The labour of publishing

This week, all I’ve been able to think about are the rail strikes. Not because they’ve impacted my life, though I did have to cancel an author event because no one was going to be able to make it, but because it has me thinking about my own labour and whether or not I think I’m being paid what I’m worth.

I think it’s safe to say that I’m not. I think it’s also safe to say that a lot of junior-to-mid employees across publishing are not being paid what they’re worth either.

This has never been more apparent than this year, when the cost of living has gone up by so much, inflation at 10%, and our wages absolutely stagnant. A friend of mine told me that even though she’d had a pay rise, given the cost of living and the inflation, she was going to have less disposable income than she had before the rise. 

The anger I feel for this is endless, thick, white-hot. I know people who have tried to get pay rises, a measly two thousand pounds more a year, only to be told that they’re not showing that they want it enough. That they’re not doing enough. A friend of mine told me she asked for a pay rise and in the next call she had with her manager, HR was suddenly there and she had to face her manager telling her she ‘didn’t respond to emails quickly enough’, along with other small things that he was using to stop paying her more. Another pushed the imprint she worked at forward in huge ways but every conversation about pay ended with her feeling belittled, small, bad at her job. She left her job to go and work in an entirely new industry, who saw her hard work, skill, and talent, and are paying her exactly what she deserves.

I, myself, have had conversations about pay with my managers and been told that I am not doing enough, even as I look at my job description and see that I am doing everything I am meant to be doing.

Not that a simple job description can account for the hours worked outside of my job, reading submissions, doing admin tasks because I didn’t have time to do them during the day because I was in meetings, the creativity I pour into my work. Not that a job description can account for all the endless work we all do outside of our jobs.

And all of this has been happening as publishing has made more money, seemingly, than it ever has before. The TikTok surge is bringing huge amounts of money into this industry, publishing houses talk about how up they are year-on-year. I know, from colleagues across the industry, that this is happening almost everywhere.

But we are not seeing that come down to us, the people at the bottom and lower-middle, who are doing so much and are being asked to do more all the time.

There is a pervasive idea that, in publishing, we must pay our dues before we get paid more money and get promoted

I cannot tell you how many times I have had to explain some kind of technology to a senior colleague of mine. Print this out, how do I do this, why isn’t my Zoom working, how do I pay an invoice, set up this acquisition, run this P&L for me. 

We, assistants, are the ones who are shouldering all of this technological burden. Not only do we have to do our jobs, accept that we have to work outside of our hours, for such little pay, living in the most expensive city in the UK, we have to also become Google for our seniors, show them how to print a Word document on both sides, knowing that they get paid so much more than we do.

There is a pervasive idea that, in publishing, we must pay our dues before we get paid more money and get promoted. That we must work harder, out of hours, edit before we are given the title of editor, run a campaign before we are paid to run campaigns, go out on author tours even as we are doing admin, so that the people above us can see our commitment to the job. Do that for six months, a year, two years, and maybe we’ll promote you.

Or, in real terms, do the unpaid labour for years and any time you ask for a promotion, we’ll make you feel small and unworthy of it. 

I have heard senior colleagues talk about how they had to do the same when pushed on this. To them, I always want to say: so let’s change the system. Much like the people on Twitter who reply to articles about how people can no longer afford to turn the gas on by saying that their lives were harder when they were younger, I do not understand why senior colleagues seem so happy to say that it was just as hard for them when they were my age.

Surely, we should be changing things for the better?

So here’s a radical idea, one taken from Mike Lynch: let’s strike. Let’s all the assistants throw down our pens and stop working, for a couple of days, to show just how important we are to the running of this industry, how it cannot sustain itself without placing such weight onto our backs.

Except it is terrifying to strike, to jeopardise the safety of your career in such a way. Because what is to stop them from hiring other people to do what we are doing? After all, we are constantly told just how many people want to work in publishing. Maybe we aren’t so important after all.

But isn’t that just what they want us to think? 

To my fellow assistants, I say, join a union. You are better than you are made to feel. You are important, necessary. This industry is not your everything, and it will never be your everything, no matter how many times you are made to feel it is. And if you feel like you need to leave, do it. You are not less for choosing yourself.