as a 

collective position.  

Discussion 
 

In this study, I have asked how a hybrid union was more successful in maintaining union 

membership than the other labor organizations for freelance media workers in New York. The 

FSP-NWU that I focused on illustrated how a freelancer caucus type of structure within the 

union consolidated the freelancer identity within the organization and the strategies used to 

collectively avert risk at work.  

i. Contribution to theory 

 

My first contribution is to document the functioning of multiple unions working or 

freelancers in New York. Using field interviews and observation, I have collated why and how 

multiple unions operate in this space. In particular, I have analyzed why the outcomes of the 

hybrid union was more effective in maintaining the union membership, a problem that all unions 

confronted without much success. In order to show that, I uncovered the mechanism of how the 

union worked, including the interplay of organizational identity and strategies that navigated 

various forms of risks that freelancers faced.  

And second, having established the mechanisms of union operation, I sought to 

understand the working of the caucus within the union in the broader theoretical landscape of 

organizations. In organizational theory, the concept of hybridity explains how organizations 



 

63 
 

with competing logics differentiate and integrate them (Smith and Besharov, 2019). Existing 

literature uses compatibility and centrality of logics as mechanisms to understand how hybridity 

works. This study integrates the hybridity literature by illustrating how the union navigates dual 

logics through caucus while extending it by uncovering the specific mechanisms. I also show the 

interplay between structures and processes in this hybrid union and departs from the existing 

theoretical framework that argues that stable structures lead to adaptive processes. Finally, I also 

use a bottom-up process like a member-driven caucus as negotiating hybridity than top-down 

approaches like leadership that existing theory highlights.  

There are distinct consequences for using this framework. First, reframing the union as 

a hybrid organization illuminates the dual logics of setting industry standards through collective 

bargaining process for freelancers. The logics of setting industry standards is a mechanism of 

regulating labor market risks such as job security and benefits while also addressing workplace 

risks such as health and safety. The logics of collective bargaining recasts the identity of a 

freelancer as parallel to that of an employee and normalizes the mediating presence of the union. 

Thus, the process of navigating a competing set of risks is conjoined with the process of 

navigating a competing set of identities. This explains why unionization drive is particularly a 

metric of success as seen by the union because maintaining and expanding membership 

acknowledges the presence of risks as well as the need to recast their identities as workers and 

collectively address them. 

I argue that the choice of unionization drive as a metric of union success is not an accident. 

However, the choice of unionization also belies the trade-off that the union faces with respect to 

other values such as engagement. I show how experiences of women freelance media workers 

have not come up as a collective issue of interest for the union to navigate. Similarly, the issue of 

opening the social class of who a freelance media worker is, was felt at an individual level but not 



 

64 
 

as collective issue to be tackled. Part of the explanation is in understanding the union’s fight for 

freelancers as one of justice, of setting baselines, and as incremental and progressive. The other 

explanation is thinking through the logics of caucus itself to argue that special interest groups 

on other issues are yet to consolidate in this space. 

Finally, I demonstrate that the presence of caucus-like structure within the freelancer 

union space as instrumental in consolidating the competing logics. The caucus of freelancer 

solidarity project has managed to retain its distinct identity within the larger union and make its 

central demand of setting industry standards through collective bargaining also central to the 

union’s freelancer campaigns. The caucus works through the organizational identity to devise 

effective strategies that are enumerated in this study. Although the presence of caucus is common 

in industrial union structures, this is the first time, a freelancer caucus is demonstrated. 

Furthermore, a freelancer caucus consists of a distinct set of workers from full-time staff with a 

competing set of logics unlike industrial union caucuses. While there is an element of 

democratization of power within the union due to the presence of the caucus, its primary function 

seems to be navigating the competing logics. In this sense, the caucus is a mechanism to navigate 

hybridity.  

ii. Limitations 

 

While I argue that the hybrid union was effective in steering unionization and navigating 

the collective risks that freelancers faced, I am unable to assess the effectiveness of some of the 

strategies from the employers’ side. In particular, unionization drive through unilateral 

announcement and group grievance requires the voluntary participation of the employers. While 

the union members and legislators who participated in this study were able to set out factors 



 

65 
 

such as worker centricity of the firm and left-leaning ideological preferences as some of the 

reasons, I am unable to verify employers’ assessment of freelancers’ unionization. 

My study is also centered in New York. While I make the case that New York city is the 

media capital in the United States with the largest proportion of freelance workers, it makes sense 

to examine freelancer union formation in this site. However, freelancer unionization is 

increasingly becoming a national project with states such as California, Illinois, Ohio and 

Washington making serious strides in unionization and regulation of the sector. While many 

features of the union are replicated across the states, the differences can be ascertained only 

through close examination of the states and a comparative analysis.  

My arguments are currently limited to the media sector and can be generalized to the 

creative industries which have a similar overall industrial relation with the prevalence of 

freelance workforce, contractual structures and union configuration. While the creative 

industries employ the largest proportion of freelancers in the United States, the exact 

configuration changes with industries. Comparison with other sectors is necessary to indicate 

how much the collective navigation of risk appears similar in other fields.   

iii. Policy implications 

 

This study has several policy implications. By examining the freelancer union, I have 

shown how union structures can act as an institution for regulation of the sector and workplace 

in the absence of comprehensive legal protections. In this context, the union navigated the duality 

of its role by using a variety of strategies and stakeholders internally and externally. Internally, 

the caucus of freelancers forged a distinct and autonomous identity of freelancers as workers, 

invited allies such as other digital and full-time media workers to be part of their advocacy 

campaigns, and channelized the union’s strategy to combat the collective risk that freelance 



 

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media workers faced. Externally, the caucus marshalled a plethora of strategies such as unilateral 

announcements, group grievances, legislative campaigns, and litigations to gain the support of 

stakeholders such as employers, politicians, and other groups of precarious workers. By framing 

their agenda as gaining collective rights through setting industrial standards, they set baseline 

rights in an unprotected workplace and industry where a large number of workers operated.  

The American approach to freelance worker protection is unique because it deviates from 

the trade union led campaigns of freelancers and gig workers in Italy and state led protection of 

European Union through directives. The American case is also distinct from many countries of 

the global South that uses existing regulations in the sector to cover atypical workers such as 

the case of Argentina that extended transportation rights to independent contractors in the 

sector.  The freelancers’ organization and strategy in the US opens possibilities for several 

countries where freelance and gig work in unprotected in a political economy where laws might 

not be strictly enforced.   

Within the American freelancer sectoral regulation, I have shown which are the sectors 

that likely involve law and policy in the near term. The top priority for freelance media workers 

is contract that ensures timely and full payment of wages and the Freelance isn’t free legislation 

exemplifies this demand. Similarly, misclassification of workers is another issue that may be 

determined in law and policy in several states of the country, at least partly resolving the anti-

trust law problem and possibly leading to more unionization. Finally, the provision of health 

insurance at group rates that some of the mutualist organization like Freelancers’ Union 

pioneered has been challenged by law such as Obamacare. This has led to the dismantling of such 

organization’s core mission and coerced many freelancers to take poor paying jobs to stay below 

the threshold of eligibility for state-sponsored health insurance. How the issue of benefits play 



 

67 
 

out is an open but important question, considering it was the second most common demand that 

freelancers made after wages.  

I also demonstrate where law will be ineffective and union practices have to step in. For 

example, if the laws on wages and contract are in place, then unions are likely to be enforcers of 

the law. If the issue of anti-trust laws is resolved, several trade unions might compete in the 

freelancer space and the consequences of union competition remains to be seen. The state-level 

variation of the laws and policies also make a case for why unions and labor organizations might 

be effective conduit of information, enforcement and grievance redress in the freelancer 

landscape. 

Conclusion 
 

In this study, I have shown why the hybrid union is more successful than others in the 

American freelancer landscape in terms of unionization. The hybrid union is able to maintain 

membership because it forges a freelancer is a worker identity and approaches the problem of 

freelancers’ collective risk through diverse strategies. The unions’ freelancer focus is driven by a 

caucus which aims at setting the industry standard for freelancers through collective bargaining. 

The caucus becomes the mechanism through which the union navigates its hybridity and dual 

roles of policing the workplace and the industry. Finally, the union prioritizes unionization 

through several of the strategies for solving problems such as group grievance and makes a case 

of why the union is effective for non-members.  

Several interesting threads emerge from this study to follow up. From the point of view 

of stakeholders, employers’ perspectives on freelancers’ risk and unionization adds to the 

narrative of the union. A state-wide comparison of freelance union performance is likely to 

illuminate how unions partner with others and the state to get optimal outcomes for the freelance 



 

68 
 

workforce. The collaboration among freelancers and gig workers that is happening in California 

is particularly of interest as it involves a large number of workers along specific citizenship 

categories such as immigrants and undocumented workers. Similarly, a comparative or stand 

alone account of various sectors can reveal the specificity of occupational structures and worker 

outcomes in a meaningful way. For example, information and technology, accounting and health 

that employ freelancers as independent contractors are burgeoning fields of interest in white-

collar work freelancing whereas construction is a typical sector where a large number of blue-

collar work freelancing takes place.  

As more sectors move their workforce into remote work and independent contract and 

consulting, freelancing is becoming a more mainstream form of work organization that ever 

before. How workers respond to these changes will certainly be of mounting interest in the near 

future. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

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