4 The Precarious Status of the Artist: Freelance Editors Struggle for Collective

Bargaining Rights (pp. 136-170)

LEAH F. VOSKO
On 1 November 2002, after a protracted struggle for legitimacy, the Canadian Artists and
Producers Professional Relations Tribunal (CAPPRT) certified the Editors Association of
Canada (EAC/ACR) as the representative artists association for a sector of editors under
the federalStatus of the Artist Act,1992. Over two decades after its formation, in the face
of considerable opposition from other artists organizations, the EAC/ACR won the legal
right to negotiate scale agreements on behalf of a segment of its membership agreements that it hopes will benefit its entire membership, but especially freelance
editors in precarious situations.
Although the CAPPRT rescinded..
Early every morning, 2,000 men and women, many of whom have recently immigrated to
Canada, deliver theToronto Starto tens of thousands of homes in metropolitan Toronto.
This job is their primary source of income. Five days a week, about 6,000 couriers - a
significant majority of whom are women - drive across rural and suburban Canada
delivering the mail. Every day in Toronto, hundreds of women, many of them members of
visible minorities and new to Canada, travel to work in private homes, providing personal
care for disabled, ill, and elderly people. Across Canada, professional editors - primarily...
Through case studies of newspaper carriers, rural route mail couriers, personal care workers, and
freelance editors - four groups who have led pioneering efforts to organize - the authors provide a
window into the ways political and economic conditions interact with class, ethnicity, and gender to
shape the meaning and strategies of working men and women and show how these strategies have
changed over time. They argue that the experiences of these workers demonstrate a pressing need to
expand collective bargaining rights to include them

If you were the only company thinking this youd be onto something, but
unfortunately for you, youre not. Bloggers are getting pitches left, right and centre
from people who have had the exact same thought about their product. As a result,
bloggers increasingly feel by taking time out to experience your product and writing
intelligently and passionately about it, its reasonable to talk about compensation.
But.
How do you compensate bloggers for their time while maintaining the impartiality
and credibility of the recommendation? And, does paying a blogger dilute the power
of their comments?
There are two main viewpoints:
The first comes mainly from the PR corner and suggests that compensation =
advertorial. The dominant sentiment is that PR doesnt pay for comment. Bloggers
are not journalists but theyare new media and PR (for the most part) is having a hard

time finding ways to negotiate this space.

As always, there are great PR companies who really do a

great job in this space you know who you are.

The second comes mainly from bloggers but also increasingly from marketing
departments and digital agencies and picks up on the new media angle. It says that
compensation is for someones time not their opinion, and in the case of a brand
partnership/ambassador program compensation is an appropriate response to
someone who pro-actively aligns their reputation (and significant time) with them.
What do I think?
I think that when a brand strategically engages a blogger to act as a promotional
partner they should be compensated.
I am not talking here about the more tactical review and giveaway campaigns
(though I am not excluding those entirely either) but about strategic campaigns
between a blogger and brand where the blogger genuinely endorses the brand and
by working with them aligns their personal credibility and provides substantial
access to their readership & community.
Not only do bloggers lend a brand their integrity via such an arrangement but they
lend their knowledge and expertise of social media. This is knowledge that rightly
deserves compensation.
And therein is the dirty word: deserves.
I dont like the word deserve. We (bloggers) do not deserve to work with brands,
we do notdeserve to be sent free stuff, we do not deserve anything.
A brand that is clever might recognise the opportunities that a blogger offers and
may choose to approach a blogger for a partnership of some sort. Should they do
this and such an offer be accepted then the word deserve comes into play; but its
not something that a blogger can claim simply because they are a blogger. We
should view as a cautionary tale the path Mommy Bloggers in America have taken
regarding this and the poor reputation they are gaining by being liberal with the
dreaded d word. I believe that when we talk in terms such as deserving we do
ourselves an injustice.
A better word is simply compensation.*
When one individual or business provides a service to another it involves
compensation. When the service provider is a blogger the situation ought to be no
different. When a blogger has information that a brand needs, or offers

an endorsement that is valuable, compensation should not be a matter of if but of

what. Compensation does not need to take the form of cold hard cash, though I
dont believe theres anything wrong with that. Brand Partnerships could take myriad
of forms, as could compensation; the key is to come to an agreement that both
parties are happy with.
What do you think?

As we continue with this series on blogging jobs, its time to look at the income a
blogger can make by blogging for pay.
The skills and qualities a company or blog owner is looking for from a blogger are
extensive, far beyond just writing abilities. As with any freelance job, determining how
to put a value on the time it really takes, and the costs associated with the time and
production, is really hard when the real cost is in time, not materials. Bloggers should
be paid for the time as well as their expertise and abilities. Are they? This is a
problem that has been around for a very long time. How much is your time worth?
For many decades, professional editorial writers found a compromise on the
time/value issue with payment by the word with a restriction on word count. I often
was told, Well pay you a dollar a word up to 1,000 words maximum.
This meant the magazine, newspaper, newsletter, or other print publication had
space for one thousand words that needed to be filled. Going over meant changing
their magazine or newspaper design structure. Giving them less meant Id be paid
less, but somewhere in the middle was a compromise for both of us, usually in the
form of me setting a minimum fee I was to be paid, no matter the word count, such
as I want $500 minimum for 700 words and a dollar a word thereafter. If the article
came it at 400 words, I would still be paid my minimum. If it crossed the 700 word
mark, at which point I should have been paid $700 for a dollar a word, thats when
they have to start paying me the dollar a word rate. It wasnt the best, but the
companies felt like they were getting a deal and for the most part, I covered the
minimum I needed to pay my rent and eat.

Here is a chart for the various traditional writers pay scale based upon a dollar
amount per word. The more experience and expertise, the higher the fee per word.
What does this mean? With the change from a per word fee to a per post fee,
bloggers have to work longer and harder to make any money on content generation
alone.
With the pay-per-word scale, you were paid more for generating more content. With
the pay-per-post model, the more content you write, the less you are paid. So it pays
to write as little as possible and generate the most posts you can. While shorter
tends to be better in web and blog writing styles, what quality of content can you offer
consistently in 100 words or less?
The dollar-a-word pay scale took into account not just the time it took to type the
word, but the research, editing, and experience and training it took to generate that
word. The pay-per-post mass content generation process is about getting the most
posts published in the shortest amount of time, the sweatshop mentality of blog
content. The pay-per-post bloggers never make enough money to adequately
compensate them for the time it takes to produce the content, thus they have to work
longer and harder. So how much time does it take?