On September 17, after a years-long organizing effort, the publishing workers at the New York branch of Oxford University Press, the world’s largest academic press, voted to unionize. They have joined The NewsGuild-CWA, where they are accompanied by thousands of unionized employees at other established media companies, including The Guardian-US, Buzzfeed, and The Nation.
“It’s not necessarily about better pay, it’s not necessarily about better benefits, it’s not about any one issue. It’s about ensuring that you have a voice.”
According to the union’s press release, workers have unionized for a more diverse workplace; job security; “dignified salary and benefits that keep pace with cost of living”; and a rationally organized enterprise with a clear path to promotion and employee protection from sexual harassment. Workers are also unionizing to curb the press’s high rate of attrition.
Oxford University Press is the biggest and oldest academic press in the world, with a history that dates back to 1586. The 165-person bargaining unit won unionization with 80 percent voting yes, despite a union-busting campaign waged by management after they refused to voluntarily recognize the union. The press additionally hired union-busting law firm Jackson Lewis—a firm that specializes in the field of “counter-organizing.”
For Scott Morales, a union organizer and department coordinator at the press, learning that it was possible to get a seat at the table with management in workplace decisions was a major revelation.
“It’s not necessarily about better pay, it’s not necessarily about better benefits, it’s not about any one issue,” Morales tells The Progressive. “It’s about ensuring that you have a voice.”
The union was built not just for improvements in workplace conditions but also for long-term worker stability. “Even the things I like about my job, there’s no guarantee they’re going to stick around,” Morales said of the pre-unionized press. “Management can decide at any point to revoke anything. They can change anything they want at any time, and I just have to go along with it. I don’t have any say in that.”
Based on input from the bargaining unit, union organizers made diversity in the workplace a key plank to their organizing campaign. This is a pivotal move given how the publishing industry has relied for decades on a structurally racist and exploitative hiring model to sustain its bottom line. This phenomenon is acknowledged throughout the industry.
In popular culture, from Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group (1963) to Darren Star’s TV show Younger (2015-2021), the lives and livelihoods of young publishing workers have been idealized, analyzed, and lampooned for generations. The romanticization of publishing has helped to keep the field highly competitive. Recent college graduates jump through hoops—degrees, internships, and rounds of interviews—to get a chance at an editorial assistant position where one barely makes a subsistence-level salary.
These workers are also often fresh out of college and unaware of their rights. Without work experience or an education in labor, they are easily exploited.
“We make a lot of assumptions like I’m an at-will employee, so I really don’t have any choice—they can fire me at any point,” Morales says. “I just need to do the best that I can . . . I think we take these things for granted because we think we have no power.”
Entry-level publishing workers are expected to rely on family for extra funds. Many employees leave after a few years for work in higher paying industries. In this way, the publishing industry, despite gestures at diversity through human relations initiatives, remains structurally racist. By demanding that highly educated people work for peanuts, elite cultural institutions ensure that their workforce comes from the same small, white, bourgeois demographic.
The staff at Oxford University Press is currently 77 percent white. Workers at the press organized, in part, to ensure that its employees reflected the diversity of New York City. The union wrote on Twitter “#Publishing is an industry largely restricted to the elite and the rich—people who can afford to work for low pay or people who already have literary connections. That needs to change to reflect the diversity of our readers *and* the world we live in.”
Publishing has historically seen much less union organizing than other white-collar industries. Publishing workers often do not see themselves as workers, and many see their poorly paid jobs as stepping stones to more lucrative careers.
At Oxford University Press, unionization efforts had been ongoing since at least 2019, with the staff unable to make it to their threshold of 75 percent of members signing on. According to Morales, this was, in part, due to the high turnover rate at the press. Employees kept leaving for other jobs, preventing a bargaining unit from cohering. The pandemic, however, with its sweeping sudden layoffs and salary cuts, sped up their organizing efforts, and they were able to go public with the campaign in June.
Their announcement was preceded in March by the announcement at Duke University Press of its publishing workers’ intent to form a union.
“For years, the press has struggled with constant turnover, extended vacancies, low compensation, inconsistent policy enforcement, and patterns of discrimination,” the Duke union wrote in their March announcement. “The expansion of different initiatives, including those related to acquisitions, platform development, product creation, and distribution, has come at the price of employee well-being.”
Given the manageable size of their bargaining units, publishing houses are ripe territory for unionization. Organizing as part of a group can run counter to the atomized way in which white-collar professionals have been trained to get ahead in the workplace. The task of deep organizing and solidarity building, however, is basically the same in all workplaces.
Even in an individualistic industry like publishing, employees quickly figure out how much they have in common with their fellow workers. They soon learn how much easier it is to advocate for yourself when you do so as part of a union.
“What Duke did, hopefully what we did, [and] hopefully other publishers after us, will spur an avalanche because all industries could use union protections,” Morales says. “All industries could use the solidarity that comes from banding together with your fellow colleagues and standing up for one another. It’s our legal right and it works.”