The publishing labor movement

and some other thoughts on workers' rights

First off, an update: my publisher sent me a statement for Nov. 9 to Dec. 31 for tax purposes, and in those seven weeks, I sold 273 copies of People Along the Sand (260 print books, 13 ebooks). I’m happy with that. If I can break 500 or even inch up toward 1000 throughout 2022, I’d consider the publication a success. With all the emphasis on blockbusters, it’s easy to forget that lower sales of good books are the lifeblood of the industry. And I’m in good company: in his Paris Review interview, Gabriel García Márquez says none of his books sold over 700 copies until he published A Hundred Years of Solitude.

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Back in 2012, a few months after I started my job as a project editor at Perseus Books Group in Colorado, I had dinner with an old friend in Portland. When she learned my salary ($35K/yr), she said the workers at my company should unionize to try to increase wages. She’s always been involved in her union as a public school teacher, and I just thought it the kind of thing she says. Right before I landed the Perseus position, I’d been substitute teaching and working for $8/hr at a grocery co-op in West Virginia, so the salary seemed OK to me. Plus, although my sister as a nurse was and is in a union, and my grandpa who worked a paper mill had been in a union (and my mom has said that the union was the reason her family rose to the middle class), I didn’t think unions applied to jobs I’d held. Or rather: if the union was there, I would have joined it, but forming a union was beyond my imagination.

Most of my life I’ve had a take-what-I-can-get attitude toward jobs. My personality and background play a role in this, as well as my choice to be an artist. I knew I’d always have a day job going into this life as a writer, and I didn’t figure they’d be very high-paying or glamorous. And it’s possible I used to subconsciously believe that because I chose to be an artist, I deserved only to scrape by, even when working forty hours a week—which is a mindset I’m grateful I’ve discarded. Every single person deserves a living wage, especially in the United States, the richest country on earth.

Also, my old friend at dinner was correct: in Boulder, Colorado, $35K doesn’t go as far as it would have in West Virginia, and if I’d had a kid or two the money would have gone faster. Publishing pay, although usually better than working in a grocery store and many other service jobs, isn’t sustainable for many professionals long-term.

I was glad to learn that some book companies have been unionizing. For bookstores: Powell’s Books in Portland, Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle, and most recently Politics and Prose in DC. For publishing companies: Verso Books as well as Oxford University Press just formed a union last year, and Duke University Press just formed a union this year, to name a few.

If I went back in time, with the views I have now, I probably still wouldn’t try to unionize Perseus—the situation didn’t seem dire enough there, and I’m ultimately an artist, not an organizer—but I might have started some kind of organizing conversation among coworkers at the public library where I worked as an on-call library assistant from 2016 to 2019.

I love public libraries—but the system for some “on-call library assistants” is messed up. Because I was primarily freelance editing, I was OK working at the library only two full days a week, then whenever I was called in, but the majority of on-calls wanted full-time work, and had to work at several different libraries to receive that.

I understand that small or new or niche businesses sometimes need to offer lower wages, and I get that greed propels it for larger corporations, but I don’t understand how this system benefits the libraries. They were probably training five new people every six to twelve months, and training/worker turnover is expensive.

The ten or so on-call library assistants at my old job processed and shelved 30,000 to 40,000 books each month at just one library. If workers from the whole county did unionize and go on strike, they’d literary shut down all the libraries. While I worked there, I didn’t acknowledge this power we had.

I was thinking of this recently because 1) I have a better job now, 2) I went to visit my old library and chatted with an on-call library assistant who was working six days a week at three different libraries, then became angry at the system again, and 3) several of the strikes over the past year, including at John Deere and Kellogg’s, were fighting a similar two-tier system. John Deere, despite having record profits throughout the pandemic, gave the old-timers benefits and a pension, and the new-timers neither. The old-timers stood up for the new-timers, instigating a strike for them.

I couldn’t imagine the full-time staff at the library doing that for the on-calls—not that I blame them; the on-calls aren’t part of the union and none of this was even in my own imagination until recently. True, for the past decade or so, I’ve followed minimum wage increases closely—needless to say, select states and cities are doing much better than the feds at increasing it—but I used to not imagine that workers deserved an increase beyond the bare minimum. I think I trusted that many of these organizations were paying workers what they could afford—but with huge university endowments or large corporate profits, that isn’t often the case.

I’m late to the labor party, but glad I’m at it now. If you don’t set the bar high, some people will take advantage and lower it to the ground. If you’re interested in workers’ rights, check out the accurate and informative PNW Labor Press magazine. Also, the informal antiwork space on Reddit has ballooned over the pandemic: so many low-wage workers have started to demand more; I sometimes go on there to cheer them on.