Editorial Resignations At Big Houses

[AgentPete]

This is concerning. From Publishers' Lunch:
---

Multiple resignations from the editorial departments at two big houses caused an online reckoning on Friday. Four editors, Angeline Rodriquez and Hillary Sames at Orbit, Erin Siu at Macmillan Children's, and Molly McGhee at Tor all announced their resignations, leading to a discussion about the workload of junior and mid-level employees and the difficulty of advancement across the industry. The online exchange brought into the open the frustrations of increased workload, burnout and turnover that has been brewing as the pandemic continues. Those feelings are intensified as big publishers report record sales and earnings, even as multiple people report on Twitter they believe their employers are not sufficiently reinvesting those proceeds in additional staff, systems and raises.

At the heart of the discussion was McGhee's resignation letter which she posted on Twitter. McGhee, who was an assistant editor at Tor/Nightfire, writes that after ten years in assisting roles, she requested a promotion when her first acquisition debuted at No. 3 on the New York Times Best Sellers list. She says in her letter that she was told she needed "more training" before being promoted and she could not expect to be relieved of administration duties "any time within the next five years."

McGhee pointed to "the invisibility of junior employees' workload" as a major issue, asserting that "many executives in the publishing industry are technology illiterate" and rely on their assistants to manage databases, pull manuscripts, and navigate new technology, on top of the duties outlined in their job descriptions.

McGhee's letter opened the floodgates to other people who have left editorial positions recently speaking openly about labor issues. As part of a thread, Margaux Weisman, who recently left Penguin editorial, flagged "the fact that editorial productivity ONLY survives because of the exploitation of assistants." Many others pointed out that the same pressures and frustration are being felt across all departments at publishing companies, though there may be less public awareness, and smart managers and veterans offered empathy and tips, and opened themselves up to consultation. A number of agents also underscored their own difficulties in establishing sustainable careers and keeping up with the workload and representing clients without overburdening editors, while emphasizing the broad financial hardship of converting "advances" into extended "guarantees" that are not paid in advance.

Former editor at Avon Books Elle Keck posted, "As one of the editors who left publishing this year, every editor you know, you’ve seen on Twitter, you’ve heard of: they are miserable and struggling. They’re tired of working all day, working at night, and feeling guilty if they take a weekend off." Julie Rosenberg, formerly of Razorbill, also noted the "crushing guilt and anxiety" caused by the workload.

Speaking to PL, McGhee described this workload: "I worked with five editors during my time at [Tor parent division Tom Doherty Associates]. I always supported at least two editors, in addition to the publisher, all while building my own list. What this means is that I did all administrative work on my editors frontlist and backlist.... At one point in time I was tracking 150 frontlist titles across four seasons in one calendar year.... On top of doing this I was managing company calendars, scheduling my publisher's meetings (publishers take a lot of meetings), reading my editors' and publisher's submissions, drafting contracts, executing deal memos, writing copy, positioning novels, networking to get to know agents as I chased my own submissions, training other junior employees, creating work flow systems to manage cross department care," and much more.

McGhee emphasized that she loved working at Tor, but the amount of work was unmanageable, especially in light of the compensation. She said, "I think a lot of folks will view this as a disgruntled employee situation. It is not. I never thought I would leave TDA. I loved my editors, I loved my authors, and I loved my coworkers. But unfortunately the workload expectations and the pay were untenable. There was no way to communicate this to my managers in a way that was not seen as 'poor time management,' as they had never assisted/started in the technological environment junior and mid-level employees now face."

On the topic of possible solutions, she noted that "admin assistants that work interdepartmentally (that is, who work with marketing, publicity, ad promo, production, contracts) will do a lot to alleviate the burnout across all departments and increase communication interdepartmentally." She added that "investing in managing editorial will go a long way towards helping editorial assistants and editors focus on the actual art of acquiring and editing books."

 

[Hannah F]

Gee wiz! I feel for them.

 

[Pamela Jo]

Adam Smith made very clear that there is no free market without Good regulation. The most unscruprulous will simply end up with everything unless the market is fairly regulated. Good regulation is usually an evolving concept, not the easiest thing to do, much like handicapping Man of War for the Kentucky Derby. Will anything change until the monopoly is broken? Banks are working kids to death. Jr. Doctors have faced the same BS for generations. Remember this? Bank of America intern dies of overwork, putting banks' working culture in spotlight

 

[Pamela Jo]

 

[AgentPete]

Remember this? Bank of America intern dies of overwork, putting banks' working culture in spotlight

Yep. Also typical of the Japanese syndrome, too – for which they have a term, karoshi, meaning death by overwork.

Publishers are indeed reporting terrific profits. Little of this is trickling down to the folk at the coal-face… NOR to most authors!!!

I’ve discussed this situation with a few pubs. There is a general acknowledgment (in private, at least) that “we should do something about it”. But so far no real action.

 

[Pamela Jo]

Yep. Also typical of the Japanese syndrome, too – for which they have a term, karoshi, meaning death by overwork.

Publishers are indeed reporting terrific profits. Little of this is trickling down to the folk at the coal-face… NOR to most authors!!!

I’ve discussed this situation with a few pubs. There is a general acknowledgment (in private, at least) that “we should do something about it”. But so far no real action.

Tell them you can provide troops. Going now to reread what Lysistrata would do in this instance.

 

[Ed Simnett]

Yep. Also typical of the Japanese syndrome, too – for which they have a term, karoshi, meaning death by overwork.

Publishers are indeed reporting terrific profits. Little of this is trickling down to the folk at the coal-face… NOR to most authors!!!

I’ve discussed this situation with a few pubs. There is a general acknowledgment (in private, at least) that “we should do something about it”. But so far no real action.

Academia in the US is having somewhat similar issues wrt the coal face. Enormous endowments, ever increasing fees, but tenure track jobs harder and harder to get, and professor pay stagnating. What is happen is that the "non-productive" ends of the organizations, the administration, and some alumni pleasing roles (e.g. football coaches) are seeing more positions and much better pay. I suppose managing large administrative bodies is easier to benchmark (aka justify big money) to the generic private sector than the teaching role itself. The result is more and more younger academics are having to juggle multiple horrible underpaid adjunct positions, and/or quitting.

 

[Jonny]

Strikes me it’s also symptomatic of the largely unchecked ability of major corporations and companies to exploit their workforce by unfair pressure and the cynical piling on of guilt.

This case is publishing but the practice is rife, particularly in Britain, where wage levels in many industries among ‘creatives’ are a free for all. Broadcasting media and production companies are other areas that stink.

I worked in sales for 30 years and every company I worked in had no set salary or promotion structure. The disparities in salary for people doing the exact same jobs was disgraceful.

I could say more but to do so may see me straying into the murky waters of politics.

 

[Vagabond Heart]

Am absolutely appalled.

 

[Hannah F]

Academia in the US is having somewhat similar issues wrt the coal face. Enormous endowments, ever increasing fees, but tenure track jobs harder and harder to get, and professor pay stagnating. What is happen is that the "non-productive" ends of the organizations, the administration, and some alumni pleasing roles (e.g. football coaches) are seeing more positions and much better pay. I suppose managing large administrative bodies is easier to benchmark (aka justify big money) to the generic private sector than the teaching role itself. The result is more and more younger academics are having to juggle multiple horrible underpaid adjunct positions, and/or quitting.

For twenty years, my pay for University lecturing never changed. When they wanted to add in on-line teaching (yes, not substitute, add in - pre-covid) for no extra pay, I said no. Younger people, keen to climb the academic ladder are definitely under pressure to say yes or lose to another.

 

[RK Wallis]

Disgusting how the young are exploited It's rife though. Even in law, partners only have to bill 4 hours a day, junior lawyers, 6 and a half. At least, our partners made the effort to be tech savvy.

 

[Barbara]

Hmmm. Less people expected to do the work of more people. Next the bosses get an intern. Grrrrrr.

But I do feel there's unfortunately a trend in this, but from another angle. There are 2 sides to each coin and bosses are often seen as the bad guys. You may not like the following (I'm going to throw a cat amongst the pigeons - is that correct English?) and it's a bit simplistic.

While in most cases it's still all genuine (I'm 100% certain the above mentioned cases are), and employees get truly overloaded, I can see how the workforce is changing. I wouldn't want to run a company nowadays. Youngsters these days seem less resilient when it comes to hard work and will feel burnt out sooner. (That's not a judgement, just a sign of the times we live in.) And I also worry that burn out is becoming a buzzword among the young. A bit like a badge of honour. I see it in my niece. 'Oh I have burn out.' (19 yo never worked. Flunked most of school. She sits on the internet all day looking at conspiracy theories and other nonsense where they 'measure who has the worse life', shes overloading the mind with negativity and computer light etc). And I see it too where I work. Give the young ones two tasks and they can't cope. (Again it's not a judgment. I'm NOT saying that they're lazy, not at all, but the generation. They overload in their free time with computers.) Now, looking at the employer's side for a moment, because mental health is involved an employer's hands are tied. All they can do (if they dare) is ask for better performance because the work still needs to be done and the company still needs to turn a profit and pay the salary. The spiral goes down. Yes, mental health needs to be taken seriously and society has worked hard for the good changes in that direction. But it's never simple or one sided.

Yes, absolutely, large companies etc do need to look at their practices and way they are treating staff.

And yes, I'm generalising. Like I said it's simplistic and a trend I'm seeing.

I can see this getting a bigger problem and the gap / clashes between employer and emploee getting worse. While I agree that salaries need to go up etc, the problem with that is that stuff we buy (books) will cost more.

I think employers need to look at capping their profits and learn to say enough is enough. (I hear share holders scream And then our pensions that are invested in stock markets ... and why shouldn't they want to make as much profit as they can. Why has success and profit become bad thing? Another question with tangled and complex answers and too long to go into. But most of us want to earn more to provide for our families and leave something behind. ... It's never simple isn't it.).

But most of all, employers need to look at how they deploy their workforce and make their companies a place people actually enjoy and want to work.

 

[Pamela Jo]

Barbara, I disagree on the idea that if salaries go up the price of things go up. There is no cause and effect today that make any sense. I remember when I saw this shift. My husband was working in the US for a construction firm that did big projects like recycling plants, power plants etc. The Americans were doing a deal in the Philippines with Mitsubishi, when suddenly the Americans demanded a profit margin of 23 percent. That was double the usual profit margin at the time (10 to 12 percent.) From then on that became the thing. Americans demanded a 20 to 24 percent profit margin-and guess where that extra money came from? Yes, workers salaries. Make fewer people work twice as hard for less money. Other countries were quick to follow the US example. Britain among the first. During the Baby Bush admin investigative journalism in the US was actively killed by this means. One of the last family owned groups of "Pulitzer Papers" was forced by shareholders to sell because they "weren't making a profit." They were making the same profit they always had-11 to 12 percent. Murdoch used a similar tactic to take over the Wallstreet Journal. I do get annoyed with the constant mislabeling of capitalism when the real meaning is corporatism. It is akin to calling Stalinism-Trotskyism. Nonetheless, I cannot help but see we are again standing in the world Adam Smith described in the 1800's, unregulated markets where all is determined by psychopathic predators. Galbraith wrote The Industrial State (neo-feudalism) to warn that the more we ceded to corporations the more we recreated the medieval paradigm of serfs and Barons. Despite modern interpretations of medieval history (GOT for example) fuedalism was tempered in Europe by the Church and the classical foundation of human rights. The New Industrial State has no checks or balances.

 

[Barbara]

Americans demanded a 20 to 24 percent profit margin-and guess where that extra money came from? Yes, workers salaries. Make fewer people work twice as hard for less money.

But doesn't that kinda make my point about increased salaries pushing prices up?

The company wanted for the end price of their products to NOT go up. They wanted to stay competitive. Yet they now needed a 20-24% profit margin which had to come from somewhere. So they simply became more productive but at the same or even less company cost. In other words, they (ab)used the cheap labour market abroad where they can make people work harder and produce more for the same wages (same company costs), and presto, they get increased profits without putting the wages bill, nor the final price up. So in essence the staff paid for the increase. Had the company paid better salaries to incentivise staff to produce more, or hired more staff (less workload for the individual and better work conditions) those company profits would have had to come from the end user. So I do think that for better salaries, prices for the end users have to go up. A reason stuff in the west is cheap-ish is because somewhere abroad, someone is working for peanuts. Raise their salary or bring the jobs to the west where salaries are higher, and we can say byebye to $2 socks. To increase salaries someone has to pay for it somewhere. It's either the company by getting less profit (fat chance here), or clever cost cutting which may mean less quality, or the end user by paying more.

A few years ago, the national minimum wage went up in the UK. Many 'small' shops like hairdressers, beauticians etc had to raise their prices to cover this, because many small companies run on small margins. They had to pass the cost to the consumer in order to trade healthily.

 

[Hannah F]

It's a problem for farmers as well which became all the more obvious during the pandemic. Supermarkets control the prices and keep them at a very low level which means the farmers can't afford to pay veggie-pickers even a minimum wage, so they utilize an annual influx of migrant pickers. Over the travel-restriction lockdowns, no migrant workers came. Not enough Brits would work for so little (which says something), but the supermarkets wouldn't accept a suitable price increase, so a lot of veg was simply thrown away.

 

[Josephine]

It's either the company by getting less profit (fat chance here),

I think this is the relevant bit (for me) - small business can't afford to cut their profits, whereas big businesses can. So in one case it's totally understandable that customer prices would go up (and if I'm shopping in a little local shop I don't mind paying a bit extra because I know they need it, and I know it stays in the community), but it's pretty galling having to pay bonuses for the rich shareholders of giant corporations. It sounds like the publishing business is closer to this model... (not including indie pubs here of course)

 

[Hannah F]

It begs the question: if readers knew profit-of-sales allowed editors to do more editing and writers to earn more for the hours, sweat and tears, would they pay more for the books they buy?

Unfortunately, there is a general misconception that authors roll out of their mansion-beds and take a stroll along their private beach accompanied by their diamond-encrusted collared dog before settling into a comfy chair - cat on lap - and writing and writing and writing . . . time to stop for that champagne swirling meeting . . .
Until readers become aware that fortunes are only held by the few, I think persuading them to spend more will be quite a battle.

 

[CageSage]

It's a problem for farmers as well which became all the more obvious during the pandemic. Supermarkets control the prices and keep them at a very low level which means the farmers can't afford to pay veggie-pickers even a minimum wage, so they utilize an annual influx of migrant pickers. Over the travel-restriction lockdowns, no migrant workers came. Not enough Brits would work for so little (which says something), but the supermarkets wouldn't accept a suitable price increase, so a lot of veg was simply thrown away.

That happened in Australia, too. We're still short on pickers, and then came the floods. Running short everywhere, of everything. We may all be forced to grow some green things if we want them, or pay for imported products from third-world countries - assuming there's a supply chain, fuel, and ...

 

[Rachel Caldecott]

This is concerning. From Publishers' Lunch:
---

Multiple resignations from the editorial departments at two big houses caused an online reckoning on Friday. Four editors, Angeline Rodriquez and Hillary Sames at Orbit, Erin Siu at Macmillan Children's, and Molly McGhee at Tor all announced their resignations, leading to a discussion about the workload of junior and mid-level employees and the difficulty of advancement across the industry. The online exchange brought into the open the frustrations of increased workload, burnout and turnover that has been brewing as the pandemic continues. Those feelings are intensified as big publishers report record sales and earnings, even as multiple people report on Twitter they believe their employers are not sufficiently reinvesting those proceeds in additional staff, systems and raises.

At the heart of the discussion was McGhee's resignation letter which she posted on Twitter. McGhee, who was an assistant editor at Tor/Nightfire, writes that after ten years in assisting roles, she requested a promotion when her first acquisition debuted at No. 3 on the New York Times Best Sellers list. She says in her letter that she was told she needed "more training" before being promoted and she could not expect to be relieved of administration duties "any time within the next five years."

McGhee pointed to "the invisibility of junior employees' workload" as a major issue, asserting that "many executives in the publishing industry are technology illiterate" and rely on their assistants to manage databases, pull manuscripts, and navigate new technology, on top of the duties outlined in their job descriptions.

McGhee's letter opened the floodgates to other people who have left editorial positions recently speaking openly about labor issues. As part of a thread, Margaux Weisman, who recently left Penguin editorial, flagged "the fact that editorial productivity ONLY survives because of the exploitation of assistants." Many others pointed out that the same pressures and frustration are being felt across all departments at publishing companies, though there may be less public awareness, and smart managers and veterans offered empathy and tips, and opened themselves up to consultation. A number of agents also underscored their own difficulties in establishing sustainable careers and keeping up with the workload and representing clients without overburdening editors, while emphasizing the broad financial hardship of converting "advances" into extended "guarantees" that are not paid in advance.

Former editor at Avon Books Elle Keck posted, "As one of the editors who left publishing this year, every editor you know, you’ve seen on Twitter, you’ve heard of: they are miserable and struggling. They’re tired of working all day, working at night, and feeling guilty if they take a weekend off." Julie Rosenberg, formerly of Razorbill, also noted the "crushing guilt and anxiety" caused by the workload.

Speaking to PL, McGhee described this workload: "I worked with five editors during my time at [Tor parent division Tom Doherty Associates]. I always supported at least two editors, in addition to the publisher, all while building my own list. What this means is that I did all administrative work on my editors frontlist and backlist.... At one point in time I was tracking 150 frontlist titles across four seasons in one calendar year.... On top of doing this I was managing company calendars, scheduling my publisher's meetings (publishers take a lot of meetings), reading my editors' and publisher's submissions, drafting contracts, executing deal memos, writing copy, positioning novels, networking to get to know agents as I chased my own submissions, training other junior employees, creating work flow systems to manage cross department care," and much more.

McGhee emphasized that she loved working at Tor, but the amount of work was unmanageable, especially in light of the compensation. She said, "I think a lot of folks will view this as a disgruntled employee situation. It is not. I never thought I would leave TDA. I loved my editors, I loved my authors, and I loved my coworkers. But unfortunately the workload expectations and the pay were untenable. There was no way to communicate this to my managers in a way that was not seen as 'poor time management,' as they had never assisted/started in the technological environment junior and mid-level employees now face."

On the topic of possible solutions, she noted that "admin assistants that work interdepartmentally (that is, who work with marketing, publicity, ad promo, production, contracts) will do a lot to alleviate the burnout across all departments and increase communication interdepartmentally." She added that "investing in managing editorial will go a long way towards helping editorial assistants and editors focus on the actual art of acquiring and editing books."

This has been building up for years now. Very sad. Let's hope they all get together and form a new, independent, and 'fair' publishing house where staff (and writers) are valued.

 

[Pamela Jo]

But doesn't that kinda make my point about increased salaries pushing prices up?

The company wanted for the end price of their products to NOT go up. They wanted to stay competitive. Yet they now needed a 20-24% profit margin which had to come from somewhere. So they simply became more productive but at the same or even less company cost. In other words, they (ab)used the cheap labour market abroad where they can make people work harder and produce more for the same wages (same company costs), and presto, they get increased profits without putting the wages bill, nor the final price up. So in essence the staff paid for the increase. Had the company paid better salaries to incentivise staff to produce more, or hired more staff (less workload for the individual and better work conditions) those company profits would have had to come from the end user. So I do think that for better salaries, prices for the end users have to go up. A reason stuff in the west is cheap-ish is because somewhere abroad, someone is working for peanuts. Raise their salary or bring the jobs to the west where salaries are higher, and we can say byebye to $2 socks. To increase salaries someone has to pay for it somewhere. It's either the company by getting less profit (fat chance here), or clever cost cutting which may mean less quality, or the end user by paying more.

A few years ago, the national minimum wage went up in the UK. Many 'small' shops like hairdressers, beauticians etc had to raise their prices to cover this, because many small companies run on small margins. They had to pass the cost to the consumer in order to trade healthily.

No because contrary to how it should work in capitalism- profits have nothing to do with salaries. My point is corporations arbitrarily decided to pay shareholders twice as much and that money had to come from somewhere. It came from salaries. First workers, then entry level white-collar jobs, now middle management. Only CEO's and firm partners benefit because they' re the shareholders in each others companies. The rise in cost of living has nothing to do with rise in the cost of production. It is simply,again, companies raising prices because they can now that they have no competition and consumers have no alternative. They are sopping up the money that was paid out during Covid as they feel is right and proper. It is why Pete is saying that publishers are raking in record profits but those who create the profits are getting no benefit from it. There is no cause and effect. There is no capitalism. Artificially keeping the prices of clothes and food low is one way that corporations have excused their transfer of high paying jobs out of first world countries to third world. Anyone who was in China in the 1980's vs now can see that manufacturing jobs even when low paid transform countries in ways that service jobs cannot. However the 2.00 socks, 2.00 hamburgers, 2.00 jars of "Manuka" honey disguised the fact that salaries were low because consumers felt they could still buy an equivalent amount. Austrian economics have created the same conditions that Dickens wrote about. It wasn't the potato crops failing that starved the Irish population. It was Mancusian economics that Dickens personified in Scrooge. Everywhere I drive in Ireland I see beautiful stone walls lining the roads. They make me shiver because each stone means some starving man or woman lifted and pulled it into place in exchange for some bread and turnip soup. Even the starving had to be "incentivised" in Mancunian economics. Tons of produce continued to be exported to England during the famine. What is usually missed by the Irish is that the same economics were starving people in Scotland, Wales and England. There are different types of capitalism just as there are different types of communism. The one we have now resembles fuedalism more than the system that existed pre Thatcher and pre Reagan. Call it Mancunian, Austrian or Trickledown it is unmistakeable in it's results in any age. There is no free market. Not in the City since the Big Bang of 1986. Not in the US since the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act in 1999. There is no capitalism that responds to supply and demand, competition, or rewards work with a salary commensurate with the profit earned from that work. The first thing that has to happen to halt climate change is to remove growth as the gauge of a healthy economy. Constant consumer-driven growth is by definition unsustainable. It is actually fairly recently established as canon in business schools. The second is to remove the Austrian, Mancusian, Trickledown canon that maximising shareholder profits is the one and only purpose of a corporation.

 

[Hannah F]

No because contrary to how it should work in capitalism- profits have nothing to do with salaries. My point is corporations arbitrarily decided to pay shareholders twice as much and that money had to come from somewhere. It came from salaries. First workers, then entry level white-collar jobs, now middle management. Only CEO's and firm partners benefit because they' re the shareholders in each others companies. The rise in cost of living has nothing to do with rise in the cost of production. It is simply,again, companies raising prices because they can now that they have no competition and consumers have no alternative. They are sopping up the money that was paid out during Covid as they feel is right and proper. It is why Pete is saying that publishers are raking in record profits but those who create the profits are getting no benefit from it. There is no cause and effect. There is no capitalism. Artificially keeping the prices of clothes and food low is one way that corporations have excused their transfer of high paying jobs out of first world countries to third world. Anyone who was in China in the 1980's vs now can see that manufacturing jobs even when low paid transform countries in ways that service jobs cannot. However the 2.00 socks, 2.00 hamburgers, 2.00 jars of "Manuka" honey disguised the fact that salaries were low because consumers felt they could still buy an equivalent amount. Austrian economics have created the same conditions that Dickens wrote about. It wasn't the potato crops failing that starved the Irish population. It was Mancusian economics that Dickens personified in Scrooge. Everywhere I drive in Ireland I see beautiful stone walls lining the roads. They make me shiver because each stone means some starving man or woman lifted and pulled it into place in exchange for some bread and turnip soup. Even the starving had to be "incentivised" in Mancunian economics. Tons of produce continued to be exported to England during the famine. What is usually missed by the Irish is that the same economics were starving people in Scotland, Wales and England. There are different types of capitalism just as there are different types of communism. The one we have now resembles fuedalism more than the system that existed pre Thatcher and pre Reagan. Call it Mancunian, Austrian or Trickledown it is unmistakeable in it's results in any age. There is no free market. Not in the City since the Big Bang of 1986. Not in the US since the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act in 1999. There is no capitalism that responds to supply and demand, competition, or rewards work with a salary commensurate with the profit earned from that work. The first thing that has to happen to halt climate change is to remove growth as the gauge of a healthy economy. Constant consumer-driven growth is by definition unsustainable. It is actually fairly recently established as canon in business schools. The second is to remove the Austrian, Mancusian, Trickledown canon that maximising shareholder profits is the one and only purpose of a corporation.

You can buy Manuka honey for £2? It's at least £7 here. I don't buy it though. I support the local bees. They get paid in heather and wild flowers and have sustainable colonies that don't have to suffer miles and miles of transportation.

No, the Irish millions who starved during the famine did indeed do so because of failure of the potato crops. And it was the British feudal system that killed them. Much of the farming industry had been turned over from grains to cattle - to keep the British stocked with increasingly popular beef. Absent British landlords paid their Irish tenants so poorly, the tenants (and an increasing number of evicted tenants) came to rely almost completely on the Irish lumper (potato). Thus, when the potato blight infected the lumper, no other food was available to them (apart from what they could poach), and so they died in increasing numbers. The British government considered the Irish a lesser species and did nothing until 1845 by which time many were already dead. The same catastrophic effect of the potato blight did not happen in Scotland, Wales or England, nor did it affect the rich British settlers in Dublin (known as "The Pale") because they did not have to rely on a single, cheap, fast growing crop to feed them. The famine was a catalyst in Ireland breaking away from the UK and becoming an independent nation.

The prevalence of dry stone walls all over rural Ireland is not because the British paid bread and soup to have them built. The oldest stone wall in Ireland is in Co. Mayo and built approximately 5 800 years ago, long before the famine. Dry stone walls are part of our Irish heritage. They make me smile and long may they remain.

 

[Rachel Caldecott]

No because contrary to how it should work in capitalism- profits have nothing to do with salaries. My point is corporations arbitrarily decided to pay shareholders twice as much and that money had to come from somewhere. It came from salaries. First workers, then entry level white-collar jobs, now middle management. Only CEO's and firm partners benefit because they' re the shareholders in each others companies. The rise in cost of living has nothing to do with rise in the cost of production. It is simply,again, companies raising prices because they can now that they have no competition and consumers have no alternative. They are sopping up the money that was paid out during Covid as they feel is right and proper. It is why Pete is saying that publishers are raking in record profits but those who create the profits are getting no benefit from it. There is no cause and effect. There is no capitalism. Artificially keeping the prices of clothes and food low is one way that corporations have excused their transfer of high paying jobs out of first world countries to third world. Anyone who was in China in the 1980's vs now can see that manufacturing jobs even when low paid transform countries in ways that service jobs cannot. However the 2.00 socks, 2.00 hamburgers, 2.00 jars of "Manuka" honey disguised the fact that salaries were low because consumers felt they could still buy an equivalent amount. Austrian economics have created the same conditions that Dickens wrote about. It wasn't the potato crops failing that starved the Irish population. It was Mancusian economics that Dickens personified in Scrooge. Everywhere I drive in Ireland I see beautiful stone walls lining the roads. They make me shiver because each stone means some starving man or woman lifted and pulled it into place in exchange for some bread and turnip soup. Even the starving had to be "incentivised" in Mancunian economics. Tons of produce continued to be exported to England during the famine. What is usually missed by the Irish is that the same economics were starving people in Scotland, Wales and England. There are different types of capitalism just as there are different types of communism. The one we have now resembles fuedalism more than the system that existed pre Thatcher and pre Reagan. Call it Mancunian, Austrian or Trickledown it is unmistakeable in it's results in any age. There is no free market. Not in the City since the Big Bang of 1986. Not in the US since the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act in 1999. There is no capitalism that responds to supply and demand, competition, or rewards work with a salary commensurate with the profit earned from that work. The first thing that has to happen to halt climate change is to remove growth as the gauge of a healthy economy. Constant consumer-driven growth is by definition unsustainable. It is actually fairly recently established as canon in business schools. The second is to remove the Austrian, Mancusian, Trickledown canon that maximising shareholder profits is the one and only purpose of a corporation.

Don't get me started on share-holders. I don't have enough polite vocab.

 

[Ed Simnett]

Aside: the 1980s "Band Aid" famine in Ethiopia was at least as much the result of political actions as climate.

The US has a surprisingly corporatist / rent seeking business mentality, especially for those that assume it is capitalism raw in tooth and claw. I suspect that is infecting the UK quickly.

It is notable that the fastest +/- sustained growth in the US economy took place at a time when the income inequality was the lowest (1950-1970). But at some point those at the top worked out that they could make more for themselves by increasing executive pay at the expense of the rest of the workforce. That said I think we should be careful not to conflate poor pay and working conditions in "charismatic" jobs with the very real issues of corporate exploitation at the high school graduate and below end of the labor market.

To lighten the tone a little, perhaps publishing is one of the "good party" jobs. i.e. one of the reasons you take the gig is because of who you meet and what you get to do (see also art, fashion, film, travel, advertising, design etc). Over the past 2 years anyone at the bottom of the pile in publishing is faced with the unremitting grind of the bad parts of the job, with almost none of the normal perks.

<ahead of my skis here> Another observation is that, from a talent pov, if the publishing houses are consolidating then naturally the career advancement opportunities will fall. With the actual model of book publishing itself in so much flux it's unclear how that resolves itself. Presumably back in the day you would just start a publishing company, but now what does that even mean?

 

[BarbaraUS]

But doesn't that kinda make my point about increased salaries pushing prices up?

The company wanted for the end price of their products to NOT go up. They wanted to stay competitive. Yet they now needed a 20-24% profit margin which had to come from somewhere. So they simply became more productive but at the same or even less company cost. In other words, they (ab)used the cheap labour market abroad where they can make people work harder and produce more for the same wages (same company costs), and presto, they get increased profits without putting the wages bill, nor the final price up. So in essence the staff paid for the increase. Had the company paid better salaries to incentivise staff to produce more, or hired more staff (less workload for the individual and better work conditions) those company profits would have had to come from the end user. So I do think that for better salaries, prices for the end users have to go up. A reason stuff in the west is cheap-ish is because somewhere abroad, someone is working for peanuts. Raise their salary or bring the jobs to the west where salaries are higher, and we can say byebye to $2 socks. To increase salaries someone has to pay for it somewhere. It's either the company by getting less profit (fat chance here), or clever cost cutting which may mean less quality, or the end user by paying more.

A few years ago, the national minimum wage went up in the UK. Many 'small' shops like hairdressers, beauticians etc had to raise their prices to cover this, because many small companies run on small margins. They had to pass the cost to the consumer in order to trade healthily.

I think my next book about an eco-friendly future will include not only a world where the Internet is part of a bygone era but capitalism will also be left in the past. I'll start with laws limiting corporate profits and also individual net worth (let's say $1 billion tops to start with). Oh, and teachers will be paid more than athletes.. much more. It will be a #solarpunk world.. where air and water are valued above all else! A girl can dream.

 

[gbhunt]

Academia in the US is having somewhat similar issues wrt the coal face. Enormous endowments, ever increasing fees, but tenure track jobs harder and harder to get, and professor pay stagnating. What is happen is that the "non-productive" ends of the organizations, the administration, and some alumni pleasing roles (e.g. football coaches) are seeing more positions and much better pay. I suppose managing large administrative bodies is easier to benchmark (aka justify big money) to the generic private sector than the teaching role itself. The result is more and more younger academics are having to juggle multiple horrible underpaid adjunct positions, and/or quitting.

Hear, hear. Exactly what I saw during my career.

 

[gbhunt]

This is concerning. From Publishers' Lunch:
---

Multiple resignations from the editorial departments at two big houses caused an online reckoning on Friday. Four editors, Angeline Rodriquez and Hillary Sames at Orbit, Erin Siu at Macmillan Children's, and Molly McGhee at Tor all announced their resignations, leading to a discussion about the workload of junior and mid-level employees and the difficulty of advancement across the industry. The online exchange brought into the open the frustrations of increased workload, burnout and turnover that has been brewing as the pandemic continues. Those feelings are intensified as big publishers report record sales and earnings, even as multiple people report on Twitter they believe their employers are not sufficiently reinvesting those proceeds in additional staff, systems and raises.

At the heart of the discussion was McGhee's resignation letter which she posted on Twitter. McGhee, who was an assistant editor at Tor/Nightfire, writes that after ten years in assisting roles, she requested a promotion when her first acquisition debuted at No. 3 on the New York Times Best Sellers list. She says in her letter that she was told she needed "more training" before being promoted and she could not expect to be relieved of administration duties "any time within the next five years."

McGhee pointed to "the invisibility of junior employees' workload" as a major issue, asserting that "many executives in the publishing industry are technology illiterate" and rely on their assistants to manage databases, pull manuscripts, and navigate new technology, on top of the duties outlined in their job descriptions.

McGhee's letter opened the floodgates to other people who have left editorial positions recently speaking openly about labor issues. As part of a thread, Margaux Weisman, who recently left Penguin editorial, flagged "the fact that editorial productivity ONLY survives because of the exploitation of assistants." Many others pointed out that the same pressures and frustration are being felt across all departments at publishing companies, though there may be less public awareness, and smart managers and veterans offered empathy and tips, and opened themselves up to consultation. A number of agents also underscored their own difficulties in establishing sustainable careers and keeping up with the workload and representing clients without overburdening editors, while emphasizing the broad financial hardship of converting "advances" into extended "guarantees" that are not paid in advance.

Former editor at Avon Books Elle Keck posted, "As one of the editors who left publishing this year, every editor you know, you’ve seen on Twitter, you’ve heard of: they are miserable and struggling. They’re tired of working all day, working at night, and feeling guilty if they take a weekend off." Julie Rosenberg, formerly of Razorbill, also noted the "crushing guilt and anxiety" caused by the workload.

Speaking to PL, McGhee described this workload: "I worked with five editors during my time at [Tor parent division Tom Doherty Associates]. I always supported at least two editors, in addition to the publisher, all while building my own list. What this means is that I did all administrative work on my editors frontlist and backlist.... At one point in time I was tracking 150 frontlist titles across four seasons in one calendar year.... On top of doing this I was managing company calendars, scheduling my publisher's meetings (publishers take a lot of meetings), reading my editors' and publisher's submissions, drafting contracts, executing deal memos, writing copy, positioning novels, networking to get to know agents as I chased my own submissions, training other junior employees, creating work flow systems to manage cross department care," and much more.

McGhee emphasized that she loved working at Tor, but the amount of work was unmanageable, especially in light of the compensation. She said, "I think a lot of folks will view this as a disgruntled employee situation. It is not. I never thought I would leave TDA. I loved my editors, I loved my authors, and I loved my coworkers. But unfortunately the workload expectations and the pay were untenable. There was no way to communicate this to my managers in a way that was not seen as 'poor time management,' as they had never assisted/started in the technological environment junior and mid-level employees now face."

On the topic of possible solutions, she noted that "admin assistants that work interdepartmentally (that is, who work with marketing, publicity, ad promo, production, contracts) will do a lot to alleviate the burnout across all departments and increase communication interdepartmentally." She added that "investing in managing editorial will go a long way towards helping editorial assistants and editors focus on the actual art of acquiring and editing books."

It does make you think that the existing paradigm is unsustainable, and the industry is due for a shake-up, which @AgentPete has been suggesting for some time.

 

[AgentPete]

Smaller publishers may find it easier to adjust to a new biz model than larger ones – who, presumably, will be mostly occupied on the zillionth Star Wars / Batman / whatever-the-current-franchise-is / novelization.

Book publishing isn’t a naturally big-corp operation. There’s far too much variability in it. Too much reliance on the individual and their talent / expertise / flair. Standardisation and risk-reduction is a typical big-corp hallmark (think Mickey D) and that ain't publishing.

My ideal publishing environment would mostly consist of medium-sized publishing companies. You can do a lot with an operation of 25 people or so.

Also, I feel we may be seeing the emergence of publishing as a service industry to authors. More on this in a Huddle.

 

[Rachel Caldecott]

Smaller publishers may find it easier to adjust to a new biz model than larger ones – who, presumably, will be mostly occupied on the zillionth Star Wars / Batman / whatever-the-current-franchise-is / novelization.

Book publishing isn’t a naturally big-corp operation. There’s far too much variability in it. Too much reliance on the individual and their talent / expertise / flair. Standardisation and risk-reduction is a typical big-corp hallmark (think Mickey D) and that ain't publishing.

My ideal publishing environment would mostly consist of medium-sized publishing companies. You can do a lot with an operation of 25 people or so.

Also, I feel we may be seeing the emergence of publishing as a service industry to authors. More on this in a Huddle.

Sorry to bang on about my dad all the time, but already in the early 70s he was tiring of BIG publishing houses, that's why he started Wildwood House. Wildwood was tiny and prided itself on publishing interesting ideas by interesting authors, and nearly all the authors eventually became friends. Certainly, they benefited from a personal relationship with the editors. (Wildwood House (publisher) - Wikipedia ) As far as I remember, Wildwood was backed by and eventually bought up by Random House. Dad left and went to run the Rider imprint at Hutchinson, which then got bought up by Century. He resigned very disheartened, as it was now run entirely by the accounts department. He ended up working for a while with Gothic Image in Glastonbury, but by that time he was already dying of cancer (he died aged 64). As a family, we hold the prevailing unadulterated capitalistic climate at Century partly to blame for his illness. (Possibly unreasonably, I do admit).

 

[Rachel Caldecott]

PS. I think my dad would have really liked @AgentPete and vice versa.

 

[N J Sturgess]

I think this is endemic it all arts organisations. I know publishers are businesses, but they're businesses that sell art.

I've been in this situation myself in the museum sector and see people going on about it on Twitter like it's normal. Giving 100% for a job you enjoy and being expected to drop everything else at home whilst doing 15 people's jobs. I can't blame them for getting out - it's a shame though that talent ends up leaving in ways like this.