Welcome to Words About Work
What is Words About Work?
Words About Work is a newsletter that tries to answer the question: “What does it mean to work for a living in the United States?”
This newsletter focuses on providing weekly digests of U.S. labor news, as well as other original news, essays, commentary, and personal stories.
Who Am I?
My name is Mel Buer, and I am a writer, videographer, and photographer based in Los Angeles, California. I focus most of my attention on the labor movement, community organizing, protests, mutual aid, and other forms of movement building in the US and beyond our borders. I am a union member and rank-and-file organizer, and I care a whole hell of a lot about the movement and the people in it. I like to listen to and then tell stories about ordinary working class people doing extraordinary things. I hope you like to read them as much as I like tellin' them.
Why Support Words About Work?
Journalism, newsletter writing, weekly news digest curation--all of these things take time and resources. Those of you who support their favorite writers certainly know this about the profession, but I suppose it bears repeating. This newsletter is no different; this is now my full-time project. As the newsletter expands, more work will go into my writing here.
I won't ever paywall my weekly labor news digests, because I believe that this information should be freely disseminated, especially in the current (fascist) climate. From my perspective, it's important that we stay abreast of the state of the struggle here in the US, particularly in my neck of the woods within the labor movement.
However, as I expand this newsletter to include more labor stories, more book reviews and other explorations, more personal essays and even a podcast(!), it's gonna take some resources to keep it rolling. If you'd like to support me in that endeavor, then I've set up subscription tiers for the newsletter/website.
If you don't want to do anything but drop a donation in a tip jar, then feel free to buy me a coffee by clicking the button below.
A pledge to you, my readers, about AI
As the world continues to be swallowed whole by the menace of AI chatbots, I felt it was important to write a bit about what, if any, AI may be used in service of this publication.
While I may use AI to help generate transcriptions of the interviews I conduct with my sources (TapeACall transcribes recordings, for example), those generated transcripts are combed through multiple times before I select quotes for publication. I often listen to recorded interviews multiple times before and after they are transcribed, and you can be sure that the quotes included in any original written piece on this website have been thoroughly vetted against the recording. However, given the recent news that OpenAI may be using chat transcripts to train their LLMs, there's a likely chance that other companies will do the same--therefore, it's highly likely that I'll be going back to transcribing audio by hand in order to preserve source confidentiality.
That's it. That's all I use any type of "AI" technology for. I do not use AI for research, for writing, for image generation, video generation, or any other item that I publish on my newsletter. I refuse to use it. This newsletter is written by my own hand, using my own brain, and my own training as a journalist, literary scholar, and researcher. AI technology is untested, dangerous, and produces subpar work with such regularity that it's functionally useless. It has also contributed heavily to the decimation of newsrooms across this country, and any newsroom leader who thinks it's the future of journalism is a rube.
This is my pledge to you: if you read this newsletter, you can rest assured that is it written entirely by me. That's a Mel Buer guarantee. ;]
Whichever way you decide to support this publication, I appreciate it immensely. Free, paid, or just idly clicking the links to my posts on my socials--it means so much to me that you're even taking some time to read the work that I put together.
Much love and solidarity,
Mel B.