Somebody Had to Insure the Freelancers
Covers Sara Horowitz's founding of Working Today in 1995, its 2003 relaunch as the Freelancers Union, and the insurance trust it built for members who could not access employer-sponsored plans.
Section 3 of five
Organising
The unions, guilds, and advocacy groups that independent workers built — and the older institutions they borrowed the idea from.
6 pieces in this section
The Cleaners Who Started Their Own Union
A dispute among Latin American cleaners at the University of London produced something the established labour movement had not anticipated: a new kind of institution.
A Lobby Group Built Around One Tax Rule
The organisation now called IPSE began as a reaction to a single paragraph in a 1999 Budget document — and has never entirely escaped that origin.
Two Organisations for Writers Who Were Never Employees
The gap that guilds exist to fill
The Guilds Had This Argument in the 1930s
Entertainment unions invented collective bargaining for independent contractors long before Uber existed. The gig economy is still borrowing their playbook.
Two Guilds Struck in the Same Summer
Residuals in 2007, AI clauses in 2023: the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA keep fighting the same fight with different names for the technology.
The other sections
Eight landing pages. Every piece is reachable from one of them, or from the archive.