Last Wednesday a historic mass meeting of freelancers took place online as freelance writers, photographers, illustrators and other media workers came together, beaming in from around the country. With over 120 people in attendance, it was the biggest meeting of any kind MEAA has had since the start of the pandemic and the biggest meeting of freelancers the union has ever had. Members voted overwhelmingly to endorse the new Freelance Charter of Rights.

The meeting was exciting for me because I’ve been working behind the scenes on the National Freelance Committee since 2018, and for years before that with the small-scale activism of @paythewriters. For most of those years it’s been difficult to imagine anything like that meeting happening. Freelancers are isolated, we move from gig to gig; we are notoriously hard to organise. We don’t have legal collective bargaining power like employees do. That’s contributed to an erosion of freelancer pay and conditions over the years, exacerbated by digitisation, precarity, and competition for work.