Hello! Welcome to Words About Work.
Through multimedia original reporting, essays, commentary, personal stories and a podcast, this newsletter explores a number of questions about work in its many forms:
What does it mean to work for a living in the U.S.? What does it mean to work for a better life? To organize for a better political reality? A better future? To organize your shop, your industry, or your country? What does it mean to show up for your neighbors physically, emotionally, spiritually?
This newsletter won't have all the answers, but it's my hope that each article, photo essay, and podcast episode helps folks come to a better understanding of their place in this current moment and gain a few extra moments of inspiration while we're at it.
Who Am I?
My name is Mel Buer, and I am a multimedia journalist and scholar 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 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?
Podcasting, newsletter writing, weekly news digest curation, reporting—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 the journalism industry contracts further and the national news desert widens, it's gonna take some resources to keep things rolling. If you'd like to support me in that endeavor, then I've set up subscription tiers for the newsletter. Every paid subscription quite literally helps me pay my bills and gives me the ability to keep working on this thing.
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.