Laura Slattery: ‘Free’ part of freelancer must not apply to pay

On any freelance worker’s CV, tenacity, determination and patience are implicit qualities. Those attributes are necessary just to get paid.

But the tedious rounds of emails and phone calls before a cent lands in their bank accounts is only part of the painful reality for many actors, musicians, journalists and other freelancers.

Since 2004, the business of getting paid a fair and decent rate for work has been stymied by a recasting of collective bargaining by freelancers as “price-fixing”.

The bizarre situation, the result of a ruling by what was then the Competition Authority, is in the process of being unpicked, slowly – too slowly for the many who have found Ireland’s creative industries an increasingly hostile, unsustainable place to try to eke out an income.

The Government has now accepted the principle behind the Competition (Amendment) Bill, tabled in January by Labour Senator Ivana Bacik, following years of activism by trade unions including Siptu, Irish Equity, the Musicians' Union of Ireland and the National Union of Journalists (NUJ).

Although Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Mary Mitchell O’Connor has said the Government will amend the Bill so it is more consistent with Irish and EU competition law, these amendments-to-the-amendments are not expected to undermine the aim of the legislation, which is to restore rights lost more than a decade ago.

In 2004, the Competition Authority (a predecessor to the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission) ruled that an Irish Equity collective agreement setting out pay rates for voiceover artists was in breach of competition law. Each actor, it said, was a “business undertaking” and it is unlawful for undertakings to agree to fix prices. A fine of up to €4 million was threatened unless the rights to collective bargaining were signed away.

Until then, it was accepted that unions could publish guides to minimum freelance fees – a modest level of protection for workers in industries where sources of income were distinctly finite and insecure. While the limited pool of employers – much bigger “undertakings” – had the capacity to organise and set terms, the freelances on who they depended could not.

"Bogus self-employment" is how both Bacik termed it in the Seanad, while her colleague Senator Alice Mary Higgins pinpointed the creation of "a perverse incentive" for employers to pursue the "aggressive casualisation" of their workforces.

Underpaid journalists In the representation of freelance journalists and photographers, the NUJ was thwarted at a particularly bad time. The union’s new inability to negotiate on behalf of its members with national and regional newspapers was followed by a sharp advertising recession that saw the industry frantically slash costs.

Competition between freelancers was no longer strictly on the basis of quality, but on the basis of who was willing to work for the lowest payment.

There are still people who manage to build solid careers as freelance journalists, because they are tenacious, determined and patient, and above all, they have the “be so good they can’t ignore you” factor. But they are underpaid.

Often, when you hear the derisory sums skilled, experienced freelancers – not hobbyists – are being paid for work, it amounts to half the payment they would have got for the same work a decade ago.

Work for free The “do it for free, it will be good exposure” mantra is now a stubborn element of some business models. As a result, talented people with much to offer have had to switch industries to pay the rent.

In the arts – a sector where any international success is given the dubious honour of fawning, credit-stealing Government press releases – the race to the bottom appears to have accelerated.

Irish Equity has, in recent years, been scathing about the “unscrupulous”, exploitative practices of some film production companies and signalled that its members have reported increased pressure to work for free.

Bean-counting behaviour like this somewhat “damages the narrative”, as the President, Michael D Higgins, put it, that Ireland is a “beacon for quality” in the arts.

As another of Bacik’s colleagues, Ged Nash, drily noted, when the European Union drafted competition rules and regulations, it almost certainly did not have the work of Irish session musicians, voiceover artists and freelance journalists in mind. It is farcical and galling that these most vulnerable of workers should have been treated as price-fixing cartels.

Of course, the right to collectively bargain for a decent income won’t actually guarantee a decent income. But few politicians continue to defend the denial of that right, which is good news for once.