Bookstore Workers Are Forming Unions Over Low Pay and Lack of Benefits

No Class is an op-ed column by writer and radical organizer Kim Kelly that connects worker struggles and the current state of the American labor movement with its storied — and sometimes bloodied — past.
A person holds a book outside Strand Bookstore on the Upper West Side amid the coronavirus pandemic on March 11 2021 in...
Noam Galai

I’ve been thinking a lot about books lately. I’ve spent the past year and a half researching, writing, and editing ​​FIGHT LIKE HELL: The Untold History of American Labor, a book that’s all about what can happen when workers stand up and fight. Since my literary debut was released, I've also been thrust into the intriguing and perplexing world of book promotion, learning new things every day about the publishing industry and the people who make it run. One of the biggest letdowns of this entire (mostly magical) process has been discovering how difficult it is for so many people involved in book production and distribution to make a decent living, whether they are a junior assistant at a literary agency, a marketing associate at a major publisher, a warehouse worker loading pallets of hardbacks, or a bookseller at a mom-and-pop retail store.

Books are precious objects that pass through many hands before they find their rightful homes; they are inanimate teachers, storytellers, companions, and comrades; a “uniquely portable magic” and a necessary tool to stretch the elastic of one’s mind. As my grandma always told me, “Books are essential.” And as the great James Baldwin once wrote, “It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” It is an awful secret that so many of the workers who bring these cherished items to life are struggling with low wages, racial and gender inequities, and unsafe working conditions. But bookstore and publishing workers around the country have become united in their demands for better.

Bookstores and book workers are just as much a part of radical working-class history as the docks, the mines, and the kitchen. Some bookstores, such as Green Apple Books in San Francisco and Portland, and Oregon's storied Powell’s Books, have been unionized for decades. Others are still in the earliest stages of their efforts to organize. But the will and the momentum are there; for example, workers at a number of Half Price Books locations in Indiana, Minnesota, and Illinois have been running an exciting multistate union drive and just notched their fifth (!) win with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). After picking up some tips from fellow West Coast union bookstores Bookshop Santa Cruz and Elliott Bay Book Company, in 2021, Moe’s Books in Berkeley, California, unionized with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and was immediately voluntarily recognized by the employer. As bookseller and organizer Noah Ross told Publishers Weekly, “We’re doing this because we love Moe’s.”

That simple statement encapsulates so much of the sentiment that we’ve heard from many other book workers (and many other kinds of workers, especially in creative or so-called white-collar fields): “We love our jobs and want to keep loving our jobs, so let us make sure we’re protected and have a seat at the table.” To get a feel for what’s fueling the current wave of bookseller unions, I spoke to two longtime workers at Powell’s Books, which unionized with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in 1999. As members of Local 5, they’ve seen firsthand the difference a union can make, and weathered a number of storms over many years in the stacks, including drawn-out contract negotiations and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. 

“The biggest issues facing bookstore workers are the same issues facing most retail/warehouse/customer service/service industry workers: low wages, lack of benefits, and bosses constantly pushing for more work from fewer people,” Tove Holmberg, an 18-year veteran of Powell’s Books and an active union member, tells me via email. “We’re seen as expendable and replaceable; our work isn’t considered ‘a career,’ and so it’s a constant struggle to get our employers to offer us anything more than the bare minimum.”

Workers at Powell’s and other bookstores are pushing back, sometimes publicly, to ensure they’re being treated fairly. As the pandemic smashed into the retail sector and many bookstores closed or laid off scores of workers, bookstore union members went to work. “Getting protections (and from the beginning, we said ‘booksellers want it in writing’) is the most important thing we can do to ensure that when an employer stops caring about the workers that make the company successful, we have not only collective action but also contractual rights to back us up,” says Ryan Takas, who began working at Powell’s in 1999, during its union drive, and who has held many roles at the store since then.

Powell’s workers weren’t the only ones who had to go to bat in 2020. At New York City’s sprawling book emporium The Strand, workers have been unionized with UAW Local 2179 since the 1970s — and they are used to conflict with the store’s wealthy owner. After undergoing brutal layoffs early in the pandemic, union members filed grievances over health and safety issues and demonstrated outside the building. “It can be painful to live inside the contradiction of being treated badly by such a beloved place of business,” an anonymous Strand worker told Vulture at the time. (The Strand denied many of the claims, telling Vulture it had taken appropriate COVID safety precautions.) 

By the time customers began venturing back into bookstores in early 2022, over 50 workers at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC, had unionized with UFCW Local 400. They were initially met with resistance from the chain’s owners, who brought in lawyers from the Jones Day law firm, which has a reputation for helping companies thwart union drives. This move was greeted with dismay by disappointed customers who valued the store’s emphasis on social justice; after public outcry, the owners swiftly changed their tune and recognized the Politics and Prose Workers Union.

Workers within the publishing industry itself have also stayed busy, sharing salaries, organizing protests, walkouts, and online campaigns, such as #PublishingPaidMe and #BlackoutTheBestSellers, that called out racial disparities within the industry. In at least one recent case (for now), they’ve also unionized outright, as Verso did in 2020. There is a precedent there: HarperCollins, one of the big five publishers that control the lion’s share of the industry, has been unionized under the United Auto Workers Local 2110 for over 30 years (and has been a union shop for nearly 80); and workers at The New Press first signed union cards in 2001. University presses have gotten in on the action too: Workers at Duke University Press successfully unionized in 2022, joining the ranks of union workers at Harvard University Press and Wayne University Press. Hopefully, we’ll soon see more movement toward unionizing within the halls of publishing, because it’s sorely needed, the time is right, and workers are tired of staying silent.

For their part, Holmberg and Takas have some parting wisdom to share with workers who hope to join the bookstore union movement. “I would encourage booksellers thinking about unionizing, who maybe don’t have other unionized booksellers nearby, to get to know their local labor communities," Holmberg says. “Cross-industry solidarity is a beautiful thing.” Takas also emphasizes the importance of building real, meaningful connections between workers and those wider labor communities. “The goal is not just to get a union or get a contract," he says. "The goal is to lift up people, to support the human, to envision and collaboratively create a more just and equitable world.”

Given the wide array of unions who already count bookstore workers among their membership, a union-curious bookseller certainly has options, including the UAW and the UFCW (and there’s always the option of going fully independent, as Amazon Labor Union members recently did in Staten Island). For customers and loyal bookworms, it’s even simpler: If you love books, show love to the people who make them possible — and support their efforts to organize. 

“Bookstores get a lot of praise for being cultural hubs and community anchors; for promoting the open exchange of ideas; and for championing progressive values; but so often, when bookstore workers voice concerns about their wages, benefits, or working conditions, that progressive facade falls away and an employer’s true priorities are revealed,” Holmberg explains. “Book workers, like all workers, deserve to have a voice in their workplace, and the most powerful voice is the collective voice of a union.”

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