Publishers' working conditions are your reading conditions
A possible strike at Oxford University Press
This week labor activity at Oxford University Press received attention in Publishers Weekly and (alongside unionization efforts at Barnes & Noble) in LitHub. Oxford is an enormous publisher with workers around the world; the current actions involve its large New York office, where 150 workers are represented by News Guild TNG/CWA 31222.
And Oxford’s geographic reach is one of the issues at play in the dispute, since workers allege the company is filling jobs that had been based in the US with cheaper positions overseas. That impulse is consistent with the move I’ve written about previously in this space, where AI and reliance on freelancers have recently been mobilized to control publishing’s labor costs. Luis Espinosa is quoted in Publishers Weekly: “OUP has said that they are a global company and can, in essence, do what they want. But that is not how the law in the US works, which offers us protections.” Plans for a strike are reportedly underway.
Why care about organized labor in the publishing industry, beyond a general commitment to progressive values (shared by many readers of this newsletter, presumably) and a hope that workers across the board can live in dignity? One point I return to is the fate of the humanities, since these jobs tend ordinarily to be performed by broadly educated liberal arts grads. If you’re thinking about the future of liberal arts education, then I believe it’s helpful to think about how to keep book publishing from going into freefall like, say, newspaper and magazine publishing.
Beyond that, I think that if you write or even just read books, you have skin in this game. I’ll return the mic to Oxford’s workers, who said on twitter: “The workload is insane. I know my entire team feels this way. I’m constantly apologizing to authors . . . not for an actual mistake or failing on my part, but for the way the company is structured. Without an adequately staffed team, we will always be far behind.”
I think that if you want better books, then it’s imperative to support improved working conditions and better pay for publishing workers. Every complaint about a sloppy, rushed, poorly published book could be flipped and turned into a call to support better publishing—and that starts with listening to the workers who make books as they articulate their needs.
For historical perspective on labor organizing in creative fields like publishing, I’ll close with a link to Shannan Clark’s book The Making of the American Creative Class: New York's Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism (published, as it happens, by Oxford).
I would also recommend a new book on the modern labor movement by Hamilton Nolan, “The Hammer.” https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/173403905