Precarious E-Lancers: Freelance Journalists' Rights, Contracts, Labor Organizing, and Digital Resistance

This chapter outlines a history of the contracts and the digital resistance of freelancers' labor organizations, situating them within a broader political economy of print journalism, freelance employment, and labor organizing in a digital age. It discusses a radical political economy of communication approach to intellectual property. The chapter examines freelance contributors' digital resistance campaigns, situating them within their broader economic structures by linking them to the corporate profiles of the print media companies with which freelance journalists have been in dispute. More research on freelance journalists' rights, labor organizing, and resistance could help radical political economy scholars understand how copyright ownership and control serve as a key corporate strategy in digital journalism. In this way, the concept of the precarious e-lancer articulates how journalists' labor organizations not only form temporary networks to sell goods and services and resist company demands but also develop long-term labor convergence strategies to organize and protect freelance contributors.