A few years ago, a part owner of an entrepreneurial US podcast house told me that the industry in the United States was a couple of years ahead of other anglophone countries and that rather than rushing to emulate their successes, we could observe them from a distance and try to avoid their failures. A couple of years later, his own show’s investigation of another workplace led to scrutiny of the company he helped to build – and charges of hypocrisy – surfacing a culture of overwork, burnout, underpayment and over-reliance on contractors, as well as systemic ineptitude in understanding race. It was also subsequently revealed that this person had once sought to undermine his colleagues’ efforts to unionise.

So it’s with more than a little irony that I take his advice. Yet in Australia, we needn’t look overseas to identify failures in our media companies; we are eminently familiar with the local flavour of these workplace issues. Our unions are of course very familiar with them too. But how about workers organising outside of, or alongside, unions?

A simple formation

It started with a tweet in December of 2021. Corey Marie Green, a podcast producer and audio engineer based in Naarm/Melbourne, had the idea for a rate card and went online to find similarly-minded people to collaborate on it.

Two years later, Podcast Workers Australia is a new collective of … well, podcast workers in so-called Australia whose joint purpose is to advocate for fairer working conditions in our industry, as well as to equip our colleagues with the skills and knowledge to negotiate a career and a craft.

The survey

Launched in mid-2022 and shared through social and professional networks and contacts online, the ‘Australian Podcasting Industry Survey’ received a tidy 100 responses, covering people at all levels of expertise, experience and seniority. (It’s worth noting that for much of the podcast industry, 2022 was a year of contraction, or perhaps correction, after an early pandemic-fuelled surge in investment – though how much these shifts had reached Australia-based workers depends on various things, like who their clients or employers were and where they were based.)

Across the data, there was a wide range of reported pay; AUD 1550 (approx. USD 1047) between the lowest and highest daily rate.’

Interestingly, tactics that resulted in the best pay outcomes were charging by the half day, as well as naming a rate and sticking to it. On factoring freelance business administration and entitlements into account, 54% of respondents said they either hadn’t considered them, were unsure or left the field blank. Union membership amongst respondents was common, with room to grow.

The expansion of the anglophone podcast industry globally has been driven in large part by freelance labour, so it was surprising to note that amongst our rate card survey respondents, there were more salaried full-timers than expected: 38%. Analysing the data, we noted that despite freelancers needing to account for the costs of running a business, it’s in fact full-time salaried workers who are on average being paid the most.

In all, the one hundred responses to the survey confirmed some assumptions and surfaced other unexpected insights into the workings of the podcast industry in this country.

This survey informed the creation of our rate card along with other factors such as rates in similar industries, rates in the podcast industry overseas and the cost of living in Sydney (where the podcast industry is most concentrated). In late 2023, the rate card was published simultaneously by MEAA (as part of their Freelancers campaign) and Podcast Workers Australia.

The rate card, in the wild

What can a list of job descriptions and numbers do? A large cross-section of podcast workers are freelancers, which makes negotiating a fair hourly rate a very important, impactful part of securing a living income – and a process that can be beset by the isolation, self-doubt and precarity that accompanies freelance work. But full-time workers also benefit from the valuation of the often overwhelming variety of tasks they might be expected to perform, and from a reliable reference of rates for hiring contractors to work on projects.

The podcast rate card lays out a series of pay ranges for different roles and levels of experience, offering great utility as a locally relevant starting point for negotiations between people hiring and people offering services. This offers some level of transparency for all parties. It also serves as an educational tool that outlines how a sound designer’s role might differ from a supervising producer’s, for example, and it can play a strong part in describing what we actually do in our work and what it contributes to a finished production.

In an industry that frequently overlaps with journalism, long-form reporting, narrative social history and documentary, I don’t need to outline all the ways in which insufficient time and squandered expertise can create distorted, poorly verified or unclear works that may result in damage to public discourse. Not to mention their effect on equity; pay and conditions more than most factors may determine whether a project or workplace is capable of welcoming the marginalised workers so prized by progressive managers and marketers. ‘Inclusion’ requires the scope to try new things, take proper time to evaluate them and shift power; time is what makes it possible.

There is also a conundrum of invisibility. Examples of well-made podcasts tend to obscure the amount of labour involved in their production; by many measures, and especially in ‘informal’ sounding formats, a top-notch production team is the one you barely notice. The same cannot be said for cinema or television, and it wouldn’t be outlandish to speculate that it’s a condition fairly particular to myths attached to the medium and genres of podcasting.

Of course, a rate card alone won’t solve the issue of in/visibility, or any of the many other labour issues raised by qualitative responses to the rate card survey. Among them are awareness and advocacy regarding the work required to produce a podcast, pay transparency and solidarity amongst workers, scope creep, and unionisation. Respondents suggested future projects or campaigns that touched on things like legal support, government funding bodies, changes to contracting law, opportunities to develop skills and networks, and quality control. On the list goes, and grows.

In bringing the rate card to completion and then publication, Podcast Workers Australia (or PWA) members collaborated to establish an online presence – then, in early November, to organise our first social gatherings. These were created to spread the word and welcome our colleagues to join PWA, and to celebrate the launch of the rate card – in Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal/Sydney, and online. During semi-structured discussions at each event, volunteers filled pages of notes cataloguing issues, opportunities and potential future campaigns and projects.

Precious simpatico

From our first project and the gatherings that marked its public launch, our overriding takeaway has been much more significant than an index of grievances or unfulfilled desires: it’s an energy to organise for change, to offer individual skills and above all to connect with other workers facing the same dilemmas and precarity. And, it must be said, often the same work. Have you ever had to reconstruct a misspoken sentence from salvaged syllables because of a recording or voicing issue? Or negotiated emotional safety for both colleagues and subjects around content considered too harrowing for mainstream media?

Beyond any political principles of our organising – and those have scarcely been addressed directly amongst the wider group, except on the question of where to position ourselves regarding the union – responsiveness to our membership is important because of some quirks in our industry.

Let me give you an example. Anecdotally, people in podcasting tend to shift between roles and levels with some fluidity and are somewhat more united than other industries by a common idea of the value of the industry or the identity of the podcaster. At one of our earliest meetings, for instance, someone came because they were running a project and didn’t know how much to pay people. This fluidity between tiers of labour is socially significant in podcasting. Frequently, we are hired by people we once hired, and vice versa. These relationships represent a challenge for traditional union organising but are an asset to ours. They’re part of our real industrial conditions – especially in our position as a non-union entity that does not have a formal role in workplace bargaining or disputes.

The economic value of our jobs fluctuates according to the fortunes and failures of a relatively new industry that emerged internationally and online. It exists within a distinctly post-tech boom milieu in which audiences are frequently built before a way to secure income has been found – somewhat analogous to social networks suddenly attempting to monetise an increasingly costly user base. In the case of major platform publishers like Spotify, who this past week announced the dismissal of 1,500 employees and two of its most acclaimed shows, there is more than a metaphorical correlation between ‘listeners’ and ‘users’. Operating costs (including staffing) are weighed against the speculative value of the company and its earning potential, and workers are dealt with accordingly. Podcasts are a means to a return on investment.

A well-made podcast is often considered first and foremost a branding exercise, and beyond public interest journalism and public arts funding, this might be the closest we get to a mindset that dovetails with paying workers consistently. Podcasts underwritten by sponsors, foundations, or clients are at least budgeted and paid for. (Where it most commonly stumbles is when the branding exercise involves throwing a celebrity or influencer in to host the work of underpaid producers. This often creates a painful clash of expectations.)

Shows primarily funded by advertisers will find extra pressure to draw larger audiences and attract higher rates, and are more susceptible to the boom and bust cycles of publishers whose value is often thought of more in terms of ‘potential profit’ than actual cash flow. Those crowdfunded by fans will for the most part experience a big helping of precarity, while those made within cooperative networks fall somewhere in between. Listeners expect free content. Even if we wanted to gate-keep and charge them for what we make (and most subscription platforms do ultimately fail), the simple technical mechanisms from which podcasting originates (RSS) means that attempts to control distribution using other technological means will typically begin with a decision to shed a huge part of a potential audience.

Our day-to-day challenges are niche too, and podcasters’ professional communities have typically been close-knit. We work in a context where the idea of ‘podcasting’ has been dominated by a perception of DIY ease – a perception that is both somewhat true and wildly misleading. Therefore, an explanation of the work and its varying modes and overlaps is necessary far more often than it might first appear.

There are several other issues specific to understanding podcast workers’ prevailing industrial conditions – the fact that our industry is periodically flooded with exiled writers, producers and managers from legacy media, looking for work that acknowledges their existing experience without having yet developed an understanding of podcasting as a distinct medium. The fact that cross-border collaborations are extraordinarily commonplace – a show can very easily have presenters, producers, sound designers, hosting platforms and engineers spread across a handful of countries, with guests, reporters and listeners in many others – while laws, unions and pay standards are almost always organised along national lines. The way audiences online form ‘parasocial’ relationships with many presenters, alongside an occasionally vicious sense of entitlement. The way many of us work alone in our home studios, feel isolated or yearn for opportunities to learn and expand our craft.

To that end, Australia lost two national podcast conferences in the fog of COVID-19 lockdowns: first OzPod, hosted by the national broadcaster, then – after a valiant remote effort in 2020 – the beloved Audiocraft Podcast Festival. In the intervening years, a new crop of workers have entered the industry. Many podcast workers are seeking recognition and skill-sharing of the many facets of crafted audio – from recording and writing to composition, editing, and sound design. This speaks to the creative ambition of our colleagues, but it’s also consistent with the entire rationale of campaigning for better rates and conditions: so that we may do a better job, benefitting all parties: workers, clients and publishers, and listeners.

Light and low

What’s next after the rate card? I can’t tell you – because I don’t know. Here’s why.

As I write this, Podcast Workers Australia has 127 members: you’ll find their names listed on the front page of our website. Who are the leaders? Who holds which position? The answer is nobody, or more accurately, potentially anybody. We’re currently organised as a collective with a flat hierarchy, arranged around simple and free digital infrastructure: an email list and a Discord server. Our members are scattered all over the continent, in cities and outside of them. There’s no membership fee; just an occasional internal crowdfund for costs like web hosting. Login and access credentials are always shared between a few trusted members to avoid inadvertent gatekeeping. Online meetings are kept to 40 minutes, encouraging them to be approachable and structured, and are typically chaired by a different member each time.

Our collective activity very much expands and contracts according to the project at hand, and temporary groups form to collaborate on specific tasks, reporting back to the wider group intermittently. Participation is driven by capacity – to keep as many people involved as possible over the long term, we welcome people to become more or less active as time and life permits.

So far, so idealistic: PWA has been an experiment in establishing a wide base and decentralising responsibility. The obvious question: how do we keep momentum and accountability? The truth is that it remains to be seen. Early in 2024, we’ll meet to discuss what ‘structure’ might mean for the collective, especially around decision-making and organising. My feeling – my hope, and surely others’ – is that we’ll emerge with a lean set of processes that relieve some of the social labour of purely informal organising while allowing us to continue developing initiatives and campaigns according to the interest and capacity of our membership. Will we end up echoing more traditional organising structures? I guess we’ll find out soon.

Those of us with experience in activist projects have seen several fail due to an overemphasis on individuals, leading to conflict or burnout. In sharing and dividing responsibility and workload, we acknowledge what we’ve learned about grind culture, ableism and unpaid labour, and seek to engender in ourselves what we seek from our workplaces: a genuinely inclusive and critically engaged approach to the time and energy of our people. It’s not flawless; sometimes we’re inefficient and of course, we have differing positions. We remain an experiment, and a young one, in trusting the collective while reaching for cohesion. We have made mistakes; I hope we can all commit to learning from them. Alongside our ups and downs, the most important thing we have established is our relationships with each other, which underpin our capacity to negotiate, organise and find community. And that’s a lot from a tweet.

Podcast Workers Australia is a community striving to create a fairer podcast industry. This piece was written by PWA and Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) member Jon Tjhia