Flexible as freedom? The dynamics of creative industry work and the case study of the editor in publishing

The neoliberal creative industry worker

The neoliberal ideology promotes deregulation of employment markets through free-market policies, destabilisation of collective bargaining by promoting individual work arrangements (Harvey, 2005), decentralisation of labour structures in favour of networked labour (Castells, 1996), and legitimisation of unpaid and ‘co-creative’ labour where the lines between work and labour are blurred (Benkler, 2006; Bruns, 2008; Terranova, 2004). Co-creative, affective, immaterial, networked, digital, precarious, unpaid and free labour have become the backbone of the new global economy (Banks and Deuze, 2009; Benkler, 2006; Castells, 1996; Hardt and Negri, 2000; Ross, 2009; Standing, 2011; Terranova, 2004). ‘Flexible’ has become the new mantra of work. But the flexible work regime – common to the creative industries – is not new, as, the full-time ‘standard’ work arrangement only became the norm during the Fordist years of mass production and mostly applied to White, middle-class males, which Cohen (2015) refers to as ‘a gendered model of employment’. Women, migrants and other marginalised groups were never really considered part of the ‘standard employment contract’ (standard employment relationship [SER]) as women were historically assigned to the ‘gender contract’ and migrants could not ‘make claims on the state’ due to their nonnative status (Vosko, 2010: 9). However, the SER has slowly been eclipsed by ‘individualisation and employment insecurity’ common in ‘neo-capitalism’ (Mathisen, 2017: 2), which I argue is a result of neoliberal policy.

The neoliberal rhetoric advocates the move from the interventionist, post-war Keynesian policies to the removal of the state from the market. Neoliberalism has come to signify a range of ideas with varying political underpinnings and is often used as a criticism of a new rampant form of capitalism. In the Neoliberal Challenge, Thorsen suggests that neoliberalism relates to a range of theories from ‘anarcho-capitalism’, the libertarian-anarchist extremity which believes the state should be abolished, to the ‘classical liberalism’ akin to the values of the Mont Pelerin Society, who believe that ‘a strong but largely inactive commonwealth is a necessary precondition for social life, as well as individual and commercial liberty’ (Thorsen, 2010: 14). From this ‘classic liberalism’ perspective, ‘planning’ by the state could be considered a synonym for ‘intervention’, which is at conflict with the role and function of capitalism (Von Mises, 1962).

The neoliberal discourse moved from the periphery to mainstream political use around the same time as embedded liberalism began to fail and the beginning of the ‘Crisis of Fordism’ (Esser and Joachim, 1989; Harvey, 2005). Milton Friedman’s Monetarism and free-market policies were enthusiastically employed by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and by US Federal Reserve Bank Chairman, Paul Volcker under President Carter (Harvey, 2005). Monetarism suggests there is a natural level of unemployment and inflation can only be curbed by minimal intervention (Friedman, 1968; Hayek, 1976). The free-market policy debate also become one of ‘moral virtue’, where the neoliberal sentiment held that individuals should have uninhibited access to the market and be willing to accept the risks involved with participating in free-markets, while the Keynesian liberal view believed that society should provide some social security to protect individuals from the dangers of rampant capitalism (Thorsen, 2010).

In Australia, there was bipartisan consensus on Keynesian economic policy until the 1970s when economic prosperity began to wane (Rowse, 1978). During the past half-century, the Australian political history has also been marked by a debate between free trade and protectionism (Berg, 2015). The free-market ideology gained significant traction in the 1980s under the Labor Hawke government when the Australian dollar was floated, the financial market opened to foreign banks and many of the state assets were privatised (Berg, 2015). From 1983 to 1996, the Labor Party deregulated nonstandard forms of employment while protecting the rights of full-time, permanent employees – predominantly held by men (Burgess and Strachan, 1999). This saw a growth in nonstandard, nonunionised and unregulated employment such as casual, temporary, part-time and contract employment – predominantly held by women. For the publishing industry, these changes occurred at the same junction as of a number of events.

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Australian publishing industry was a product of its geography, held captive through the Traditional Market Agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom, which gave the British exclusive rights over the Australian market (Munro and Curtain, 2006). Two events changed the discourse of Australian publishing: the Second World War which brought in more protectionist trade embargoes and allowed independent publishers to thrive, and the 1976 anti-trust action brought on by the US Department of Justice after heeding the plea from Australian publishers to be granted local rights to publish international titles (Hart, 2006; Munro and Curtain, 2006). At the same time as free-market labour policies were being rolled out, old colonial reigns on the publishing industry were being loosened. The 1970s and 1980s also saw the rise of the international media conglomerate and the move towards outsourcing editing work in order to downsize and reduce costs (Poland, 2007). On the heels of one of Australia’s most venerated editors, Beatrice Davis, book editor at Angus and Robertson from 1937 to 1974, editing work largely became the domain of women, which over the 1980s and 1990s was progressively farmed out to freelancers (Kent, 2006). It is difficult to get an accurate measure on freelance editors in Australia today. Chairperson, Kerry Davies, from the Institute of Professional Editors Limited (IPEd), said that according to their member survey which is taken every 2 years, freelancing increased from 53% in 2011 to 56% in 2014, but that ‘it is very difficult to pin this figure down’. Part of the issue lies in defining the term ‘editor’ where some sources, such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) conflate film and video editing with manuscript editing. Adding to the issue is the number of undocumented freelance editors who do not belong to a professional institute or do not have a job description that falls neatly into an ABS category.

Looking at what motivates an editor to become a freelancer, Charlesworth (1997) argues, there is a disparity between employer-led flexibility and employee-led flexibility where there are significant perils for female workers. According to Charlesworth (1997), employer-led flexibility is often promoted as beneficial for women, but pays little heed to the stripping away of social security. However, flexible working arrangements have always been a part of the publishing industry, particularly for freelance editors. Clark and Phillips (2014) argue that it is common to move between publishers in order to progress and that freelancers represent a large fraction of the workforce. Granger et al. (1995) reported that there was a dramatic increase in self-employment in UK publishing in the 1990s particularly among women. They identified two poles on the motivation spectrum leading to self-employment or freelance work: the unemployment push effect and the self-made pull effect based on Staber and Bogenhold’s (1993) ‘logic of autonomy’ and ‘logic of economic necessity’. While freelancing has been around for a long time in publishing, Granger et al. (1995) argue that the contraction of publishing ownership and recession contributed to the increasing prominence of freelancers. In Canada, Leah Vosko (2005) also outlines how editors face a set of profound issues and freelancers find it difficult to unionise:

Predominantly women, they work in isolation, frequently in their own homes, where they juggle childcare and other family responsibilities with waged work. As independent contractors, they lack the benefits and entitlements typically attached to a standard employment relationship and, in most instances, the ability to organize and bargain collectively. (p. 138)

This also concurs with the findings from qualitative interviews where female freelancing editors felt as if they were expected to do more work, for less pay, had feelings of disconnectedness from the whole publishing process and little power to change their rate of pay.

Similar to the debate of freelancing as empowering or disenfranchising, the ‘technology-as-a-democratising’ debate, which legitimises the use of co-creative and unpaid labour, is also a polarising topic. Barbrook and Cameron (2009) coined the term ‘California ideology’ to explain the techno-positivist rhetoric often used by the technocrats of Wired magazine. The libertarian tone of Wired, shaped by writers and editors such as George Gilder (2006), Nicholas Negroponte (1996) and Kevin Kelly (2005), promotes the Internet as a democratising media which has lowered the barriers to entry held by previous gatekeepers and revolutionised personal freedom. Louis Rossetto, co-founder of Wired, writes, ‘digital citizens are reinvigorating democratic discourse and reinventing civil society’ (Fisher, 2010: 36). However, many scholars criticise this rhetoric as a form of exploitation through commodification of unpaid labour and transferral of risk from capital back to labour resulting in precarious and insecure working conditions (Banks and Deuze, 2009; Barbrook and Cameron, 2009; Ross, 2009; Sennett, 1998; Standing, 2011; Terranova, 2000, 2004). Fisher (2010) argues the technology discourse legitimises the restructuring of capital to flexible models, which ultimately destabilises the bargaining power of labour.

In the publishing industry, this debate is played out in the move to outsource more work to developing countries such as Malaysia and India, particularly editing work, where the labour rates are cheaper (Davis, 2007). Facilitated by the Internet, it has become far easier for international freelancers to underbid their local counterparts, and also without compromising the quality of work or speed of delivery. Publishers can now accurately track the amount of time spent in a document based on time stamps of digital tracked changes and the digital paper trail. Thus, while for some freelancers technology may be seen as a democratising medium, opening up new markets to sell one’s labour, for others, it can lead to a bidding war, adding downward pressure on labour rates and increasing expectations to turn around work faster than before.

The neoliberal technology discourse also opens up a debate around the blurring of work and labour theories where value is increasingly co-created and commons-based and peer produced (Banks and Deuze, 2009; Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004; Ross, 2009; Terranova, 2000). The grey area of unpaid labour is viewed by scholars either favourably as democratising (Benkler, 2006) or unfavourably as exploitative (Ross, 2009). Terranova (2000) uses the term ‘free labour’ and argues that this new form of co-production is both ‘exploitative’ as capital can skim the surplus value of free labour and ‘democratising’ as the worker is reconnected to the means of production. Free labour, according to Terranova (2000), is carried out willingly by the participant under the condition that it is always capitalism. Thus, free labour is legitimised as a new development in late capitalist societies and has become integral to the operation and function of post-Fordist economies. Considering the plenitude of online publishing platforms that rely on unpaid user-generated content to increase their brand’s worth (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest etc.), it is not hard to find an example of the blurring of work and labour. However, as Terranova (2000) suggests, this work is carried out ‘willingly’ where participants, in some way, agree to the terms of capital engagement.

Other scholars reject the idea of analysing labour under the industrial lens. In, ‘Co-creative Labour’, Banks and Deuze (2009) call for a new theoretical framework that moves beyond industrial media economies. Banks and Deuze (2009) propose that the binary definitions of work and labour associated with industrial media economies no longer apply to the post-industrial and networked economies. Rather than analysing the grey definitions of work and labour, Banks and Deuze (2009) draw attention to the meaning creative and cultural workers attribute to their work.

Despite the partisan debate on ‘co-creative’ or ‘free’ labour, there is consensus among scholars that the advanced economies are embracing lighter, more responsive and flexible means of production. New communication and publishing technologies – often built on peer-production – have been paramount in reshaping the global marketplace as seen in the widespread use of social media. The ‘knowledge entrepreneur’ is being lionised by many policymakers as the future model for work. For the publishing industry, there has been an increase in flexible working arrangements, most often seen in the form of freelancing. Freelancing is attractive to many editors as it offers a greater degree of flexibility in their work, but little power to unionise. If flexibility can be viewed as either empowering or disenfranchising, how then does it play out in real life? And what are the social and economic risks worn by flexible workers? This article will now present the findings from qualitative and quantitative research to contextualise how these industry and global changes have affected the nature of work for editors in publishing.

Method

The data for this article were collected through a quantitative survey to gain a snapshot of working arrangements and attitudes towards work and qualitative semi-structured interviews to gain insight into the dynamics of the editor’s working lives. A survey was chosen in order to identify the relationship between working conditions and attitude towards work. The survey used nonprobability sampling based on self-selection. A link to the online survey was distributed via social media networks, mainly through Twitter. There were 15 questions in total with a mixture of clarifying and attitudinal questions. For feelings towards work, attitude scales were employed.

The interview subjects were chosen by snowballing technique. This method was chosen because freelance editors work autonomously and are nonunionised and can be hard to reach. Semi-structured interviews were chosen in favour of structured interviews in order to gain detail-rich information, and also in favour of unstructured interviews to achieve comparability and consistency (May, 2011). Furthermore, semi-structured interviews allow greater flexibility to ask probing questions in order to find out deeper attitudes and feelings about certain topics or experiences relevant to the subject. The questions asked were open ended and nondirective to allow latitudinal responses (May, 2011). The interviews were partially transcribed and coded. The sample group consisted of five full-time working editors who worked both in-house and as freelancers. The sample for the interviews covered a cross-section of the publishing industry from education, academic, magazine, literary and trade book publishing. One restriction with snowball sampling was getting in contact with male editors. While only one male subject was interviewed, it is noted by the IPEd (2014) that female editors make up around 82% of the workforce.

Overall, there is a risk that the chosen research methods may have come from a homogeneous population of people from the same network and therefore the results could be skewed. However, this may be negated by the fact that this study aims to investigate a particular population from a relatively close network in the Australian publishing industry. Furthermore, to mitigate the risk of homogeneous attitudes within the same peer network, various entities and persons were contacted to distribute the survey. There is also a risk of invariably excluding editors who do not maintain regular contact with Twitter. To try and negate this risk, personal email and Facebook were also utilised.

Findings

The data raised some interesting observations about the dynamics of flexible working conditions among editors in Australian publishing. As an overview, there were 176 survey respondents of which 85% were female. The majority of respondents, 35.5%, worked in Trade Publishing, followed by 34% in Education, 31% in Digital Content, 25% in Literary, 16.5% in Magazines and 15% in Self-Publishing. Over half of the respondents had over 5 years of experience, with 19% reporting over 15 years of editing experience. For the purpose of the results, standard employment will refer to the status of ‘Employed, full-time’ and nonstandard will refer to all other modes of employment including ‘self-employed or freelance’, ‘employed, part-time’, ‘employed, casual’, ‘employed, fixed-term/contract’ and ‘not employed, looking for work’. These terms were chosen to reflect the greater labour market and not meant to be representative of the publishing labour market.

From the five semi-structured interviews, certain themes were directed in the interviews to ensure consistency of results, such as, employment status and satisfaction, feelings of security compared to flexibility in one’s job, the trajectory of one’s career and the use of digital tools and networks. Over the course of the interviews, other themes emerged including, starting as unpaid interns, building knowledge capital from in-house experience and post-graduate education, women being ‘pushed’ rather than ‘pulled’ towards freelancing, a feeling of ‘flexible as freedom’ among female freelancers while the male freelancer felt more uneasy with the insecurity, feelings of isolation from the whole publishing process for freelancers, and limited capacity for career progression once moving to freelance. Below are the key observations from the data.

On the whole, the data show that the occurrence of ‘self-employed or freelance’ is proportionately much higher than the average workforce. The total number of self-employed Australians is estimated to be around 17.2% including 8.5% independent contractors and 8.7% business operators who employ others (ABS, 2013). From 176 survey respondents, 42% were self-employed or freelance, more than twice the national average. When these numbers are interrogated by gender, there were a higher proportion of females, 43.5%, than males, 25%, who reported they were ‘self-employed or freelance’. Also in line with these figures, more female respondents work from home than male respondents: 48% women compared with 40% of men. More than half of male respondents, 56.5%, were ‘employed, full-time’ compared to 34.5% of female respondents. Of the five interviewees, four were working as freelancers.

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Among nonstandard positions, freelancing was the most common working arrangement for editors. The craft of editing is something that is learned over many years and usually takes on the master–apprentice model. The interviews confirmed that freelancing only became an option after the editor had spent some time in-house. Foong Ling Kong, freelancer and Managing Editor at Anne Summers Reports (a part-time role), explained it may be possible to become a freelancer without time spent in-house, but the editor can offer more value by understanding and knowing the process from the inside. This also predicates the prominence of unpaid work and the internship model.

The survey asked editors to estimate, on average, how many hours they spend on nonpaid editing work each week. A large number of survey respondents, 43%, estimated spending between 2 and 30 hours on unpaid editing work with 29% reported spending between 5 and 30 hours on unpaid editing work. The interviews reveal that unpaid internships are common. All interviewees acquired their initial training as interns or unpaid workers in-house at either a publishing house or magazine. It was quite common for subjects to be offered a job based on opportunity and being in the right place at the right time. Of her first paid editing position, Jacinda Woodhead said, ‘I just hung around and I made myself very available at Overland’. On the internship model, Nicole Redhouse, freelance Editor and former editor at Scribe, said, ‘it’s awesome experience but what kind of dynamic does that set up from the start?’ The interviewees also noted it is difficult to quantify hours worked because, in most cases, freelancers have to work according to a budget.

When asked in the survey, ‘How satisfied are you in your work as an editor?’, over 70% of respondents felt highly or mostly satisfied at work. This was congruent with the interview subjects who all noted moderate to high satisfaction in their work. However, for those working in ‘nonstandard’ arrangements (anything other than full-time), there was a disparity between men and women. When nonstandard work is broken down by gender, women appear significantly more satisfied than men with 17% of women being ‘highly satisfied’ and 0% of men. This suggests that female freelancers generally find more satisfaction in their work.

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In accordance with the survey, each of the freelance interview subjects confirmed they had reasonable to high satisfaction in their work. The female interviewees all noted that freelancing was not their initial choice, but since becoming freelance, they enjoyed the flexibility. On flexibility, Redhouse said, ‘In hindsight if I had known what the experience would have been like in freelance, I probably would have chosen it … because of the flexibility’. The male freelance interviewee enjoyed the diversity of freelance work, but noted he would have preferred to work with other people. Tim Coronel said, ‘I think three years working from home has been enough. So I’m ready to either go back into the workforce or … to share an office so I’ve got a place to go’.

Each freelancer also lamented the loss of daily contact with colleagues. On working outside the office, Kong said,

You miss the colleagues. You miss the ambient conversation that go on around you. You miss being part of a team … and just being able to talk to someone in the corridor and walk into someone’s office and say ‘should I go down this route, or should I go down this route?’

Nicole Redhouse explained how she missed being apart of the whole process and found, as a freelancer, she had less contact with the author. Redhouse said,

Author contact would be something that I miss … [In-house], it would be a much more personal relationship. Freelance, once in a while I’ll have no contact with the author at all … When I was working in-house, I was so involved in the whole aspect of the business … I was part of the bigger picture and I do miss that.

Thus, while freelancers enjoyed the flexibility, each also noted feelings of isolation from the whole publishing process.

When asked, ‘How secure do you feel in your position as an editor?’, almost one in five (19%) respondents felt ‘very precarious’ and close to one in four (24%) of the population felt only ‘some assurance’ in their position as an editor. Notably, male respondents in nonstandard working arrangements (anything other than full-time) reported higher feelings of precarity and insecurity than women in the same arrangement, except for a small portion who felt ‘assured to always have work’. Of the male respondents who were working in ‘nonstandard’ working conditions, 57% felt ‘very precarious with little assurance’ in their current position as an editor, as opposed to 24% of women in the same situation.

This suggests that, despite a fraction of male freelancers who feel very secure in their position, the majority male nonstandard workers feel very precarious in their position as a freelance editor. When comparing this to female nonstandard workers, less than one-quarter of respondents felt the same way, which suggests a higher acceptance, or tolerance to the level of insecurity.

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Freelancers who were interviewed all voiced concerns over the precarious nature of their employment. Kong aptly stated, ‘if your phone doesn’t ring, you don’t work’. The male freelancer was ready to seek full-time work in favour of security over the flexibility which freelance offers. ‘After doing this for three years all I can think is, how can I get a secure job again’, Coronel said. Meanwhile, the one subject who was employed, full-time did not feel insecure in her ability to obtain and maintain work: ‘Security is not something I think about … I feel that I can always get a job’, Woodhead said. Although it is possible that Woodhead’s optimism could also be attributed to her age as she was the youngest interview subject.

This concurs with a generally more optimistic view among survey respondents where respondents with over 15 years’ experience felt more insecure than those with less than 2 years’ experience.

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It can be assumed that years’ experience is positively related to age; however, that information was not collected in the survey. However, the data do highlight a gender and possibly age disparity.

One theme that was not directed, however emerged from the semi-structured interviews was a common thread of child birth as a reason why female editors switched to freelancing. Each freelancer explained that they made the switch after not being able to go back to full-time work expected by their employers and thus it was more of a ‘push’ rather than ‘pull’ to self-employment.

Nicole Redhouse said,

I was an in-house editor until I had my first child and then after a year of maternity leave, I should have gone back … The reason given to me was … we can have you back but only in your old role, full-time. And they knew I wouldn’t take that. I couldn’t take that, so it was a way to make me redundant.

Ann Standish said,

I worked as an Editor for 4 years. During which time I finished my PhD, had a baby and got made redundant after going back following maternity leave.

Foong Ling Kong said,

I started as a Commissioning Editor and then became a Publisher before I left. Then I had the baby, and then it just didn’t work out. They wanted someone who was more full-time and I really didn’t want to do full-time.

Each of the three women noted that the only position available was the same position they left, full-time with no option for flexible work. Conversely, the male editor explained that he was ready to leave his job to pursue freelancing and for the flexibility. Coronel said, ‘There was no obvious next step out there at the time, so it seemed like a good idea to see what I could do for myself’.

When asked how important were certain features in their work as editors, ‘Rate of Pay’ ‘Flexibility’ and ‘Security’ were almost equally important to all respondents, followed by ‘Employee Benefits’ which was about a third less important. When asked about flexibility in their pay, 73.5% of respondents felt they had ‘Rigid’ or ‘Limited flexibility’ in their pay.

Among interviewees, Redhouse noted, ‘as a freelancer, budgets are smaller and smaller. Even in the last five years … The assumption is I will do the same amount of work, for less’. Redhouse then went on to mention the effects of the global financial crisis. Redhouse said, ‘Apparently, it directly affected me returning to work as there wasn’t any money to pay that role’.

In-house magazine editor, Jacinda Woodhead, said,

It’s great to have the content but you do wonder how it’s going to last until the end of the year because the budgets are so tight. Everything about Overland is budgeted to the nth degree, there’s no flexibility there.

Foong Ling Kong spoke about the cause and effects of the RED Group collapse:

Because it [the industry] lost 180/190 Angus and Robinson and Borders stores, the industry has just become smaller. It’s become 25 per cent smaller. As a result of that, all the flow and effects are there … Three to five thousand copies is good these days. Where as, three to five thousand copies used to be minimum. There is just less shelf space.

Kong also explained that the squeeze on publishers means that those who are in-house are expected to do more production work, and it is almost unreasonable to expect an editor to complete much editing work. Rather, they must spend more time on publicity or production, which may also have contributed to sending editing work out of house.

Another interesting theme developed among editors around the pressure to maintain a digital profile. The majority of survey respondents spent between 2 and 10 hours maintaining their digital profile each week. Also among the survey respondents, 66% said digital networks are ‘Absolutely’ or ‘Quite’ necessary in order to attain work. In line with the survey respondents, one interviewee mentioned Twitter as a necessary tool to stay up-to-date and engage with the literary community. Another interviewee noted an increased pressure to maintain an active digital profile despite being more of an introvert by nature. It appears that, like authors, editors are now being marketed as personalities in the promotion of books and events.

Discussion

The creative industry worker has become the poster-girl for work in this latest iteration of capitalism. While the creative industries are venerated as a key driver of future economic growth, it is necessary to understand the economic and social implications of moving towards normalising this type of work. The editor has been used in this article as a case study to gain insight into the dynamics of this type of work. A survey of 176 editors and five semi-structured interviews revealed a disproportionate percentage of flexible working arrangements, widespread prevalence of unpaid work, a feeling of doing more for less, disconnectedness and stagnation once being pushed towards freelance work, a gender disparity where females are more inclined to tolerate precarity than their male counterparts and overall, despite the precarious nature of work, high levels of work satisfaction. The data suggest that flexibility has become the normal mode of work in publishing, especially among female editors. As such, the neoliberal rhetoric of creative entrepreneurialism with deregulated and decentralised labour structures that legitimise the use of technology as a means to individual empowerment, is made manifest in the lived experiences of editors today.

Overall, the findings suggest that the editor is more likely to be female, will often start in-house as an unpaid intern or volunteer, learn the craft, make a few vertical steps, and eventually when they have reached the ‘glass ceiling’ or career potential within one organisation, or, when it comes to child rearing, they will ‘opt for’ or be ‘pushed towards’ more flexible work arrangements commonly in the form of freelancing. It has become normalised within the publishing industry, and among editors, to pursue a meaningful career at almost any cost. Unpaid work has become the backbone of the industry where almost everyone starts out as an intern. Furthermore, it appears that the ‘push’ out of full-time work towards flexible arrangements is almost inevitable at some point during one’s career where women, in particular, have come to accept a certain level of precarity in their work. And the creative industries have come to depend on these flexible workers.

The neoliberal mantra congratulates those who seek their own path rather than rely on the state or capital for social security and benefits. Flexible capitalism has allowed organisational structures to become more agile and new technologies have opened digital labour networks where flexibilised workers are highly disposable. Both globalisation and digitisation have flattened international borders and connected the world. Yet where is the social contract binding individuals together?

Scholar on neoliberalism, David Harvey (2005) questions what this means for women:

So how, then, do disposable workers – women in particular – survive both socially and affectively in a world of flexible labour markets and short-term contracts, chronic job insecurities, lost social protections, and often debilitating labour, amongst the wreckage of collective institutions that once gave them a modicum of dignity and support? For some the increased flexibility in labour markets is a boon. (p. 170)

There are a series of risks for late capitalist societies to accept this level of insecurity. Several studies over the past two decades (Artazcoz et al., 2005; Benavides et al., 2000; Ferrie et al., 2002; Scott, 2004) outline negative physical and mental health effects of flexible work and call for more progressive social policy. There have also been a number of studies (Eikhoff and Warhurst, 2013; Gill, 2002; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Oakley, 2006) addressing the impact of precarious work in the creative industries. Yet, there have been no notable moves by policymakers to negate these social risks and address the lack of social security, especially among female creative workers.

Perhaps the most pressing concern for the publishing industry today is the alarming ‘push’ to freelance work for female editors. While freelancing offers greater flexibility, which can be seen as a drawcard for many women, it also means highly precarious conditions often marked by sporadic work and little opportunity for education and upgrading of skills. This leaves freelancers in a vulnerable position with high risk of being replaced by someone else in the digital network with the right skills offering to do the work at the right price.

On a global scale, advanced capitalist economies can no longer support the industrial labour model, which was based on gendered employment structures, and as a result there has been a rise in nonstandard employment models. The ‘standard’ workday is falling out of fashion and ‘flexibility’ is fast becoming the new norm. But who exactly does this benefit and who is being further marginalised? Under the free-market regime, flexibility may mean freedom to some, but for others it is inherently flawed.