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.
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
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.
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.