William Butler Yeats, suffused with Celtic twilight, signed his cheques ‘yours sincerely, W.B. Yeats’.

With these examples in mind I tossed up whether to cash or frame a cheque for a book review in The Age. Beneath the signature was a rubber stamp on behalf of the receivers for David Syme.

Although like Yeats – and all writers – my mind is preoccupied with spiritual questions, I could not help noticing that the payment had fallen from $200 to $150. Was this reduction an editorial hint that I had to write better? Or was it a sign of tougher times ahead?

I have a suspicion that several of these columns during 1991 will be about filthy lucre. Malcolm Cowley pointed out that fees and royalties were as much a part of the writer’s trade as punctuation.

Faced with a run of bills from oculists, ophthalmologists, and opticians, I paid the cheque into my account before further disasters could overtake the Fairfax dynasty.

Since coming to accept that I am less likely than ever to see socialism in my lifetime, I have been taking delight in the discomfiting of capitalists. Their bankruptcies provide more pleasure than their imprisonment because they would much rather lose a couple of years of their lives than be deprived of their millions.

And yet my historical knowledge keeps reminding me that the big boys would have squirreled away funds. Equally, I accept that those who had not benefited from the boom of the 1980s would now be the ones to pay for entrepreneurial excesses.

When Bond goes bust, it is the cleaners in the Bond Tower who will not be able to meet their mortgage payments. When Herscu goes to prison, it is the children of his construction workers who will have to drop out of school.

And so it is with the collapse of the media empires. Skase and Cosser might be deprived of their licences but it is writers who will lose their regular incomes.

Consider the following imagined yet probable scenario for a sacked screen-writer. During the 1980s, she has put together a respectable income from mini-series scripts for commercial television companies. Late in 1990 she retrieves the draft of a novel that had been put aside in 1981. Armed with her list of drama credits, her thoughts return to the Literature Board. Her application helps to double the number of claims received during 1991.

Working with her for the previous eighteen months had been a recent Swinburne graduate. He adjusts his sights downward and lets it be known that he is willing to do casual work at SBS, thereby adding to the squeeze on the writers already surviving on earnings from polishing subtitles.

Because their future employment depends on keeping their names before the industry, they both accept offers to appear unpaid on a 2MMM radio programme discussing popular culture.

Hence, the effects of their unemployment will trickle down to reduce the prospects of anyone who puts pen to paper, poets and reviewers as much as scriptwriters or sub­editors.

Longer-term problems await authors hoping to publish the books to which they have been devoting their efforts. Accountants are telling editors to accept no manuscripts for the next twelve to eighteen months. Publishers are writing escape clauses into contracts to let them delay publication if the economy does not pick up until 1992. Who wants to be remaindered before Christmas?

On top of the financial crisis in the mass media industry, opportunities to scratch for a living will be curtailed by the recession throughout the Australian economy. AMPOL has withdrawn as sponsor of the Walkeley Awards for journalism, citing the company’s economic problems as the cause.

Because publishing houses have been bought by the conglomerates, even firms that had run a tight and profitable operation can be dragged under by the corporate disasters of their controlling companies. If Mass Murdoch misses an interest payment, what happens to Collins/A&R?

Reduced advertising revenues for newspapers and magazines will mean fewer pages to fill with freelance material. There will be fewer book pages for reviews and promotional interviews.

When this drying-up of sources of income coincides with an over­supply of writers, one result must be falling real rates of return to grub street.

If unionised workers are willing to give up some of their benefits in order to hold on to their jobs, what chance is there of writers holding the line against take-it-or-leave-it offers?

The Australian Journalists Association has never shed its ambivalent attitude towards freelancers. Instead of ensuring from the start that all newspaper work had to be paid for properly, there lingered inside the AJA some hope that starvation rates for freelancers would drive them out of the industry.

In the past, the Writers Guild has defended the conditions of screen-writers, but there has never been an industrial organisation for print authors. For the effect that it has, The Australian Society of Authors could just as well be called the Australian Scabs Association or the Australian Society of Amateurs.

The Screen Writers Guild used to publish a list of production companies that violated acceptable conditions. The ASA could do the same along with the names of its council members who write for less than approved rates.

After almost twenty years of ASA membership, I unintentionally failed to pay my 1990 dues. When I got a reminder, I decided that its leadership’s behaviour over the Mt Isa letter and the importing of books had so denigrated the writing profession that I would sit on my money for a bit longer.

Unions succeed when there are large enough concentrations of employees to prevent the bosses taking advantage of scab labour. Authors produce in near isolation. The daily exchanges that can create solidarity do not exist.

Moreover, many authors place more value on seeing their names in print than on any monetary return. This is understandable even for professionals because publicity is one way of attracting financially satisfactory offers.

Authors with guaranteed incomes from teaching or some other profession often scab because they feel guilty about taking any money at all. That reticence makes good sense in relation to little magazines but not for media corporations.

Academics and politicians should remind themselves that they are scabbing when they write for newspapers at less than $300 for 1000 words of unresearched material.

Private sector pressure to maximise profit by cutting costs is not the only problem. Bureaucrats with tenure and superannuation easily forget that not everyone has a fortnightly salary paid into their bank accounts.

The National Library of Australia is offering less than half the standard AJA rates for researched articles in its new quarterly Voices to appear from March. When taxed about this offer, the editor replied that the budget was tight.

Would the editor’s union allow him to work for forty per cent of his salary? Will the Library’s printer accept forty percent of his account? No. And neither should any author.

It’s not only the niggardliness of the Library’s offer that is offensive. It is – as Jack Thompson put it in Sunday Too Far Away – the bloody insult.

Unionisation of Australia’s writers and authors is unlikely to occur during the difficult times immediately ahead. And yet, many of our most militant unions arose out of the experiences of depression, so we should prepare for what might be possible later this decade.

With no union to protect me, I suppose I will eventually forward my back membership fees to the Society of Authors – but only for the reason given by that bloke in Henry Lawson’s verse who had been union for forty years. I’m too middle-aged to rat.