|
Archive-name: organizations/union/natl-writers/part1
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 ONE Quick Hints: This FAQ is divided into four parts. You are reading Part One. The complete contents are in only this part. Every other 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 If this version is more than 45 days old, it is obsolete and should be discarded.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 ONE Section 0: Introduction and Disclaimers --------------------------------------- 0.0 What are the contents of this FAQ? --------------------------------------- o Section 0: Introduction and Disclaimers 0.0. What are the contents of this FAQ? 0.0.1. How does this version differ from previous versions? 0.1. Who maintains this FAQ? 0.1.1. Who died and made Vicki Richman the boss of the NWU FAQ? 0.2. How did this FAQ get on rtfm.mit.edu? o Section 1: History 1.0. What is NWU? 1.1. If you're a UAW local, why don't you call yourselves the Local Writers Union? 1.1.1. Exactly when was the NWU founded? 1.2. How can the NWU both have locals and be a local? 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. But a real *freelance* union. So how come your president gets a full-time salary? PART THREE o Section 3: Electronic Writing 3.0. What are you doing online? 3.1. I've HTML-ized my work for my Web site, but my publisher claims all rights to it and won't let me post it. 3.2. What are electronic rights? 3.3. I write code. Why should I join a union that puts me in the same campaign as an advertising copywriter? o Section 4: Membership 4.0. So, how can I join? PART FOUR o Section 5: NWU Groups on the Net 5.0. What are the online NWU groups? 5.0.1. What is alt.union.natl-writers? 5.0.2. Vicki again! Don't tell me that any rank-and-filer may run a BBS forum in the name of the NWU. 5.1. What is the charter of alt.union.natl-writers? ----------------------------------------------------------- 0.0.1. How does this version differ from previous versions? ----------------------------------------------------------- After challengers to the 2001 election for NWU president and other officers charged improper use of union funds and resources to support the slate headed by incumbent Jonathan Tasini, who was re-elected, the Oversight Committee has vacated the results of all contested elections and ordered new ballots within 90 days. The Tasini team has vowed a vigorous appeal, to the courts if necessary. The 2001 Delegates Assembly voted to pay the elected president a "part-time salary" of about $25,000 per year, and to hire a full-time executive director, who reports to the president and the National Executive Board, at about $60,000 per year. Hence Question 2.5 is changed. The text of the passed amendment to the By-Laws: http://vicric.com/restruct.html The number of NWU members is now about 7200. In a lawsuit financed and primarily supported by the National Writers Union, President Jonathan Tasini and six other writers prevailed before the U.S. Supreme Court in gaining copyright protection for freelance articles archived in profit-seeking databases. The answer to Question 2.4, on putative blacklisting of NWU members, has been changed to note the decision. The number of locals is now nineteen, with the addition of San Diego and Tucson, formerly At-Large sublocals. Westchester(NY)/Fairfield(CT) has elected to remain separate from the New York City local, while the Miami Area Organizing Committee is no longer cited as a local. See the updated Question 4.0 for the latest list of locals. The NWU membership application is now excluded from the FAQ. The citation of fees and request for financial data was inconsistent with Usenet netiquette. Question 4.0 cites only the professional data requested by the application and advises readers how to get the application. ---------------------------- 0.1. Who maintains this FAQ? ---------------------------- The version you are now reading is by Vicki Richman <nwufaq@vicric.com>. Other versions may have other maintainers. In maintaining this FAQ, Vicki does not speak for the union leadership and is independent of it. Vicki is only a rank-and-file union member. ---------------------------------------------------------- 0.1.1. Who died and made Vicki Richman the boss of the NWU FAQ? ---------------------------------------------------------- o Vicki's answer: The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, bozo -- read it and weep! o The disclamatory answer: FAQ-writing -- or *maintaining*, as it's called -- has become a literary genre. A genre has conventions, which invoke one of two fates when violated: a. The envelope is pushed, and the genre is never again the same; or b. The document and its author are discredited or ignored. One of the FAQ conventions is that no FAQ should deny the authenticity of any other FAQ on the same subject. Anyone may write a FAQ; only the audience chooses among them. (The audience of course includes the MIT moderators of the Usenet newsgroup news.answers -- see Question 0.2.) Accordingly, every FAQ should have a disclaimer -- like the answers to Questions 0.1.x, which you are now reading -- acknowledging at least the possibility of another FAQ, inviting contributions, corrections and addenda from diverse sources, and identifying a person or a small group of collaborators as solely and independently responsible for the content. Another convention is that no FAQ is carved in stone. FAQs necessarily shatter the stone into electrons, which continually flutter, float, flit about and displace each other. If the National Writers Union wrote its own FAQ, or empowered an official FAQ-maintainer, its FAQ would be more permanent, more authentic, than any other FAQ on the union. It would be constitutional, biblical in nature, changeable only clumsily -- by committee perhaps -- antithetical to the FAQ genre. Such a FAQ would be like a candidate's press release or a TV commercial that pretends to interview a person on the street. Neither is journalism -- either is a parody of journalism for political advantage or corporate gain. An official NWU FAQ would either push the envelope of FAQ-maintaining to include public relations, advertising and self-promotion, or be scoffed at by the FAQ congnescenti, who would make it an object of Net ridicule. In its present form, a FAQ is a cross between a dry, objective technical manual and an intense confession of the author's most secret vanities, fears and, of course, obsessions. It reveals not so much about its subject as about its author's personal relationship to its subject. ------------------------------------------ 0.2. How did this FAQ get on rtfm.mit.edu? ------------------------------------------ Almost all FAQs are regularly posted to Usenet newsgroups, and many seek to be voices for their groups. This FAQ is connected to the newsgroup alt.union.natl-writers. Some faculty and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have taken it upon themselves to archive Usenet FAQs as: ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/faqs/* with the asterisk representing the archive name at the top of the FAQ. In fact, by popular consensus, acceptance for such archiving has come to be a minimum standard of FAQ quality. Any other site may seek to accomplish the same end. Several sites mirror some or all of the MIT site. To be archived at MIT, the FAQ must satisfy many technical niceties. Most of the check is by digital code, with minimal human intervention. The maintainer of a FAQ that passes the digital and human screening typically posts it to news.answers and to the various *.answers groups that are in the same hierarchies as the newsgroups in which the FAQ appears. Section 1: History ----------------- 1.0. What is NWU? ----------------- The National Writers Union is the labor union for freelance writers. It is Local 1981 of the United Automobile Workers (UAW), a member of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL/CIO). ------------------------------------------------------------- 1.1. If you're a UAW local, why don't you call yourselves the Local Writers Union? ------------------------------------------------------------- Beginning in 1979, _Nation_ magazine hosted national writers conferences at different U.S. cities. Hoping to found a writers' union, the participants at two of the conferences -- in New York, sometimes called "the publishing capital of the world," and in San Francisco -- set up organizing committees in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Washington D.C. and several other major U.S. centers. In 1981, those committees sent delegates to the convention that founded the NWU. Each committee with a delegate became an NWU local. Later, writers in other geographical areas organized their own locals. Writers remote from their colleagues organized the At-Large Local, which is the only NWU local that seeks to grow smaller. When At-Large members find that their neighbors are also NWU members, they form their own geographical local, with blessings and assistance from the At-Large officers. We now have nineteen locals. The number grows faster than we can write FAQs. Our members now number about 7200. They live in every part of the U.S. and in 35 other countries. The international members are either emigrated Americans or writers who have contracts with U.S. publishers. Therefore we are truly the *National* Writers Union. ---------------------------------------- 1.1.1. Exactly when was the NWU founded? ---------------------------------------- We celebrate our anniversary on November 19. The year, of course, is our UAW local number: 1981. ----------------------------------------------------- 1.2. How can the NWU both have locals and be a local? ----------------------------------------------------- The NWU locals elect Delegates to convene at the annual NWU Assembly. The 1989 Delegates Assembly voted to affiliate with the United Automobile Workers after considering offers from two other historic U.S. unions. We did that to gain the labor-union benefits that the UAW fought hard to achieve for most of the 20th century; the UAW took us to gain strength through solidarity. The UAW is a federation of locals, so we had to become a UAW local, even though we're a national union. Taking the year of our founding, we became UAW Local 1981. So the rest of the world sees us as a single local. But, what's in a word (besides the writer's tool of the trade)? Internally, we have maintained our federal structure: national officers and staff, with bicoastal offices; and at least nineteen independent locals (okay, call them "units" or "sublocals"), each with its own officers and staff. --------END PART 1/4--------CONTINUED IN PART 2-------- User Contributions: |
Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: