ABSTRACT
The experience of entertainment industry unions offers many lessons for organizing the new economy workforce. Many new media professionals share common professional goals and concerns with their counterparts the “old” media of film and television. Both groups have very high degrees of professional identification, and work primarily on a freelance basis. Within both groups there are people who are at different times both employer and employee. But while the new media workforce is almost exclusively nonunion, the old media workforce has one of the highest union densities in the United States. I first outlined the similarities between these two groups in an article in Working U.S.A. (Amman, 2002).
