The Case for the Union

by Suzanne Gordon

Susanne Gordon is an award-winning journalist, health care commentator, popular lecturer, and author of eight books — most recently, When Chicken Soup Isn’t Enough: Stories of Nurses Standing Up for Themselves, Their Patients and Their Profession (ILR Press, 2010).  This article, which appeared in the (May 1982) issue of American Writer, helped launch the union.

Two years ago, I drove through the South with several teamster union organizers, gathering material for a story. We traveled more than 4,500 miles and spent a good deal of time discussing the problems of truck drivers. Finally, one of the organizers—who’d never met a writer before—asked me about my job. Like many people who regard writers as a privileged elite, he assumed we were all handsomely rewarded for our work.

I had to laugh. No, I told him, my career as a freelancer didn’t fit that image at all. Like most writers, I complained, I suffered from poor working conditions. I told the organizers about magazines that assigned a story and forced you to rewrite it over and over again to please editors who could never agree about it among themselves. I explained that the rewritten story could be unceremoniously “killed” (rejected) and that all you got then was a “kill fee” – a quarter of what the printed piece would have earned.

I also told them about articles I’d written in which editors had arbitrarily changed facts, names, and dates—mistakes for which I, not they, would be held responsible. I explained that most publishers’ contracts commit a writer to several years of work, but do not require the publisher to distribute and promote the finished book. A publisher, I told them, might distribute and promote just enough copies to recoup the author’s advance and then some, but fail to seek the extra five or ten thousand sales that mean an extra $10,000 for the author.

After a few more of these stories, the teamsters interrupted with the logical question: “What are you doing about all this?” I had no answer. I explained that there was little writers could do about their problems because they had no union and were thus powerless to negotiate with their publishers. If writers are lucky, they have an agent who can complain and perhaps win some benefits. But not all writers have agents, and even those who do are still subject to their publishers’ whims. Their next question was “Well, why don’t you organize a union?” And then I explained what I and other people had encountered when we tried, in the early 70s, to do just that.

The first problem we came up against was the inviolability of the writers’ self-image. Most writers tend to have an incurably romantic conception of themselves and their work. Most of us, when we begin writing, feel so lucky to be doing meaningful, creative work that we’d willingly pay our publishers for the chance they’re giving us. Even as we become more experienced and realize that underpaid writing is very hard work, we still feel that our sacrifices purchase the freedom and prestige that most Americans – who work at boring, undemanding jobs—never enjoy. And we begin to identify with the myth of the starving writer, wearing our horror stories like medals, considering our penury a mark of authenticity. So when publishers act as though the satisfaction of seeing our work in print is our greatest reward – one that more than compensates us for our minimal wages – we hesitate to complain about this rather bad bargain.

But we also buy another myth – that acting to change these terms would jeopardize both our creativity and our self-respect. To unionize, we fear, would be to admit that we’re not just artists, but workers, and it would mean joining a movement made up of people who labor for a living. Rather than accept the fact that we, like most other Americans, have been tutored in deference and discouraged from engaging in collective action, we prefer to think of ourselves as rugged or sensitive individualists, constitutionally incapable of collective action. In his way, we rationalize and idealize our powerlessness.

Indeed, some of us become so attached to this romantic image that we actually content that earning more money would drain our creative energy. This argument, of course, is applied only to those at the bottom of the heap; no one suggests that a Mailer, Roth, Irving, or Oates return to the garret, nor that Flaubert, Tolstoy, or Dickens were hampered by their relative affluence.

Even politically radical writers who do not share this romantic view of their craft are reluctant to join a union. But they cast their objections somewhat differently. The labor movement, they contend, is not worth joining because it has become complacent and materialistic, struggling toward goals and values they do not share. They fail to understand that the labor movement has fought not only for economic justice, but for social and political justice, as well. In the early days, crucial battles for freedom of speech were fought by the workers in the IWW; labor leaders like Eugene V. Debs not only argued for higher wages and better working conditions, but also spoke out against war, racism and sexism. In fact, trade unionists have won nearly every progressive social program we enjoy today.

Contemporary writers, disconnected from their own history, are unaware that many major American writers were closely allied with the trade union movement. Writers like Farrell, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Algren, Dorothy Day, Jacob Riis, and Sinclair Lewis wrote about life as it was lived in the factories and in the fields. Community and workplace struggles were to that era what suburban angst and movie star bios are to our own.

When I worked for unionization in the early 1970s, the writer’s lot seemed to be improving and many authors considered a union unnecessary. In those days, non-fiction authors could earn $20,000 or $30,000 for a book advance; publishers were printing first novels by authors of unproven commercial appeal; even minorities, gays, and feminists were “in.” Serious magazines printed politically sensitive articles and investigative reporting was a growth industry. 


Today, writers are in grave trouble. Columbia University recently releases a survey revealing that the average American author earns just $4,775 a year. Publishing houses have started asking writers already under contact to agree to lower royalty rates in order to keep book prices down. Such luminaries as Joyce Carol Oates have apparently agreed to these cuts, hoping that they will make up their losses in sales. But what of writers who do not make the best-seller list? What will compensate them? Even university presses, which don’t normally pay advances, but do give writers contracts before they embark on a project, are increasingly unwilling to allow even that minimal protection.

That publishers now want writers to shoulder most of the risks involved in the industry was evident in Thomas Whiteside’s depressing series of articles last year in the New Yorker. Whiteside wrote on the inequality that results when conglomerates take over publishing houses. Publishing used to be a gentleman’s profession; and the gentlemen, and the ladies, who ran it could fairly claim that they printed commercial trash only in order to finance the production of real literature. Now, thanks to what Whiteside calls “the Blockbuster syndrome,” editors are encouraged to seek giant best sellers that come with pre-sold movie and television tie-ins, book club contracts, and the promise of huge paperback auctions. They want writers who not only write, but who perform well on television and can be marketed along with their books.

Because the blockbuster is so lucrative, publishers are less inclined to take risks on serious writers or first novels. Writers who believe that their personal relationships with editors will protect them soon discover that the good feelings developed over the years are not protection enough. If ever there was a need for a union, is today, when writers, as individuals, no longer bargain with individual editors, but confront anonymous conglomerates whose priorities are directly in conflict with their own.

Writers have gotten this message. Three thousand showed up at the American Writers Congress in New York in mid-October and met there with representatives of European writers union, the U.S. Screenwriters Guild (The Writers Guild), and the Graphic Artists Guild. In Sweden, England, Norway, Denmark, and Germany, unions represent most book and magazine writers. They have negotiated significant improvements in wages and working conditions, so that writers in European earn higher royalty rates than wedo in America. Their unions have also lobbied for legislation that gives them lending fees (like the residuals an actor get when a series is rerun on TV) each time their books are borrowed from the library. Writers are also paid if their wok is read on TV or radio. In America, screenwriters, actors, dancers, musicians all have unions: none of them are any less creative and all fare better than writers.

At the congress, it also became clear that the writers’ organizations we have today – P.E.N., The Authors Guild, and regional groups  -- have little power. These organizations can deplore the decline of literary quality, suggest contract terms for book writers, and give awards for literary excellence. But that is all they can do – protest, suggest, and award. They do not have the power to bargain collectively with an employer and enforce contractual agreements. As one writer put it, “I’ve belonged to the Authors Guild and P.E.N. and to local writers’ groups. We’ve had those groups for years. They’re valuable. But they’re too polite, and their existence has not stopped what’s happening in the industry today. Things are getting worse and these groups can’t do a thing about it.”

Writers are also beginning to understand the limits of their only other source of protection – the literary agent. They see that agents protect only a few and are powerless to help the majority of writers. Moreover, agents bargain for individuals. When a publisher offers a bad deal, an agent can only refuse and seek a better deal with another publisher. Agents cannot do what a union like the Writers Guild does – withhold the labor of all screenwriter and negotiate minimum salaries and standard applicable to everyone, not just the elite.

For this reason, some agents even welcome the prospect of a writers’ union. One prominent literary agent told me that he feels a union could make his job easier. “Today publishers constantly rewrite their contracts. They do this so often that even the editors are barely able to master the clauses in one contract before their house decides to write up a new one. I spend most of my time poring over contracts, figuring out what’s wrong with them. If a union negotiated firm contracts in the industry would free agents to do their job – to sell ideas and authors.”

Unprotected by agents and literary associations, writers have finally understood that the only way to cope with the threats to their livelihood and craft is to organize collectively. Thus, at the congress’s plenary session, two thousand writers voted to endorse the principle of a national writers union.

What would an American writers union do? Most certainly it would model itself on European unions and American arts unions. It would, for started, negotiate increased fees, cost of living escalator clauses and standard minimums based on a publisher’s circulation and financial resources. A writers union could also negotiate the death of the kill fee. (Since magazines that assign pieces agree to pay the writer something for his trouble, why not simply make the kill fee an advance, so the writer can have money to live on while researching and writing? And if work is held so long that it is rendered untimely, magazines should have to pay writers in full – with a penalty.) Writers, like screenwriters, should also be paid for rewrites. A magazine should be entitled to one rewrite and have to pay for any others. Finally, magazine writers should be paid on acceptance of a piece, rather than having to wait for months to be paid on publication. A writers union could help secure all these basic and most reasonable agreements.

At the same time, a writers union would surely turn its attention to issues of quality. A book or article may not be “killed” for arbitrary or capricious reasons —because a publisher changes his mind; because he decides a serious story should be funnier, an analytical piece more descriptive, or a descriptive piece more thoughtful. While it is true that some manuscripts are terrible and that issues of quality are difficult to determine, artist in other fields have, nonetheless, managed to work out procedures to resolve them.

In symphony orchestras, for example, “just cause” provisions allow conductors to fire musicians if they are drunk while working, or if they are late to performances or rehearsals. But if a conductor wants to fire a player for so-called artistic reasons, she must submit his case to a panel of the musicians’ peers. The performer is than given a chance to improve and if he or she does not, the case goes to a peer review board. Why couldn’t this procedure be used in book and magazine publishing?

A writers union might also take some initiative in developing new markets for books. Because publishers dare market only to audiences they have already identified and reached, be they mystery addicts or college professors, vast potential markets go untouched. A writers union, like many of the smaller presses, could reach these.

Finally, a union could set up funds and give grants (as European unions do) to promote the work of writers who have little power in the marketplace. These grants would have the special virtue of being relatively free from changes in corporate or government policy.

Organizing for the writers union is now going on all over the country. Local committees have been formed in many major cities and will come together for a national meeting this winter. Writers are also forming alliances with existing national literary organizations. And what is even more encouraging, large national unions like the Writers Guild, and District 65 of the UAW, a union which has organized workers in the publishing industry, have expressed interest in allying with a writers union.

Creating a vibrant, powerful union will take sacrifice and commitment. But these sacrifices will be different from those we are already forced to make, daily, without a union: they will lead to significant improvements in our working lives. For years, writers have essentially gone on strike whenever, as individuals, they decided not to write for a particular magazine or publisher gain. For years, writers have worked too hard for too little pay. And for years, writers have been effectively censored whenever an editor decided that their work was not slick enough to sell. Without a union, we’ve been able to do nothing – except complain. With a union, we can start to act.

[Note:  Freelance writers in the U.S. are still pressing for legislation that would allow them to bargain collectively. Our union does, however, have the power to wage campaigns to improve industry standards and to help our members file grievances to address contract violations. The NWU Grievance and Contract division has, to date, recovered nearly 1.5 million dollars due writers.  Read the highlights of NWU campaigns over the past three decades at www.nwuboston.org/timeline.htm.]