Among the goals of "a real union" of writers, Whyte recommends:
- more pay for writers -- a demand he supports with detailed data on how low writers' incomes are. He doesn't mention that all his data on the earnings of Canadian writers seem to come from surveys commissioned and paid for by the Writers' Union of Canada, which actually has been working at this matter for many decades;
- increasing payments to writers from Public Lending Right. Whyte doesn't mention that after decades of advocacy by Canadian writers, it was the sustained lobbying of the Writers' Union that brought PLR into being in 1987, or that more recent lobbying by the union led to recent and significant increases in PLR funding. More? Sure, but likely to come along the same way.
- better contract terms for writers. Whyte seems unaware of the model trade book contract laboriously developed and promoted by the Writers' Union, the contract advising service it has always offered its members and other writers, the legal advice it provides, the grievance process it runs, the Minimum Terms Agreements negotiations it sought to have with publishers, the random royalty audits of publishers' royalty statements it undertook. It's true that many of these initiatives, particularly bargaining with publishers over money and rights, have had limited success (which may be why the Union makes more noise about its many successes in changing the writing-and-publishing policies and practices of governments and public agencies). The failure to unionize publishing contracts was mostly due, I can testify, to the granite-hard opposition marshalled by virtually every publisher large and small, foreign and Canadian, and by their well-heeled organizations. Lack of success in this area is because it is hard, not because it has not previously been thought of or fought for .
- union activity rather than employment of agents. Whyte mocks Canadian writers for both having both a union and employing agents. Historically, the seemingly endless impossibility of achieving contract reform coincided with and doubtless spurred the rise of literary agency in Canada, which indeed has benefited writers much more than Whyte, a publisher as well as a writer, can see, and which still leaves much scope for union activity in areas which agents do not address.
Surprisingly, Whyte fails even to note the need for a union-run collective licensing agency to manage and licence creators' reprography rights (ie, copying both digital and xerographic) -- which ought be another significant source of Canadian writers' incomes. The Writers' Union of Canada campaigned for collective licensing from its first moments, and was instrumental in bringing into being the Canadian legislation for collective licensing in the 1980s -- despite immense opposition from the education sector and much apathy in the publishing community. Regrettably, the copyright collective Access Copyright has since been captured by publishers, so that a handful of foreign-owned educational publishers control how -- and how much -- income collected on creators' behalf actually reaches creators. It seems to be as a result of that capture that legislators and judges, while they continue to endorse the fairness of collective licensing in principle, have been consistently reluctant to give the existing collective the tools necessary to allow it to work in practice.
Whyte does offer one rather original suggestion: a campaign to abuse librarians and cultural bureaucrats for their job security and high salaries. I think he's right to suggest the real Writers' Union has never engaged in that. The union has, however, engaged constantly in negotiation with those same libraries and bureaucrats to secure benefits for writers -- a form of collective action which does seem more directly useful to writers than abuse and barrier-building.
Still most of Whyte's other proposals do have quite a lot of appeal to writers. He goes wrong, I think, only when he suggests the existing writers' organizations would call them "impractical, unworkable, untested, ridiculous." More likely, they might reply, it's just difficult, given the forces lined up against them, particularly in the publishing sector.
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| One very early Writers' Union gathering |
