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Archive-name: organizations/union/natl-writers/part2
Posting-frequency: monthly Last-modified: 2004 Oct 31 Version: 7.1.9 7.1.9vr-usenet See reader questions & answers on this topic! - Help others by sharing your knowledge FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS & CHARTER National Writers Union Usenet newsgroup: alt.union.natl-writers Maintained by: nwufaq@vicric.com (Vicki Richman) URL: http://vicric.com/ NWU staff: nwu@nwu.org NWU URL: http://www.nwu.org/ PART TWO Quick Hints: This FAQ is divided into four parts. You are reading Part Two. The complete contents are in the first part. This part has only its own contents. The Charter to alt.union.natl-writers is in Part Four. Go to Part Four first for guidelines on posting and advice from Emily Postliterate. Please read the Charter before you post. For an NWU membership application, go to http://www.nwu.org/ or read Part Three. Note the Last-Modified date above. If this version is more than 45 days old, it is obsolete and should be discarded. NWU-FAQ v. 7.1.9 7.1.9vr-usenet Copyright 2000 Vicki Richman. All rights reserved. ****************************************************************** ** ** ** Permission is hereby granted to copy, reprint and dis- ** ** tribute this document without payment or recompense, for ** ** noncommercial purposes only. But permission is so granted ** ** only for copying the entire text, without changes, dele- ** ** tions, editing or cutting. Permission must be sought and ** ** received for any commercial use of this text. Any copy ** ** must retain the copyright line and this permission notice. ** ** ** ****************************************************************** PART TWO o Section 2: Freelance Writing and the Labor Movement 2.0. What have automobiles to do with writing? 2.1. I thought it was illegal for freelance writers to have a union. 2.1.1. What's union scale for 5000 muckraking words exposing the corrupt FAQ-maintaining industry? 2.1.2. My publisher says my theater reviews serve the gay community, so I should be proud to work for zilch. 2.2. That's great, but what makes you a union? 2.2.1. "Sweeping changes" in "the publishing industry"? You mean "industries," right? 2.2.2. I got an offer to ghostwrite academic theses. Does that make me a kind of dope dealer to the fuzz? 2.2.3. Do "the benefits of solidarity" mean you offer group health insurance? 2.2.4. So what you're saying is you're a union because you rig your elections and claim to be a democracy. 2.3. Get real. If you're contractors, you need a professional association, not a labor union. 2.4. Okay, you're a real union. So real that a publisher would have to be crazy to use my work if I joined the NWU. 2.5. Okay, so you're a real *freelance* union. So how come your president gets a full-time salary? Section 2: Freelance Writing and the Labor Movement ---------------------------------------------- 2.0. What have automobiles to do with writing? ---------------------------------------------- The United Automobile Workers should be renamed the Union of All Workers. It has many professional and white-collar locals, including lawyers, teachers, graduate students, government workers, artists of various kinds and jai-alai players. ----------------------------------------------------------- 2.1. I thought it was illegal for freelance writers to have a union. ----------------------------------------------------------- That question should probably be rephrased: Does the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) protect freelance writers from antitrust legislation? Most of the NLRA applies only to employees. Freelance writers are considered independent contractors. But we are free to organize ourselves into a union, take what benefits the law now offers, and lobby for full labor protection. Even without reform of the NLRA, we have achieved collective-bargaining agreements with several publications. We also achieve a kind of collective bargaining in our standard contracts between writer and publisher. We offer the standard contracts to our members, with training in negotiating with the editor or publisher to gain preference for the NWU contract over any other agreement. The contracts -- specific to periodicals, books, and other types of publishing -- were drafted by teams of attorneys and seasoned writers. ------------------------------------------------------------ 2.1.1. What's union scale for 5000 muckraking words exposing the corrupt FAQ-maintaining industry? ------------------------------------------------------------ Only 5000 words? "Union scale" can be set only by collective bargaining between publishers and a writers' union. As freelance writers are contractors, we don't have complete protection of the NLRA -- yet. The National Writers Union is working toward reform of the publishing industry to include union scale for freelancers. For now, union members can ask their publishers to use the NWU standard contract. The publisher may refuse at first, but if enough writers insist, the publisher may have to agree or put blank pages on the stands. Also, the NWU has published its _Guide to Freelance Rates and Standard Practice_. It does not attempt to set union scale, but it gives writers an idea of what to expect. It's available in most bookstores. Anyone can order a copy from the NWU office; there is a discount for NWU members. It would not be ethical to quote a price for any job without collective bargaining. Fees vary among publications. The circulation, the advertising and the intended audience all affect the writer's pay, just as the size and location of a theater affect an actor's salary. Our union hopes to quantify the industry's sliding standards so that writers will have a reasonable estimate of what their work is worth, but we have an uphill struggle. Therefore any dollar amount cited in this FAQ is for illustration only. No standard rate is implied or should be inferred. --------------------------------------------------------- 2.1.2. My publisher says my theater reviews serve the gay community, so I should be proud to work for zilch. --------------------------------------------------------- In bargaining with a publisher, freelancers should remember that, unlike wages for typical employees, our pay is not necessarily proportional to our labor. A writer falls into the professional or artistic category, in which the venue, the arena or the client is more significant than the hours worked. A Hollywood star, who commands eight figures for a film, may do an Off-Off-Broadway gig for the union minimum. A successful attorney, who bills corporate clients at $300 per hour, may waive any fee in representing a falsely accused indigent. Likewise, a writer may contribute an article without payment to a small-circulation journal that sees service to society as a higher cause than selling copies. However, that same writer may demand five grand for the same article sought by a mainstream magazine with millions of readers and more advertising than editorial content. That is good union practice, with ample precedent. However, the writer should not be hoodwinked into free work for a publisher reaping the profits. It is common for special-interest publishers to convince gay and lesbian writers -- and other minorities -- that they are working for a noble cause. We are "honor-bound" to donate our professional services -- or so they tell us -- for some hypothetical greater good meaning little or nothing to the publisher. Asking victims of societal discrimination to work for nothing just because they are victims -- that's both hypocrisy and discrimination, as it shams indignation against exclusion to exploit and profit from exclusion. Judge your venue. If it is genuine _pro bono_ work, be proud to donate your services. The greatest writers have done their greatest work for free. But if it is a publisher's scam to increase profits with cheap labor, go to your union grievance officer at once. The union may be able to help you get the pay you have earned. ---------------------------------------------- 2.2. That's great, but what makes you a union? ---------------------------------------------- o Our vision We are fighting for the right to bargain collectively and to have labor mediators and arbitrators hear our grievances against unethical publishers. We have launched campaigns for sweeping changes in the working conditions at all levels of the publishing industry. We don't see ourselves as entrepreneurs with dainty home offices. We see ourselves as sweaty workers running from job to job with notebooks and laptops. We stand in solidarity with other workers. o Our grievance system Our grievance officers have recovered over $1,000,000 (yes, a million) for our members. They did that by going directly to the publisher -- by letter, phone and personal visit -- and presenting the facts. No wrongfully injured NWU member has to confront a publisher alone. A trained grievance officer will represent any member who has been ripped off or who suffers unjust discrimination. That often (but not always) spares our members the pain of appearing in Small Claims and other civil courts to get the payments denied them -- or just eating the loss to avoid court appearances and legal expenses. If a lawsuit cannot be avoided, the grievance officer discusses legal strategy with the writer and the writer's attorney. Of course, before taking action, a grievance officer must be satisfied that the publisher has violated the law, professional ethics or standard industry practice, and has refused the union member's request to correct the violation. o The benefits of solidarity Our Publication Rights Clearinghouse (PRC) is a database of writers who have had journalism, fiction, poetry and works in other genres published in periodicals. It identifies the author as the copyright owner. If any person or corporation wishes to republish a work online -- as on the World Wide Web or in a proprietary service -- the PRC collects a fee and delivers it to the writer as the copyright owner. We offer our members health insurance and other benefits that they could not get as individuals, or that would be too costly. Faced with the challenge of finding low-cost health care for themselves and their families, freelance writers are sometimes forced to leave the industry. NWU tries to answer that challenge with a group health plan for members. We maintain confidential databases of agents and jobs for our members. We issue press passes to eligible members. o Our influence on the political system Our Political Issues Committee urges Congress and state and local legislatures: a. to reform copyright law to protect hard-working writers from theft and fraud, instead of merely protecting multimillion-dollar corporations from competition; b. to establish freelance writers as creative workers, not as unprotected contractors; c. to give writers full protection of the First Amendment; d. to protect writers from prosecution or retaliation against their work, and to so protect agencies that sell or distribute their work; e. to keep the Internet open to all writers and readers without government interference in personal or family decisions; f. to end discrimination by age, color, creed, ethnicity, gender, ideology, physical disability, race or sexual orientation in publishing and in all society; ----------------------------------------------------------- 2.2.1. "Sweeping changes" in "the publishing industry"? You mean "industries," right? ----------------------------------------------------------- Since Guttenberg, publishing has come in many guises. That is even more true now, with CD-ROM, the Web and interactive software, like games and teaching tools. Artists are driven not to the genres that pay the best, but to the genres we have spent years learning and mastering. However, typical publishers -- Disney, Murdoch, Time-Warner -- continually expand into new enterprises, looking to expand their profit and impose their own idea of standard practices on us. Almost all major newspapers now have their own Web sites. Therefore, we don't believe we can reform labor practices in one publishing genre without seeking changes in all publishing. Since our inception, however, our activists have recognized broad publishing categories. We have mounted specific campaigns directed at specific genres. The deepest historical rift in publishing is between books and periodicals. So we organized our Book and Jouralism Campaigns. Activists worked in the field more familiar to them, while coordinating their efforts with activists in the other field. For example, the Book Campaign aimed at getting accurate and intelligible royalty statements from publishers. The Journalism Campaign sought full payment, instead of a kill fee, for work frivolously rejected by editors. In the early 90s, we added the New Technologies Campaign, to protect writers against database rip-offs and censorship. At the same time, many of our silent members -- corporate speechwriters, catalog writers, advertising copywriters, writers under contract to produce text books and technical manuals -- started to file grievances. They had typically been ignored in favor of their more glamorous sisters and brothers -- poets, novelists, journalists. These commercial contract writers went on to organize the Business, Instructional, Technical Writing Campaign (BIT). That made four campaigns, including New Technologies. But few of our members actually wrote code or designed Web sites, while most of our BIT writers were working to enrich their repertoire with electronic work. So we folded New Technologies into BIT, to form the Business, Instructional, Technical, Electronic Writing Campaign (BITE). Although we have three campaigns -- Book, Journalism, BITE -- we see the publishing industry as one, and ourselves, however different our genres, as co-workers with a common cause. The separate campaigns allow activists to focus on specific targets, while unity amplifies our diverse efforts into one movement aimed at reform of all publishing. Contrary to previous versions of this FAQ, the vote by the 1998 Delegates Assembly did not actually exclude "computer programmers" from membership in the National Writers Union, unless they meet some other membership criterion. Presumambly, "computer programmers" means code writers and perhaps Web designers. The vote was simply a decision not to actively seek to organize them. The motion was sponsored by the former and present chairs of the New York local, who preferred that organizing funds be spent only on authors and writers in human languages. The maintainer of this FAQ urges solidarity among quill scratchers, fountain-pen squirters, code writers, Web designers, and everyone in between. ---------------------------------------------------------- 2.2.2. I got an offer to ghostwrite academic theses. Does that make me a kind of dope dealer to the fuzz? ---------------------------------------------------------- In most cases ghostwriting is legal and honorable, if difficult, ego-bruising, and poorly rewarded. In some cases, the *client* uses the ghostwritten work in violation of laws and ethics governing the client. If the client does that, it is the client who is the violator, not the ghostwriter. That said, it probably is not wise to respond to an advertisement seeking ghostwriters of academic papers. If the ghostwriter knows the client's intent to cheat, the ghostwriter might be a collaborator in violating laws or ethics. The ad might even be entrapment. Slicker agencies advertise for a "research assistant," which is a time-honored euphemism for a "ghostwriter." Call yourself a research assistant, and anything the client does with your work is the client's responsibility. It is well-known that many blockbuster authors use hired work by so-called "research assistants" on their staffs. Such an "author" is in fact no more than an editor, handing out assignments and assembling the work of others into a final, best-selling version. It is not so well-known that many academic papers are produced the same way. And of course the so-called "author" is virtually always the copyright owner. Work by a "research assistant" or a ghostwriter is work-for-hire. The ghostwriter loses all rights if the contract is written properly. If, however, there is no contract, or it is written badly, the ghostwriter retains the copyright and may enforce it. What about payment? If the client violates the contract by failing to pay, the copyright reverts to the true human author. If there is no contract, the true human author owns the copyright whether or not the client pays. Any ghostwriter should be careful to retain proof of authorship, to be able to enforce a copyright. That may become necessary to get paid. (In fact that scenario has been the basis of many a murder-mystery plot.) The National Writers Union includes ghostwriters as members and officers, and grievance officers will support ghostwriters. However, there is a unique problem to ghostwriting grievances. The ghostwriter's client may also be an NWU member. In that case, NWU grievance officers may refrain from taking any action. ------------------------------------------------------ 2.2.3. Do "the benefits of solidarity" mean you offer group health insurance? ------------------------------------------------------ o The short answer: Yes. o The real answer: The NWU represents its members in negotiating with insurers for the best rate and most equitable policy. Then we authorize the insurer with the winning bid to write up an NWU group plan. We monitor the insurer's billing and practices in the interests of our members. Therefore, no, *we* don't offer health insurance. We authorize a *health insurer* to offer an NWU group plan, and we make sure our members are treated well. This FAQ is on unions and freelance writing. The present NWU group plan is beyond the scope of this FAQ. To learn what the NWU health insurer offers, please phone the NWU office during business hours. ----------------------------------------------------------- 2.2.4. So what you're saying is you're a union because you rig your elections and claim to be a democracy. ----------------------------------------------------------- No, no. We never rig our elections. We don't have to. Nobody has dared to run against our President in our history. Nobody, that is, until the summer of 1999, when Miryam Williamson (Western New England), representing the RenewNWU party, challenged the nine-year incumbent, Jonathan Tasini (New York), representing the Leadership for Writing Power (lwp) party. Tasini defeated Williamson by about 58% to 42%. Apart from the excitement and tension of our first major personality contest, we have always had heated and close ballots for policy issues, like raising the dues, paying salaries to officers, and funding the Diversity Committee. Once again, in the summer of 1999, members will vote on whether to increase their own dues. Earlier opposition to increasing the dues has been the regressive nature of the proposals. While paying less, impoverished members saw their dues increase at a greater rate than wealthy members. The current proposal corrects that. Approving the proposal, the membership voted to raise the lowest rates by about 5% and the highest by about 8%. ------------------------------------------------------------- 2.3. Get real. If you're contractors, you need a professional association, not a labor union. ------------------------------------------------------------- o The answer by Mike Bradley, Chief Grievance Officer: The line between professional associations and unions may have been clear at one time, but no longer. The difference has become one of degree, not kind. The laws that define the organizations just hasn't kept up. Both types of organization work to advance their profession's prestige, lobby legislatures, and help members improve their skills and income. For instance, both the union and the Authors Guild have supported programs aimed at making writers more valued in society, gone to Washington to lobby Congress, helped members with contract problems, and founded projects to collect royalties. Unions were once the working class counterpart to upper-middle class professional associations, but no longer. Doctors are in unions and secretaries are in professional associations. Class and occupational barriers have been transformed. So should our thinking about the future. o Vicki's answer: Writers are not a monolith. We are a diverse group. Some of us are rich and famous. Some are poor and struggling to be heard. Some are middle-class, with families and lawns. Some work alone in cold, drafty garrets. Some writers employ other writers as researchers, copy editors or (shudder) ghosts. The NWU unites all of us. It protects the integrity of the whole writing profession, not just a segment of it, against exploitation and injustice. It protects our right to a decent living. A union like Actors Equity crosses class and salary -- from the superstar who is also a producer of the show to the boys and girls in the chorus. Likewise, the NWU brings blockbuster authors -- who are also publishers of a sort -- in common cause with poets or technical writers working for only pennies a word. -------------------------------------------------------------- 2.4. Okay, you're a real union. So real that a publisher would have to be crazy to use my work if I joined the NWU. -------------------------------------------------------------- Well, blacklisting of union members is a notorious union-busting strategy by bosses. The most successful unions respond by recruiting so many workers into the union that a blacklisting boss would have an empty shop. However, the NWU has no chance at a "closed shop" for freelancers. We are such a diverse, independent, and free-thinking profession that no union, no professional association, could hope to recruit a significant majority of freelancers. There will always be major players who refuse to join. Besides, under the NLRA, a closed shop for freelancers is illegal. Still, there has been no noteworthy instance of blacklisting against NWU members in the union history. We have recovered well over $1,000,000 in greivances for our members, but virtually none has cited a blacklist as the reason for failure to be paid or hired. Many have cited unlawful discrimation, as by ethnicity or sexual preference. There is one tangential exception. About a dozen NWU members -- all prominent and one the union president, Jonathan Tasini -- sued the New York Times and other publishers for selling the plaintiffs' works through Internet databases without paying royalties to the authors, who owned the copyrights. About a year into the lawsuit, there were rumors that the Times was blacklisting certain plaintiffs -- particularly by refusing to publish reviews of their books. The rumors were not substantiated, but several plaintiffs withdrew from the suit. The NWU members who persisted in the suit eventually won, in the U.S. Supreme Court. So, will you be blacklisted by your publisher if you join the NWU? It's possible, but for now highly unlikely. If it does happen, and you can demonstrate the blacklist to the satisifaction of our grievance officers, you may be sure that the full weight of our 7200 members will be thrown in support of your cause, in the courts and in legislative lobbies. Your disaster may eventually be redressed by a new law protecting freelancers against blacklisting. ---------------------------------------------------------- 2.5. Okay, so you're a real *freelance* union. So how come your president gets a full-time salary? ---------------------------------------------------------- He doesn't. Not any more. (And he'll remain a "he" for at least two years.) The 2001 Delegates Assembly has voted to pay the president a "part-time salary" of about $25K, and to hire a full-time executive director at about $60K. Some members disagree with even the part-time salary. The president, they argue, should be a voluntary position, with a stipend, not a salary, of about $12K, in recognition of service to the union, and an expense account. To read the text of the amendment to the By-Laws, go to: http://vicric.com/restruct.html --------END PART 2/4--------CONTINUED IN PART 3-------- User Contributions: |
Natl Writers Union FAQ, Part 2/4: Writers and Labor Unions
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Natl Writers Union FAQ, Part 2/4: Writers and Labor Unions
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