Employees at book publisher HarperCollins in Recent York have been on strike for 4 weeks fighting for wage increases to offset the rise in inflation, higher family leave advantages and other improvements. Greater than 250 editors, designers, salespeople and marketing personnel, members of the United Auto Employees Local 2110, haven’t had a big raise since their last negotiated contract first expired in December 2020.
HarperCollins is refusing to budge on its insulting wage offers and staff say negotiations are going nowhere. The intransigence of the corporate, one in every of the Big Five English-language publishing firms on this planet, just isn’t attributable to any financial constraints. HarperCollins reported $2.19 billion in revenue for fiscal 2022, greater than a ten percent increase over the record $1.98 billion it reported in fiscal 2021.
Like firms in every other industry, HarperCollins seeks to extend its profits still further on the expense of its staff. But each industry, and every company inside a given industry, has its particularities that staff must understand. A review of the history, management, ownership and political relationships of HarperCollins is helpful information for the striking staff to advance their struggle.
HarperCollins is a mix of American publisher Harper & Row and the Scottish publisher William Collins, Sons. The multibillion-dollar media company News Corp, owned by Rupert Murdoch, bought and merged the 2 publishers in 1989. Headquartered in Recent York, HarperCollins has publishing groups in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Recent Zealand and the UK.
The pinnacle of HarperCollins is President and CEO Brian Murray. He was appointed CEO in 2008 but has worked at the corporate since 1997. Murray is a board member and past chair of the Association of American Publishers, a trade association for the book publishing industry. He’s a donor to the Democratic Party, which has united with the Republicans to outlaw a strike on the railroads and impose a pro-company contract that staff had rejected.
Murray’s previous employer deserves mention. Before joining HarperCollins, Murray was a consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton. This consulting firm has intimate connections to the American government and military that date back not less than to the years following World War II. It’s linked with the Democratic and Republican Parties, each of which it supports with financial donations.
Bloomberg once called Booz Allen Hamilton “the world’s most profitable spy organization.” The firm’s own website once stated that amongst its employees were greater than 10,000 individuals who had passed background checks for top secret security clearance.
As a part of its intelligence operations, the corporate partners with the armed forces and surveillance agencies of foreign states, including Saudi Arabia. The Recent York Times reported that Booz Allen Hamilton has helped Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman consolidate his power. After the barbaric murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, for which bin Salman is responsible, the firm didn’t distance itself from bin Salman. Murray’s previous association with Booz Allen Hamilton should give HarperCollins staff pause concerning the cold-blooded manner by which the CEO defends corporate and geopolitical interests.
News Corp, which owns HarperCollins, is a mass media company that reported $10.39 billion in revenue for fiscal 2022. The corporate, controlled by Rupert Murdoch and his family, owns Fox News and Dow Jones & Company, which publishes the Wall Street Journal—the voice of the financial oligarchy. It also owns News UK, which publishes the right-wing tabloid The Sun and the conservative newspaper The Times.
Murdoch has a net value of about $21.7 billion, making him the thirty first richest person in the US and the 71st richest on this planet, based on Forbes. Born in Australia, Murdoch began constructing his empire within the UK and later became a US citizen. For many years, he has used his media holdings to advertise his reactionary free-market political agenda, which dovetails together with his own financial and business interests. This has led him to support not only conservative capitalist politicians, but additionally putatively liberal politicians at times.
Within the UK, Murdoch was a powerful supporter of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who oversaw a pointy turn to the best by British and world politics within the Eighties. He assisted Thatcher’s counteroffensive against the working class by attacking the trade unions on the Times.
Murdoch also supported the right-wing Prime Minister Tony Blair of the Labour Party. Blair oversaw the UK’s participation within the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003. A supporter of Brexit, Murdoch had frequent private meetings with David Cameron and backed the vile and buffoonish Boris Johnson, each of whom were Conservative prime ministers.
Within the US, Murdoch has supported the presidential candidacies of Democrat Barack Obama, Republican Mitt Romney and Republican Donald Trump. He also has hosted the bloodstained bin Salman for dinner at his Bel Air estate in Los Angeles. As well as, Murdoch is a staunch supporter of the Israeli state, which has long oppressed the Palestinians and functioned as a beach head for US imperialism within the Middle East.
HarperCollins staff can arm themselves for his or her struggle by recalling the teachings of the 1986 strike of print staff against the Murdoch-owned News International, which is now a part of News Corp. On the time, Murdoch desired to introduce latest offset litho technology that may enable journalists at newspapers akin to the Times to enter copy directly into the printing process. The technology was more efficient than the older hot-metal Linotype method that was then common within the UK, and it threatened 90 percent of News International’s print staff with unemployment. Many staff belonged to the National Graphical Association (NGA), which rejected Murdoch’s offer of redundancy payments and called a strike.
Murdoch had secretly built a latest print shop within the Wapping district of London and equipped it with offset litho technology. When the strike began, Murdoch fired the 6,000 staff and transferred the printing of his 4 fundamental newspapers to Wapping, where he had hired latest employees. The NGA leadership allied itself with the Labour Party and called for a boycott of the 4 newspapers. The boycott was not successful, and the picketing and protests that the NGA leadership organized didn’t prevent News International from producing and distributing its newspapers at nearly full capability. After having strung staff along for 54 weeks, the NGA finally allowed the strike to collapse in a devastating defeat for the print staff. The union had no progressive response to the issue of the brand new technology. As an alternative of mobilizing broader sections of staff, it appealed fruitlessly to one in every of the UK’s fundamental capitalist parties.
Corporations seek to make use of latest technologies to slash jobs and increase the profits they pump out of staff. Since it defends the capitalist profit system, the UAW, not more than the NGA, has no answer to defend staff’ jobs and living standards. As an alternative, the UAW bureaucracy has collaborated within the destruction of a whole lot of 1000’s of the roles within the auto industry, whilst the assets of the UAW apparatus have risen through direct payments from the firms.
HarperCollins executives are citing increased costs of printing, production, freight and distribution to justify its hard line against staff’ wage demands. In October, HarperCollins cut jobs within the adult and youngsters divisions and announced a “pause” in hiring, with an organization spokesperson telling the Bookseller, “We’re taking decisive steps to operate as efficiently as possible.”
Yet increased book sales throughout the pandemic have allowed the corporate to reap big profits. Earlier predictions that ebooks would dampen demand for print books have proven inaccurate. Print sales still remain strong, and publishing continues to be a highly profitable industry, based on Forbes. This puts HarperCollins staff in a positive position.
At the identical time, a category motion lawsuit was filed in January alleging that the Big Five publishers—Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishing Group, Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House—have been engaged in a price-fixing conspiracy with Amazon to stop competition and artificially inflate the value of e-books.
In other words, HarperCollins staff are squaring up against an enormous transnational corporation with extensive corporate and political ties to capitalist governments within the US, the UK and elsewhere. It’s indeed a robust enemy. But HarperCollins staff have potentially stronger allies: the thousands and thousands of staff coming into struggle against inequality within the US and internationally. This includes 120,000 railroad staff, greater than 50,000 striking academic staff on the University of California and The Recent School, newsroom staff on the Recent York Times and the tens of 1000’s of Recent York City municipal employees.
To unite with these staff, HarperCollins staff must take the conduct of the struggle out of the hands of the UAW bureaucracy, which is doing every thing to isolate the strike and starve staff into submission with poverty-level strike advantages.
It’s urgent that staff form a rank-and-file strike committee, democratically controlled by staff themselves, to stipulate their demands and develop a technique to fight for it. This committee should demand that each one negotiations are livestreamed and that no contract is accepted unless it fullfills all of the demands of staff for inflation-busting raises, cost-of-living protection and family leave.
At the identical time, the publishing industry can’t be left within the hands of billionaires. It have to be transformed right into a public utility democratically controlled and collectively owned by staff themselves, with the intention to provide reasonably priced reading material and way of life to all staff.