The American Society for Indexing held its 2023 Virtual Conference, “The Eyes Have It: The Indexer Perspective–Past, Present & Future,” on Friday, April 28, 2023, and Saturday, April 29, 2023. Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.
The first session on Saturday, Changing Industries from the Inside: Learning from the HarperCollins Strike, was presented by Olga Brudastova, President of Local 2110 of the United Auto Workers. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the labor movement has seen an increased interest in unions organizing across different industries and sectors. Recently, over 200 employees of HarperCollins Publishers went on strike for more than three months to win a fair contract.
Ms. Brudastova said that HarperCollins union workers had worked without a contract since April 2022, and that bargaining began in December 2021. An impasse dragged on for months, with management refusing to budge on salary increases from the low of $45,000 in relation to NYC’s high housing costs. The union requested raising salaries to $50,000. The union authorized a strike on November 10, 2022. With the aid of a federal mediator, a deal was finally ratified on February 16, 2023, granting the union some of what it had asked for. Starting salaries were increased to $47,500, rising to $50,000 by 2025. Union workers also received a lump-sum payment, and workers making under $60,000 were granted two hours of overtime per week without management approval. The strike had an impact on the publishing industry, and the final deal was a win for nonunionized workers at other publishers, since Hachette and MacMillan announced they would increase their starting salaries.
Ms. Brudastova also discussed other fields where UAW Local 2110 is active, such as clerical workers, and her own experience organizing student workers. She described the benefits of unionization in decreasing the power inequity between management and workers. She outlined the shift from wage workers to freelance workers, and how this is exploitative, and how and why freelance workers should consider unionization.
In the next blog posting, I will discuss the second Saturday session of the ASI 2023 Virtual Conference. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.