Abbreviation | NWU |
---|---|
Formation | 19 November 1981 |
Type | Trade union |
Purpose | To defend the rights of and improve the economic and working conditions for all writers |
Region | United States |
Parent organization | International Federation of Journalists |
Website | nwu |
National Writers Union (NWU), founded on 19 November 1981, is the trade union in the United States for freelance and contract writers: journalists, book and short fiction authors, business and technical writers, web content providers and poets. Organized into 17 local chapters nationwide, it had been Local 1981 of the United Automobile Workers, AFL–CIO since merging with them in 1992. On 11 May 2020, the NWU disaffiliated with the UAW. [1]
NWU is affiliated with the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the International Authors Forum (IAF), and the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations (IFRRO). [2] [3]
The NWU seeks to defend the rights of, and improve the economic and working conditions for, all writers. It offers advocacy, contract advice, grievance assistance, a job hotline, member education, press passes for qualified members, writer alerts and warnings, and access to group rate health and dental insurance (in certain geographic areas). The union also issues various publications and an irregular journal called American Writer.
Ultimate power in the NWU rests in the biennial Delegate Assembly (DA), subject to the provisions of the UAW's constitution. Delegates are elected to the assembly by local chapters and serve a term of two years. Each chapter is allocated a number of delegates according to the size of its membership. The DA sets over-all union strategy and policy, charters new locals, and establishes national working bodies that carry out union activities. Delegates are unpaid volunteers.
The National Executive Committee (NEC) consists of 11 officers directly elected by the membership. The NEC administers the union between meetings of the National Executive Board (NEB), oversees union staff, initiates new union activities, and implements strategies, campaigns, projects, and policies adopted by the Delegate Assembly.
The President is paid a full-time salary and the Vice presidents and Financial Secretary/Treasurer are paid part-time salaries. (The question of salaries is the subject of perennial debate within the NWU.)
There is a National Executive Board (NEB), consisting of the 11 officers of the National Executive Committee plus the chairs of the 17 local chapters. The NEB meets annually to approve the annual budget and to review the implementation of policies adopted by the Delegate Assembly.
Contested elections for the National Executive Committee officers have occasionally been the subject of great controversy within the NWU, and a considerable level of acrimony has inevitably developed. In particular, during one re-election attempt, a president was charged with using union funds to promote his campaign. The charge went to the US Department of Labor, but the department refused to hear the case after Lowell Peterson, a United Auto Workers lawyer, insisted that Federal labor law did not apply to the Writers Union. Despite its name, wrote Peterson, on behalf of the NWU and President Jonathan Tasini, the union was in fact not legally a "labor organization," since its members are freelancers. Peterson's position was felt by many members to undermine two decades of work in establishing the NWU as writers' legitimate bargaining representative under Federal labor law. [4]
The best-known activity of the NWU is probably the 2001 victory in Tasini v. Times , in which the United States Supreme Court in a decisive 7–2 ruling affirmed the copyright privileges of freelance writers whose works were originally published in periodicals and then licensed by the publishers to electronic databases without explicit permission of, or compensation to, the writers. [5]
In 2008, NWU joined over 60 other art licensing businesses (including the Artists Rights Society, Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, Illustrator's Partnership of America, Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, the Stock Artists Alliance, and the Advertising Photographers of America, among others) in opposing both The Orphan Works Act of 2008 and The Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008. [6] Known collectively as "Artists United Against the U.S. Orphan Works Acts," the diverse organizations joined forces to oppose the bills, which the groups believe "permits, and even encourages, wide-scale infringements while depriving creators of protections currently available under the Copyright Act." [6]
In 2017, the NWU sued Ebony magazine for $200,000 on behalf of writers who were owed money. [7] The suit was settled with writers being paid $74,000. [8]
In February 2019, the NWU published a statement by a number of author organizations regarding the Internet Archive's Open Library project. The NWU was concerned that freely distributing copies of authors' works violated the protections that those authors get from copyright laws. [9] The statement called for "a dialogue among writers, authors, publishers, and librarians on how to enable and create the digital libraries we all want, in ways that fully respect authors’ rights" [10]
The Freelance Solidarity Project was organized by NWU in September 2019 with the aim of organizing freelance, permalance, staff, and contract workers. [11] FSP is overseen by a twelve-member committee that aims to set industry wide standards for freelancers. [12]
Freelance, freelancer, or freelance worker, are terms commonly used for a person who is self-employed and not necessarily committed to a particular employer long-term. Freelance workers are sometimes represented by a company or a temporary agency that resells freelance labor to clients; others work independently or use professional associations or websites to get work.
An orphan work is a copyright-protected work for which rightsholders are positively indeterminate or uncontactable. Sometimes the names of the originators or rightsholders are known, yet it is impossible to contact them because additional details cannot be found. A work can become orphaned through rightsholders being unaware of their holding, or by their demise and establishing inheritance has proved impracticable. In other cases, comprehensively diligent research fails to determine any authors, creators or originators for a work. Since 1989, the amount of orphan works in the United States has increased dramatically since some works are published anonymously, assignments of rights are not required to be disclosed publicly, and registration is optional and, thus, many works' statuses with respect to who holds which rights remain unknown to the public even when those rights are being actively exploited by authors or other rightsholders.
The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), is an independent democratic rank-and-file labor union representing workers in both the private and public sectors across the United States.
New York Times Co. v. Tasini, 533 U.S. 483 (2001), is a leading decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of copyright in the contents of a newspaper database. It held that The New York Times, in licensing back issues of the newspaper for inclusion in electronic databases such as LexisNexis, could not license the works of freelance journalists contained in the newspapers.
Jonathan Bernard Yoav Tasini is an American political strategist, organizer, activist, commentator and writer, primarily focusing his energies on the topics of work, labor and the economy. On June 11, 2009, he announced that he would challenge New York U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in the Democratic primary for the 2010 U.S. Senate special election in New York. However, Tasini later decided to run instead for a seat in the House of Representatives in 2010.
The Authors Guild is America's oldest and largest professional organization for writers and provides advocacy on issues of free expression and copyright protection. Since its founding in 1912 as the Authors League of America, it has counted among its board members notable authors of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including numerous winners of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards. It has over 9,000 members, who receive free legal advice and guidance on contracts with publishers as well as insurance services and assistance with subsidiary licensing and royalties.
Open Library is an online project intended to create "one web page for every book ever published". Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Malamud, Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization. It has been funded in part by grants from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation. Open Library provides online digital copies in multiple formats, created from images of many public domain, out-of-print, and in-print books.
Robertson v Thomson Corp, [2006] 2 S.C.R. 363 , 2006 SCC 43 is a 2006 Supreme Court of Canada decision on the ownership of copyright in published text that are stored in databases. The ruling held that though a newspaper held the copyright in the collection and the arrangement of freelance articles and in its newspaper, it could not publish the articles within a database. Publication within the database would remove the articles from the context of the collective work and therefore their publication as such was not within the rights held by the newspaper.
The American Society of Media Photographers, abbreviated ASMP, is a professional association of imaging professionals, including photojournalists, architectural, underwater, food/culinary and advertising photographers as well as video/film makers and other specialists. Its members are primarily those who create images for publications, though many cross over into wedding and portrait photography.
The Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of trade union women affiliated with the AFL-CIO. The CLUW is a bridging organization that seeks to create connections between the feminist movement and the labor movement in the United States. The organization works towards overcoming past constraints and conflicts in pursuance of relationship improvement between those movements and thus enabling broad coalitions. The CLUW is the only national organization solely for women union members and is one of six constituency groups within the AFL-CIO. It is based in the headquarters of the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C. CLUW pursues by four goals: to bring women into union leadership, to organise unorganized women workers, to bring women's issues onto the labor agenda, and to involve women into political action.
Greenberg v. National Geographic was a copyright lawsuit regarding image use and republication rights of National Geographic Society to their magazine in electronic form.
The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, usually known as the Berne Convention, was an international assembly held in 1886 in the Swiss city of Bern by ten European countries with the goal to agree on a set of legal principles for the protection of original work. They drafted and adopted a multi-party contract containing agreements for a uniform, crossing border system that became known under the same name. Its rules have been updated many times since then. The treaty provides authors, musicians, poets, painters, and other creators with the means to control how their works are used, by whom, and on what terms. In some jurisdictions these type of rights are being referred to as copyright.
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Authors Guild v. Google 721 F.3d 132 was a copyright case heard in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and on appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit between 2005 and 2015. The case concerned fair use in copyright law and the transformation of printed copyrighted books into an online searchable database through scanning and digitization. The case centered on the legality of the Google Book Search Library Partner project that had been launched in 2003.
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