Here’s something I only worked out recently. Freelance World went online in 1995. That same year, a labor lawyer’s daughter in Brooklyn named Sara Horowitz started an organization called Working Today, because she’d noticed that the way people worked was changing and nothing had been built to catch them.
Two people in two cities, same year, staring at the same problem. She did rather more about it than I did. Working Today became Freelancers Union in 2003, and today it has something like 490,000 members.
It costs nothing to join. I’ll say that again, because every freelancer I mention this to assumes there’s a catch: membership is free.
What it actually is
It’s not a union in the way your grandfather would have recognized one. There’s no collective bargaining, nobody’s negotiating your rate, and there’s no strike fund. It’s a non-profit that decided the useful thing to do for independent workers was build the safety net nobody else was going to build.
Horowitz came by it honestly. Her father was a labor lawyer, and her grandfather was a vice president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. She grew up around the old model and concluded it didn’t fit the new work, so she went and invented something that did.
What they’ve actually pulled off
This is the part that surprised me, because it’s easy to assume an organization like this is mostly newsletters and good intentions.
2008: portable health insurance. They launched Freelancers Insurance Company, the first portable benefits model built for independent workers. If you freelanced through that era you’ll remember what the alternative was: nothing, or something unaffordable with a deductible that made it theoretical.
Unincorporated Business Tax reform. Deeply unglamorous, and it saved freelancers in New York real money.
October 27, 2016: the Freelance Isn’t Free Act. They campaigned it through the New York City Council, where it passed 51 votes, making New York the first city in the country to legally protect freelancers from clients who don’t pay.
That last one is the big one, and it hasn’t stayed in New York. California now has its own version, the Freelance Worker Protection Act, in force since January 2025, with a threshold of just $250. Illinois has one. Los Angeles has an ordinance. A law that started as a campaign by a freelancers’ non-profit is now protecting people in states most of its early members never set foot in.
If you’ve ever sent a fourth polite follow-up email about an unpaid invoice and wondered whether anybody was ever going to do anything about it: somebody did.
What you get today, for free
- A contract creator. Free, and it produces something that actually complies with the laws above. If your current contract is an email saying “sounds good, let’s do it,” start here.
- Free legal help through their non-profit arm, Working Today. Actual answers to actual questions.
- A state-by-state map of freelancer rights. Genuinely useful, because these protections vary enormously depending on where you and your client are sitting.
- Health insurance and benefits curated for self-employed people, plus financial planning resources.
- Freelancing 101, a tax center, and a tech center. The boring infrastructure nobody teaches you.
- SPARK meetups and the Freelancer’s Hub. Free co-working and events, if you’re near one. Freelancing is lonely and this helps more than you’d expect.
They also run something called the Longest Invoice, a running public tally of money freelancers are owed and haven’t been paid. It’s a fundraising device and an advocacy tool, and it is also genuinely depressing to scroll. Worth a look anyway. You are not the only one.
So, join
I don’t get anything for saying this. There’s no affiliate link, and there isn’t one to have, because it’s free.
Thirty years on from 1995, the questions haven’t changed much: where’s the next job, what do I charge, and is this client going to pay me? Freelance World can help with some of that. Freelancers Union has spent three decades building actual infrastructure underneath it: insurance, contracts, and laws with teeth.
Take the ten minutes. freelancersunion.org