Yesterday, workers at the University of Chicago Press announced a plan to unionize. As Publishers Weekly reported, the UCP Workers Guild would be the first union in the nonprofit publisher’s 130-year history. But they wouldn’t be lonely, in this timeline.
For just last week, we got wind that workers at Hachette Book Group—one of the ultra-powerful “Big Five” publishing houses—have also moved to unionize.
The week before that, a similar effort advanced at Catapult Books. And before that, it was the American Library Association.
All of this is thrilling news for the literary laborer. But we may wonder at the timing. Why so many union drives now?
The first answer shouldn’t shock you. Though the whole world is hurting, wages in publishing have been notoriously stagnant for decades. We’ve been seeing regular discourse cycles about the industry’s low salaries since the 80s—sometime around the end of Tina Brown’s three hour business lunch.
