I’m grateful to Shannan Clark, the foremost historian of labor in American culture industries, for agreeing to provide background on recent developments at HarperCollins, Duke University Press, and Oxford University Press. Here’s his guest post.
The most comprehensive survey to date of salaries and conditions in New York book publishing offered few surprises, but the sheer accumulation of data starkly illuminated the exploitation of the industry’s workforce. Even though women accounted for an overwhelming majority of white-collar employees in publishing, they encountered pervasive discrimination with regards to pay and career advancement. Men in the industry on average received salaries that were 80% greater than those of women. Fully 35% of the questionnaire respondents reported earning salaries that were below what the State Department of Labor had calculated was the minimum subsistence income for a single woman living in New York City.
A report summarizing the survey’s findings concluded that “women in book publishing are seldom given jobs as heads of departments although they frequently advance to positions of editorial assistant or assistant in publicity, promotion, advertising, or production.” Merit pay in the form of bonuses, the survey indicated, tended to be dispensed in a capricious manner by supervisors, and was usually inadequate even when it was available. Benefits in the industry were likewise meager.
While much of what the survey revealed would seem all too familiar to workers in book publishing today, it was actually conducted during the last months of 1939 by the Book and Magazine Guild, the most important early labor union for workers employed in the industry. Established in 1935, the Book and Magazine Guild, like many of the unions for culture workers that emerged during the Great Depression and its aftermath, began as a strident professional advocacy group that gradually evolved into an organization that pursued collective bargaining under the terms of the recently passed National Labor Relations Act. In 1937, the Guild formally became Local 18 of the United Office and Professional Workers of America (UOPWA), a national union affiliated with the upstart Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) that had a wide jurisdiction to organize the growing white-collar workforce of the mid-twentieth century United States.
By the time it released the findings of its survey in early 1940, the Book and Magazine Guild had negotiated contracts for editorial department employees at renowned mid-twentieth century publishing houses such as Random House, Knopf, and Viking that boosted weekly pay by more than 20%, instituted well-defined job classifications, eliminated Saturday work (a common practice in the industry at the time), and implemented grievance procedures. By the mid-1940s, the Guild pushed for additional contract terms to prohibit discrimination in hiring and promotion on the basis of race or gender. In addition, beginning in 1941, when former editorial assistant Jane Benedict became president of the Guild, the union was led by women.
Although major commercial publishers enjoyed booming sales and substantial profits during the prosperous decades that followed the Second World War, conditions for the bulk of the industry’s workers declined relative to other white-collar workers in the years following the Guild’s demise—a casualty of McCarthyite frenzy that left workers in most of the publishing houses it had organized without union representation. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, second-wave feminists, advocates for racial equality and minority empowerment, and partisans of various New Left currents, including opponents of US imperialist aggression in the Vietnam War, initiated a new phase of workplace organizing throughout the culture industries. They revitalized many of the long-stagnant unions that had survived the onslaught of the early Cold War and sparked the first new organizing drives in book publishing since the 1940s.
At Harper and Row, feminists transformed their ineffective employee association into a fiercely militant union that struck successfully for a greatly improved contract in 1974 and then subsequently joined Distributive Workers District 65, a renegade union on the left of the American labor movement, the following year. Workers at New Press and Feminist Press formed new unions, which remain units within UAW Local 2110 today. The efforts of the Distributive Workers and District 65 to organize throughout higher education during the 1970s also stimulated some initial interest in unionization among employees of some university presses.
In recent years, workers in publishing have been affected by the general crisis of contemporary culture and knowledge production, but they have also been influenced by the new wave of labor activism. At HarperCollins, unionists not only demanded substantial raises to offset the surging cost of living, but also measures to promote greater staff diversity as well as enhanced union security. After months of escalating actions during 2022 failed to resolve a deadlock in contract negotiations, 250 members of UAW Local 2110 walked out on an unlimited strike in November. They picketed through much of the winter before finally ratifying a new agreement in February 2023. Under the deal, any employee who took advantage of a provision for guaranteed overtime work would earn no less than $52,660 a year. While this new salary minimum raised the bar for commercial publishing in New York, and set a standard that employees at other presses could aim for, it nonetheless remained inadequate given the city’s skyrocketing rents.
Renewed interest in union organizing has also been evident recently at university and nonprofit presses. At Duke University Press, with about 70 employees, proponents of unionization narrowly won an NLRB representation election in May 2021. Although the university challenged the legitimacy of the balloting, the NLRB finally certified the union in August 2022. Due to further management obstinance, it has taken the DUP Workers Union, a unit of the News Guild, two years to negotiate its first contract.
Employees of Oxford University Press in New York also began organizing in 2021. Management at the press did not initially seek to block recognition of the OUP Guild (also a News Guild affiliate) and it acceded readily to the union’s demand for a liberal continuation of remote work arrangements introduced at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic—which, in turn, has enabled the press to relocate to a much smaller space in midtown Manhattan.
However, Oxford management has taken a hard line on a number of critical economic issues, including minimum salaries, cost-of-living adjustments, protection of the bargaining unit’s jurisdiction over work, and severance. After nearly two years of largely fruitless negotiations, in May 2024 the OUP Guild filed multiple unfair labor practice charges against management. On June 18, the day that top executives arrived from the UK to try to force acceptance of the publisher’s contract terms, the union staged a one-day strike, the first ever at the press. As of this writing there is still no contract settlement.
Even as the recent strike at HarperCollins and organizing drives at Duke University Press and Oxford University Press demonstrate publishers’ continued resistance to unions, the continued deterioration of working conditions all but ensures that workers at more and more presses will organize in pursuit of collective bargaining. The prospects may look daunting at this juncture, but there is no way forward for publishing without the editors and other workers whose labor makes books possible coming together to secure greater autonomy over their own creative tasks and more democratic control over the productive process as a whole. As more publishing workers join in these efforts, they build on a legacy of organizing that stretches back for nearly a century.
Shannan Clark is an Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University and a proud member of American Federation of Teachers Local 1904. He is also the author of The Making of the American Creative Class: New York’s Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2021).