I have friends in this industry, and it's outrageous what they have to endure. As a software engineer, it's impossible to understand.
There are literally 100 people gunning for your role at any time. You're infinitely replaceable, so they can treat you however they want. These folks are living in NYC on a wage that's barely liveable in Omaha. Not to mention a culture of abuse and overwork that eats people alive.
They are in a bad situation, but isn’t the problem exactly what you said? Too many people vying for these jobs? What incentive do publishers have to pay better, especially as their own market declines? Not trying to denigrate the strikers at all.
The strike is attempting to lower the supply of labor, in order to force the buyer to pay more.
However, for a seller to be able to negotiate a higher price from the buyer, the buyer has to be able to pay. And HarperCollins’ business is not exactly raking it in.
Presumably the employer wants/needs a staff. If they didn't they'd have gone contractor-only a long time ago.
The immediate incentive is that the staff they want/need isn't doing the thing.
A strike is not a protest.
It's a negotiating tactic when you have much else leverage than your ability to work.
Realistically scabs/contractors might lessen the strike's leverage. The strike may push the publisher to go "staff-less".
Larger organized labor might be able to hold Harpers to account for working around the strike -- like if contractors were organized, if scabbing made it hard to get hired elsewhere. But that's not where labor is at currently.
> Realistically scabs/contractors might lessen the strike's leverage. The strike may push the publisher to go "staff-less".
Seems inevitable to me. The publishers will sell their NYC real estate for a one-time bonanza, strip down to a skeleton crew of employees, and contract out most work. Quality will dip far below that of the last 100 years, and few will care. It was a golden age of publishing but I don’t think it’s remotely sustainable.
> There are literally 100 people gunning for your role at any time.
Doesn't this fact make a strike rather ineffective? If the labor is a hot commodity then what pressure does striking put on the
company outside of some publicity?
Working conditions are awful enough that companies can afford a high turnover rate, but can't efficiently fill too many positions at once.
If people quit two or three at a time, management just redistributes work around, with extra pressure to deliver.
However, if everyone leaves at once (or goes on strike), there's nobody to redistribute the work to. Even if you could hire replacements on the spot (which you usually can't anyway), you can't just say okay, you're hired, now start working. New hires need company- and department-specific training, they need to coordinate with other people (who would also be fresh hires) and so on.
Modern companies don't run solely on management directions, they also run on an enormous body of practical knowledge and experience which bridges management intention with practical action. Without this, nothing works.
"Infinitely replacement" is a comfortable management myth -- it works only as long as it happens gradually. You can "infinitely replace" each part of a sailing boat, but if you try to infinitely replace all of it at once, everyone just falls into the ocean because at some point in the replacement effort there's no bloody boat. Same here. A 50-people company can afford to replace virtually everyone over the course of one year, as long as it's four fresh hires/month for 12 months. Fifty fresh hire in a single month while also keeping the shop open, on the other hand, is a no-go.
Yes. Not literally everyone is on strike literally all the time -- shifts still get covered, in part because the people who are actually on strike actually want the company they're with to grow, and still want to work there, otherwise they'd quit, rather than go on strike.
Yeah, that's not how the real world works. If the publisher indeed had zero reason to "indulge" the strikers, they would just fire them. They don't because they've left their concerns unaddressed for so long that it's now a large enough proportion of their workforce that firing all of them wouldn't bring about a better, more efficient team, but outright bankruptcy.
Striking is just a form of clarifying the strength of their leverage. It's been going since November because negotiations have been going on since November.
Historically, a labor strike means people walk, at risk of being fired, and don’t work until negotiations are resolved. If anything, if the strikers continue to keep the lights on, the strikers are demonstrating that they’re overpaid.
> Historically, a labor strike means people walk, at risk of being fired, and don’t work until negotiations are resolved.
No, it doesn't, it hasn't worked like that for decades. Most labour organisations have some form of agreement in place as to when and how strikes can be organised, and most of them involve some commitment to at least some continued operation for a period of time. Even when such an agreement is not in place, strikes are initially not complete strikes, because that wouldn't be in the interest of either party. Fully walking out of work right away and bringing the company down would literally bring down the jobs along with it, at which point negotiating payment or working conditions would be meaningless.
Sounds like someone has perverted the notion of a strike in favor of the goals of capitalists. If your argument is honestly what people believe is the polite way to strike, then capitalists have won.
this is false, for this strike as well as others I am familar with
the striking workers are fully withholding their labour. supervisors and contractor scabs are doing all the work—or attempting to—as neither is part of the union
If it isn’t then raise minimum wage and make immigrants pay taxes. I do believe if you work an honest full time job you should be able to live outside of poverty. Does that include a 5k/mo apartment and Starbucks every day?
Strikes are, historically, one of the means through which governments pretty much everywhere (including the US) was pressured to introduce, and then adjust, minimum wage.
(inb4 smug citation needed see, for example, the Lawrence textile strike, and the ensuing consequence in S. Doc. No. 870, 62nd Cong., 2nd Sess., at 9 (1912), reprinted in Serial Set Vol. No. 6170, or really just search for "strike" and "minimum wage" in your favourite library of actual history books)
The invisible hand of the market is, sadly, unable to write bills or increase pay, and since management can't see it -- unsurprising, given that it's invisible, it's right in the name -- they sometimes need to have it spelled it out for them.
I'm not anti strikes or labor unions or whatnot. In fact I'd love to see the minimum wage for individuals with dependents be raised to something most people would think is uncomfortably high and let society deal with the fallout.
Because people deserve a livable wage. If it is a full time job, it needs to be paid good enough to eat, live and have shelter. Everything else is a hobby (and considering another comment, that is even true for some).
It can be useful to model the same thing with different viewpoints for different purposes.
For the purposes of ensuring a healthy, long term society, humans are not only resources.
For the purposes of properly allocating a society’s resources (which is also in the interest of a healthy, long term society), humans’ labor is a resource, which can be shortened to humans as resources.
I briefly lived in SF, wherein the dynamic was similar. Most of us were a paycheck (or less!) away from homelessness. It's "doable" if you're okay with having near-zero room for savings, or covering unexpected expenses, or what have you.
> $45k is not a livable wage anywhere within an hour commute of Manhattan
I think $45k comes out to a take-home of about $2800 per month. I see ads on craigslist for 2-bedroom apartments in Brooklyn in the 2000-3000 range, and 3-bedroom apartments also in Brooklyn in the 3000-4000 range, either of those seem reasonable with a $2800 take-home. Of course it means having roommates.
You don't even necessarily need roommates - I make about this much, and live in a 1 bedroom all to myself in an Outer Borough. Midtown is a 30-minute commute.
But let's reframe the question: "why should a publishing company willingly starve their competent and talented staff, which they force to live in the most expensive city in America?"
So, according to the article, the minimum salary is $45K. Yes it's Manhattan--though you don't need to live in Manhattan to work there. However, I'm not sure I'd characterize a salary which is approaching median US income as "willingly starving."
Because a society full of desperate people is less productive and more expensive to maintain than its alternatives. It's not about deserving, it's just pragmatic.
Sadly, I don't have that citation. It'll take time for data from UBI efforts to accumulate.
Still I believe that more than 75% of human effort is currently spent on zerosum games, keeping the riffraff in their place and jockeying for position among ourselves.
If we could flip that so that 75% was spent on non-zerosum games, we could work half as hard and still have more.
It's not about "should", it's about whether or not the people can compel them to do so.
It's probably in the people's best interest to be a bit less ambitious than "pay for an infinite number of people", since that's unlikely to happen regardless of how compliant the companies are.
Pundits and academics claim the H1B is America's secret weapon, and while it is true that we get some exceptional individuals as a result of brain drain from other nations, in my experience most H1B's are simply a means for a corporation to get cheaper 'office labor' and nothing about these positions are uniquely suited to some skill-set that can't be found domestically.
Graeber calls out publishing (including periodicals) as an industry in which it's nearly impossible to make it, long-term, unless you come from money, precisely because you have to be able to endure years on end of pay too low to live on (on top of college!) before you can get into a position that pays real money. Plus having a degree and network from an expensive private liberal arts school helps a ton with your odds of climbing the ladder. It's one of his examples, in Bullshit Jobs, of how desirable (artistic or pro-social) jobs that also pay a meaningful wage tend to be staffed mostly by the rich—so many people want to be in those fields (see also: non-profits) that wages at the bottom of the pyramid aren't high enough to support someone without other money helping them out, either from family money or a high-earning partner.
Seems quixotic, given that their industry is in a slow, apparently inexorable implosion. Positions like hers have paid poorly since the beginning. The NYC publishing world has long been staffed largely by trust fund kids.
OTOH if I were their employer I would feel ashamed to be paying someone that gifted $45K in Manhattan.
The employers don't care. While they publish Clifford the Big Red Dog, they're also having extramarital affairs and fighting over scraps. [0]
Pisses me off I enabled these guys asshole behaviors while buying books at the elementary school bookfairs. Thank goodness I learnt how to pirate epubs in middle school and was walking distance to a library.
Also, explains why Elaine Benes was working in this industry (and who better to play the role of a trust fund socialite than another trust fund socialite. great actress though - Dreyfus' parts in Seinfeld and Veep were great)
Unfortunately the Manhattan publishing ecosystem has been this way since before even Rupert Murdoch was born. It was always cruelly exploitive for everyone except top-tier authors and employees at the top of the flowchart.
I'm just going to go out on a limb -- unions in a artistic field are very difficult to maintain. There are alternatives to hiring (contract workers), plenty of would-be artists looking for work, now you have the AI competing. Finally, businesses can often do without the "best" art.
Where's the leverage? What theyre asking for is..
> so we walked—forgoing pay to fight for livable wages, codified diversity measures, and union security.
Oh boy...
> livable wages
I haven't seen the exact terms, but "livable wage" is often referred to, but very open ended. I'd never pay a person a "livable wage", I'd pay them fair market rate. Unfortunately, that's the reality. Most of the time, that's livable, but I cannot hire a 5 hour / week maid for a "livable wage", I hire them for the job they do.
This demand will push the company to use more contract labor IMO. There's hundreds of people looking for these roles / gigs, why deal with a union demanding rates higher than others would be willing to work for?
> codified diversity
This 100% of the time means incorporating some sort of "-ism" into the company. Might be an unpopular opinion in these parts, but the truth is that you cannot combat racism with racism. Setting up double-blind hiring practices might be possible or promotion boards, but in the end... it's more about culture and trying to look past physical traits (that said, fully support double-bling hiring/promotion methods).
In the end, the company might not legally be able to meet these demands. That said, many companies are doing illegal things like promoting based on race today.
> union security
Not sure what this means, but isn't this what union dues are supposed to cover?
My wife worked in book publishing as an operations manager - basically she oversaw the physical production of a book (what materials, what factories, what ships would be used to ship them, etc). This was in Manhattan and the pay was shockingly low. She moved to Physical Therapy, where the pay is still shockingly low but she gets to help people and is on her feet all day (it helps we also moved out of the city and are in NJ now).
Between self publishing, Amazon, and the myriad of demands on people's attention, the traditional publishing industry is trying to plug holes in a dam with bubble gum. The workers are obviously going to feel the brunt of the decline first while the executives try to hold on, but a big publisher decline is the underlying issue.
> Much too often, we are overworked and underpaid. We are in what people call a “passion industry,” one that ultimately capitalizes on our love of stories to excuse low wages and a “you better be grateful to this opportunity” attitude. We wish it was different. We’re not quite sure how to make it different.
The author identifies the situation completely accurately and is also able to see that they have no leverage whatsoever to make Harper Collins change their behavior. The fact is that doing a job that you are absolutely passionate about is something to be grateful for, and also something that is in high demand. Combined with the fact that the exact skill set required for this kind of work is currently possessed by a surplus of workers means that any position left by a striker will be rapidly fulfilled by a passionate scab.
I have no doubt that publishers will also readily take advantage of AI to make the pool of available jobs even shallower, which will decrease the viability of this movement even more.
The creative people are very good at what they do, but they are working in a terribly inefficient industry that is not responsive to internal or external demands. Many titles are still developed based on "gut," trend chasing, or agent/publisher backroom connections, and the result is a failure rate that could not be tolerated in many other industries.
Following the recent PRH/DOJ antitrust testimony, an NPD analyst said that of 45,571 frontlist ISBNs from the top 10 U.S. publishers in 2021, 15% sold less than 12 copies. Another 51% sold between 12 and 999 copies.
Most VC investments lose money too. And I don't see all of Netflix' data leading to consistently compelling/popular original content.
It certainly is true that publishers often work on the basis of gut and lunches. That was the case with me when I got a publisher contract. (Met the editor at an event dinner then worked out details over coffee in London.) But it's also not clear to me that data has revolutionized getting creative content out in the world to the degree once promised.
Publishing a book is also pretty cheap compared to getting into production with a film.
What's so weird about these stories is there is almost zero need for HarperCollins and similar companies to even exist any more in a world of eBooks.
The authors can self publish. The artists can be independent freelance contractors who work with the authors.
Kids books may be somewhat of an exception with reliance on paper. My child has been on mostly eBooks for a long time though (before the age of 10).
In that sphere where eBooks are a thing and you don't need millions of dollars to do your first print run of paper books all these big publishers do is gatekeep and rent-seek and feed off the creatives they abuse.
There's no reason for the artists to have to live in NYC today either if the big publishing company isn't chaining them to the city! The artists are probably already sending all their work digitally.
>you don't need millions of dollars to do your first print run of paper books
Publishers are not spending millions of dollars on a massive print run for an unknown author. Printing and distribution is cheap. I can get a quantity 1 PoD of a book priced at cost from Amazon for about $5 shipped.
> gatekeep
That's not clearly a bad thing. Having a major publisher whether for fiction or technical books probably communicates some level of floor and some level of editorial care. Certainly a lot of readers give authors more props (probably more than they should) be being published than self-published. I've seen this myself.
69 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadThere are literally 100 people gunning for your role at any time. You're infinitely replaceable, so they can treat you however they want. These folks are living in NYC on a wage that's barely liveable in Omaha. Not to mention a culture of abuse and overwork that eats people alive.
I'm glad the strike is holding strong.
However, for a seller to be able to negotiate a higher price from the buyer, the buyer has to be able to pay. And HarperCollins’ business is not exactly raking it in.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NWSA/news/profit-m...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NWSA/news/net-inco...
The immediate incentive is that the staff they want/need isn't doing the thing.
A strike is not a protest.
It's a negotiating tactic when you have much else leverage than your ability to work.
Realistically scabs/contractors might lessen the strike's leverage. The strike may push the publisher to go "staff-less".
Larger organized labor might be able to hold Harpers to account for working around the strike -- like if contractors were organized, if scabbing made it hard to get hired elsewhere. But that's not where labor is at currently.
Seems inevitable to me. The publishers will sell their NYC real estate for a one-time bonanza, strip down to a skeleton crew of employees, and contract out most work. Quality will dip far below that of the last 100 years, and few will care. It was a golden age of publishing but I don’t think it’s remotely sustainable.
Doesn't this fact make a strike rather ineffective? If the labor is a hot commodity then what pressure does striking put on the company outside of some publicity?
If people quit two or three at a time, management just redistributes work around, with extra pressure to deliver.
However, if everyone leaves at once (or goes on strike), there's nobody to redistribute the work to. Even if you could hire replacements on the spot (which you usually can't anyway), you can't just say okay, you're hired, now start working. New hires need company- and department-specific training, they need to coordinate with other people (who would also be fresh hires) and so on.
Modern companies don't run solely on management directions, they also run on an enormous body of practical knowledge and experience which bridges management intention with practical action. Without this, nothing works.
"Infinitely replacement" is a comfortable management myth -- it works only as long as it happens gradually. You can "infinitely replace" each part of a sailing boat, but if you try to infinitely replace all of it at once, everyone just falls into the ocean because at some point in the replacement effort there's no bloody boat. Same here. A 50-people company can afford to replace virtually everyone over the course of one year, as long as it's four fresh hires/month for 12 months. Fifty fresh hire in a single month while also keeping the shop open, on the other hand, is a no-go.
Striking is just a form of clarifying the strength of their leverage. It's been going since November because negotiations have been going on since November.
No, it doesn't, it hasn't worked like that for decades. Most labour organisations have some form of agreement in place as to when and how strikes can be organised, and most of them involve some commitment to at least some continued operation for a period of time. Even when such an agreement is not in place, strikes are initially not complete strikes, because that wouldn't be in the interest of either party. Fully walking out of work right away and bringing the company down would literally bring down the jobs along with it, at which point negotiating payment or working conditions would be meaningless.
the striking workers are fully withholding their labour. supervisors and contractor scabs are doing all the work—or attempting to—as neither is part of the union
If capitalism tells people their job is not worthwhile, it has failed. This is especially applicable for creative work.
(inb4 smug citation needed see, for example, the Lawrence textile strike, and the ensuing consequence in S. Doc. No. 870, 62nd Cong., 2nd Sess., at 9 (1912), reprinted in Serial Set Vol. No. 6170, or really just search for "strike" and "minimum wage" in your favourite library of actual history books)
The invisible hand of the market is, sadly, unable to write bills or increase pay, and since management can't see it -- unsurprising, given that it's invisible, it's right in the name -- they sometimes need to have it spelled it out for them.
It is that simple. Humans are not Resources.
For the purposes of ensuring a healthy, long term society, humans are not only resources.
For the purposes of properly allocating a society’s resources (which is also in the interest of a healthy, long term society), humans’ labor is a resource, which can be shortened to humans as resources.
$45k is not a livable wage anywhere within an hour commute of Manhattan
> And I thought we were talking about book cover artists?
"editors, marketing assistants, publicists, sales associates, designers, and contract assistants"
I briefly lived in SF, wherein the dynamic was similar. Most of us were a paycheck (or less!) away from homelessness. It's "doable" if you're okay with having near-zero room for savings, or covering unexpected expenses, or what have you.
I think $45k comes out to a take-home of about $2800 per month. I see ads on craigslist for 2-bedroom apartments in Brooklyn in the 2000-3000 range, and 3-bedroom apartments also in Brooklyn in the 3000-4000 range, either of those seem reasonable with a $2800 take-home. Of course it means having roommates.
But let's reframe the question: "why should a publishing company willingly starve their competent and talented staff, which they force to live in the most expensive city in America?"
How you answer that question will be telling.
Still I believe that more than 75% of human effort is currently spent on zerosum games, keeping the riffraff in their place and jockeying for position among ourselves.
If we could flip that so that 75% was spent on non-zerosum games, we could work half as hard and still have more.
It's probably in the people's best interest to be a bit less ambitious than "pay for an infinite number of people", since that's unlikely to happen regardless of how compliant the companies are.
This is why tech companies etc are always lobbying for more H1B visas and immigration. Supply and demand applies to labour as much as anything else.
OTOH if I were their employer I would feel ashamed to be paying someone that gifted $45K in Manhattan.
So the market has been flooded by people who drive the price down; unfair competition, if you don't mind the captalism angle.
Pisses me off I enabled these guys asshole behaviors while buying books at the elementary school bookfairs. Thank goodness I learnt how to pirate epubs in middle school and was walking distance to a library.
Also, explains why Elaine Benes was working in this industry (and who better to play the role of a trust fund socialite than another trust fund socialite. great actress though - Dreyfus' parts in Seinfeld and Veep were great)
[0] - https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/03/inside-the-successi...
Their employer is owned by Rupert Murdoch. Management have had their capability for shame surgically removed as a condition of their employment.
Where's the leverage? What theyre asking for is..
> so we walked—forgoing pay to fight for livable wages, codified diversity measures, and union security.
Oh boy...
> livable wages
I haven't seen the exact terms, but "livable wage" is often referred to, but very open ended. I'd never pay a person a "livable wage", I'd pay them fair market rate. Unfortunately, that's the reality. Most of the time, that's livable, but I cannot hire a 5 hour / week maid for a "livable wage", I hire them for the job they do.
This demand will push the company to use more contract labor IMO. There's hundreds of people looking for these roles / gigs, why deal with a union demanding rates higher than others would be willing to work for?
> codified diversity
This 100% of the time means incorporating some sort of "-ism" into the company. Might be an unpopular opinion in these parts, but the truth is that you cannot combat racism with racism. Setting up double-blind hiring practices might be possible or promotion boards, but in the end... it's more about culture and trying to look past physical traits (that said, fully support double-bling hiring/promotion methods).
In the end, the company might not legally be able to meet these demands. That said, many companies are doing illegal things like promoting based on race today.
> union security
Not sure what this means, but isn't this what union dues are supposed to cover?
Nobody is asking you to. This isn't what anyone, not one single solitary person, is asking. Unless you're also asking your maid to sign a non-compete.
What a ... poor poor example just to make a point.
> Oh boy...
Indeed
Say bye to your limb: Hollywood is the poster child of unionization in an artistic field.
The only choking is the sum of all our free time.
The author identifies the situation completely accurately and is also able to see that they have no leverage whatsoever to make Harper Collins change their behavior. The fact is that doing a job that you are absolutely passionate about is something to be grateful for, and also something that is in high demand. Combined with the fact that the exact skill set required for this kind of work is currently possessed by a surplus of workers means that any position left by a striker will be rapidly fulfilled by a passionate scab.
I have no doubt that publishers will also readily take advantage of AI to make the pool of available jobs even shallower, which will decrease the viability of this movement even more.
Following the recent PRH/DOJ antitrust testimony, an NPD analyst said that of 45,571 frontlist ISBNs from the top 10 U.S. publishers in 2021, 15% sold less than 12 copies. Another 51% sold between 12 and 999 copies.
It certainly is true that publishers often work on the basis of gut and lunches. That was the case with me when I got a publisher contract. (Met the editor at an event dinner then worked out details over coffee in London.) But it's also not clear to me that data has revolutionized getting creative content out in the world to the degree once promised.
Publishing a book is also pretty cheap compared to getting into production with a film.
The authors can self publish. The artists can be independent freelance contractors who work with the authors.
Kids books may be somewhat of an exception with reliance on paper. My child has been on mostly eBooks for a long time though (before the age of 10).
In that sphere where eBooks are a thing and you don't need millions of dollars to do your first print run of paper books all these big publishers do is gatekeep and rent-seek and feed off the creatives they abuse.
There's no reason for the artists to have to live in NYC today either if the big publishing company isn't chaining them to the city! The artists are probably already sending all their work digitally.
Publishers are not spending millions of dollars on a massive print run for an unknown author. Printing and distribution is cheap. I can get a quantity 1 PoD of a book priced at cost from Amazon for about $5 shipped.
> gatekeep
That's not clearly a bad thing. Having a major publisher whether for fiction or technical books probably communicates some level of floor and some level of editorial care. Certainly a lot of readers give authors more props (probably more than they should) be being published than self-published. I've seen this myself.
That's not clearly a bad thing