The More Things Change
The arguments for the first (still-existing) writers' union remain the same
There’s been a lot of twitter chatter this week about writers and the difficulties of making a living via this high-wire writing life — the amount of books people write to stay afloat, the slow or low payments, et cetera, et cetera. As usual, the question floats up — do we need a union? Could we even have one?
When this came across my timeline, I went to look for the articles that I vaguely remembered having read about why a union for freelance writers and novelists isn’t possible.
BUT the first thing I came to wasn’t that at all. It was an article in the New York Times (here’s a gift link, but I’ll also be quoting freely from it) from 1982.
The opening anecdote involves author Arthur Cohen running an ad to suggest mourning his recent novel due to lack of support from the publisher.
''My main complaint was that Harcourt was the largest publishing house I worked with, yet this book amounted to virtually a semiprivate publication by a major American publisher,'' said Mr. Cohen, the author of 16 previous books with a half-dozen publishers. ''The point of my ad was that a great deal of American book publishing, which prides itself on being efficient and full of good will, is highly pretentious and highly meretricious.''
Helen Yglesias, author of several acclaimed novels, is even more critical. ''Everything about being published is disappointing,'' she said. ''It's just a very bitter experience today for almost everybody.''
Those are strong indictments of an experience that often generates the kind of high hopes that caused F. Scott Fitzgerald, on the day his first novel was accepted for publication, to quit work and run along the street stopping automobiles to tell friends and acquaintances about his good luck. But many novelists today - once they have a publisher - are more likely to run to another publisher. ''Most of my best friends are disgruntled authors,'' said Faith Sale, an editor at G.P. Putnam's, ''If they aren't when they start they will be when they finish.''
Let’s continue!
The writer's profession has often been marked by grief and frustration, but authors, publishers and editors say that never before has publishing so resembled an adversarial process. As a result of this widespread dissatisfaction, ''For the first time in the history of publishing and book writing there is a strong possibility that a writers union will succeed,'' according to Mrs. Yglesias. She declared herself ready to join, as did Toni Morrison, a book editor and novelist whose ''Song of Solomon'' (1977) won the National Book Critics Circle Award. ''I think a union can help the publisher, the bookseller and the author,'' declared Miss Morrison. This weekend writers from one dozen states are meeting at Princeton to lay plans for a national writers union.
And the off-the-record comments against such a thing:
Other publishers, however, regard a writers union as impractical, unnecessary and unrealistic. Generally unwilling to speak on the record, they say privately that they are the inevitable scapegoats for problems that are mostly beyond their control - problems of dealing with artistic temperament, with consumers' tastes and with the difficulties inherent in trying to wed business practices to literary judgments. Theirs is a unique industry, they say, which turns out the equivalent of 40,000 new products a year, loses money on 80 percent of them, and earns on average less than half of what it could earn simply by investing in municipal bonds rather than in books.
Since PRH posted last week that they publish 15,000 new books each year themselves, I’m gonna guess that number is much, much higher now.
Nevertheless, disillusionment is said to be more widespread than ever, and critics of the system attribute it largely to the increasing domination of publishing by conglomerates that supposedly are transforming trade-book publishing (the publishing of books sold primarily through bookstores and other retail outlets) into a fastpaced, high-risk operation beset by rising prices and increasing competition for time from electronic games and cable television.
The Risk Is Ours, Say Writers
Writers say that it is they who take most of the risk. ''The publisher is selling a whole line, so he risks almost nothing on a single book,'' said Mrs. Yglesias. ''But the author risks everything, and unless he's out there hustling his next book almost immediately, his next meal is in question.'' An American writers congress voted overwhelmingly last year to form a national union for American writers. This Saturday and Sunday delegates from a dozen cities across the nation will meet at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University to lay the groundwork for the establishment of a national writers union next fall.
About the parallels and unparallels to the WGA, something that still comes up every time this is discussed:
But that is not the only difference between screenwriters and book writers. ''The difference is like the difference between having a job in the Civil Service and being a migrant worker,'' said Benjamin Stein, a member of the Writers Guild and the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction. ''When you write a book the publishers pay you what they feel like, take as long as they feel like, they don't have to account and you may never hear from them again. If you're a member of the Writers Guild, producers have to pay you within 10 days, every penny, they make sure you have good health insurance and they have to pay you a certain amount for a rewrite.''
That seems like a bit of an overstatement — they do have to account, although as the article also discusses, royalty statements are still byzantine and bespoke in a way that is bewildering (note my excellent alliteration there).
And this comment could’ve come from anyone now:
Writing remains for many a vexing livelihood. ''For 25 years I was one of the pack,'' said Mary Lee Settle, who since 1955 has published nine novels with several publishers, and who won the National Book Award for fiction for her 1977 novel ''Blood Tie.'' ''It was always a bitter experience, but my complaints had little to do with anything that a union can deal with,'' she said. ''It had to do with publishing lists, with promoting certain writers and neglecting others. If you had a low advance you had a low promotional budget. For a long time I had the feeling I was being published as a secret document by the C.I.A.''
The whole article is filled with such things and worth a read — and while it’s certainly depressing our complaints and the challenges to the whole union thing remain the same, it’s also a little comforting (to me) that it was ever thus. The article ends with doubting that the organization effort would work…
But it did.
From a Christian Science Monitor article in 1983:
Publishers laughed two years ago when a group of writers proposed founding a labor union. But they aren't laughing now. In a two-day founding convention recently, delegates representing more than 1 ,500 American writers formed a National Writers Union (NWU).
The NWU aims to represent free-lance journalists, fiction and nonfiction book writers, poets, and others, and ''to promote and protect (their) rights, interests, and economic advancement.''
The union is the result of efforts begun at the American Writers Congress in 1981 to organize writers in an effective group to improve rights and working conditions. The union was born May 1, the international Labor Day.
Alas, the prediction that it would continue to grow in power doesn’t seem to have come to fruition. But…it is still around. Imagine my surprise!
For a long time the National Writers Union was affiliated with the United Auto Workers union. I do not know enough about unions to truly analyze all this, but from what I’ve gleaned the UAW started telling the writers union they couldn’t establish set contracts with publications and also became embroiled in scandal itself so the writers union disaffiliated a few years ago. The main issue writers’ unions face besides, well, organizing writers in an effective way, seems to be the potential to run afoul of price-fixing laws:
The legal issues the UAW brought up aren’t out of nowhere, and they can create headaches for labor. Sanjukta Paul, a labor law professor at Wayne State University, wrote in an article abstract for the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal (8/21/15):
The threat that organizing for decent wages and working conditions will be prosecuted as price-fixing is a powerful constraint upon [freelance] workers’ ability to take action to change their circumstances…. The default rule that workers and other less-powerful economic actors are subject to the heavy hammer of the price-fixing doctrine for cooperation in pursuit of a decent livelihood ought to be revisited.
However, others see this as less of an issue:
Goldbetter believes the NWU—which is talking to other big unions about re-affiliating—will continue to settle more of these types of agreements, despite the UAW’s expressed concern that, because freelancers function as independent contractors, they may run afoul of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibits “price-fixing.” As Goldbetter sees it, there are all sorts of independent workers who are also covered by collective-bargaining agreements, like professional athletes and movie directors. “There’s decades of cases, and there are certainly rulings against people trying to organize, but there are more rulings in favor than there are against,” Goldbetter said. “We’re confident that if we do get challenged, we would win. I almost welcome a challenge.”
In October 2021, the National Writers Union became affiliated with the AFL-CIO. The director of the larger union gave a speech/statement announcing the partnership:
The National Writers Union has provided a voice and power to writers for nearly 40 years.
You educate freelance writers, journalists and creative professionals on fair contracts.
You provide access to healthcare and benefits.
And you make sure copyright and intellectual property rights for your members aren’t abused.
So…why bother telling you all this? I found it fascinating, is really all I have. It sounds like there’s been plenty of ups and downs and in-fighting over the years in the NWU. And it’s hard for me to believe this thing is effective, since I literally didn’t know it existed until last night. So, this is really just a huh post. A “the more things change” post.
But if anyone has insights about how it could do more or be effective, on whether we all should be joining it, then feel free to chime in the comments. Otherwise consider this your daily visit to the time capsule of disenchanted writers past.
I say all this knowing that I tend to have a more positive outlook on publishing than most writers. I think it’s because of my background writing for PW, and thus having a little more insight (and sympathy) for the ways everyone working in publishing struggles within this system. Certainly, it would be great if we had a collective way to negotiate things like speedier, fairer pay scales, contract standards to prevent terrible clauses, things agents do (or don’t) one by one or agency by agency at the moment.
I did some threads about publishing over on twitter last night, on the occasion of my 12th published novel, in my 10th year of doing this and truly, I love this wacky business and everyone I work with in it:
The More Things Change
Fascinating.
When I started down this path a mentor suggested that I start following The Author's Guild, and I have. I'm just a bystander at this point, but it seems they have been doing a lot of the work that most of us would want a professional organization to do - all but collective bargaining - and they've been at it since 1912. Am I wrong in thinking they have a voice that makes a difference? FWIW, Architects have been intermittently having this same conversation for decades. I think the goal of being properly compensated for creative work is common across the art world.