Image: Pauline Loroy, Unsplash
Bookstores are understandably romanticised spaces. It’s difficult to understate the near-unbridled pleasure book lovers take in losing themselves among the shelves of a well-curated store. The smell of pages, the sumptuous aesthetic feast of colourful covers and spines, the brief glimpses into exotic alternate worlds—even as online giants like Amazon have cannibalised independent bookstores with their economies of scale, the passion with which many bookworms cherish the in-person browsing experience has only increased.
‘I want to be able to get lost in them, to lose track of time in them, to encounter titles and authors and subjects in them that I hadn’t anticipated, and to leave me brimming with anticipation,’ writes Howard Fishman in the New Yorker—even going so far as to encourage bookstores to charge entry fees to monetise these ‘intangibles’.
But while said romanticism is usually attached to physical spaces and the tomes they house, it is the labour of bookstore workers that makes these spaces intellectually stimulating and commercially functional. Far from the standoffish, dishevelled introvert epitomised in Black Books, the booksellers I’ve encountered in my many hours of enraptured loitering have been inviting and knowledgeable advisors, drawing upon wellsprings of knowledge from countless unpaid hours of reading.
Their labour is frequently forgotten. Even in The Bookseller’s Tale by veteran bookseller Martin Latham (2020), a meandering history of the bookselling trade, the employees who guide browsers on their literary quests frequently recede from view. Latham’s loving, witty volume renders early traders, store owners and customers in their full diversity, including lengthy passages on female and working-class readers. But ironically, given its title, it reads at times as if all those books somehow sprouted legs and walked themselves to their shelves.
When bookstore workers’ labour is depicted, it is frequently imagined to be idyllic simply because of the proximity to books and their hallowed halfway homes. George Orwell, reflecting on his time working in a second-hand bookshop in London, wrote that bookstores are ‘so easily pictured, if you don’t work in one, as a kind of paradise…But the hours of work are very long, and it is an unhealthy life.’ Indeed, he writes that before long, ‘I lost my love of books… The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer.’
When bookstore workers’ labour is depicted, it is frequently imagined to be idyllic simply because of the proximity to books and their hallowed halfway homes.
Just as it has taken me seven years to regain a taste for popcorn after working in a cinema, any worker subjected to the realities of labour in beloved institutions can never quite stomach their romanticisation by enchanted visitors. One may be drawn to the institution by its varied promises, and remain committed to the trade, but labouring there doesn’t feel like a ‘privilege’ as some might depict it. It feels like work, because it is.
It is the value of this work that Australian bookstore staff are increasingly highlighting, as industrial activism rises. And it is the ‘privilege’ of being immersed in spaces others frequent for pleasure that bookstore owners have been accused of weaponising when pushing back against workers’ claims.
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The closest my home town of Melbourne gets to Paris’ Shakespeare and Company or Venice’s Libreria Acqua Alta is undoubtedly Readings. Inaugural winner of the London Book Fair’s Bookstore of the Year award in 2016, the franchise has expanded from its home on Lygon Street to a small chain of boutique outlets across the city.
I’m sure many customers imagine it to be a dream workplace. Imagine getting paid to potter around those gorgeous shelves full of Penguin Classics, not to mention the famous ‘Readings Bargain Table’, or eavesdrop on an author talk, the sounds of a jazz record from the store’s music section gently scoring your thoughts? But for many Readings workers, their love for their iconic stores isn’t enough to compensate for what they view as substandard wages and conditions. The Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (RAFFWU) Secretary Josh Cullinan told me that many Readings workers receive only the minimum wage for their industry, and said that some receive less than the adult minimum due to discounted junior rates.
That’s why a group of Readings workers have unionised under RAFFWU and have been pursuing an enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA) since 2020, after an initial aborted attempt in 2018. Readings owner Mark Rubbo initially told The Age that ‘he didn’t feel an EBA was necessary in a company the size of Readings…”I have just had the worst year of my whole career and we’re trying to recover”.’ But he subsequently agreed to a binding ballot of employees on the question of initiating negotiations, which came back narrowly in favour—RAFFWU claimed that most shop floor workers were supportive, while many managerial and professional staff backed Rubbo.
Negotiations are ongoing. Rubbo told me, ‘We are coming to the end of our meetings with the bargaining representatives. This is an internal process, and I don’t think it’s appropriate to comment publicly until it has come to its conclusion.’
Readings aren’t the only booksellers pursuing this path. After a fractious, two-year-long negotiating process, staff and management at Better Read than Dead (BRTD) bookstore in Sydney have finally settled on an EBA, the first in the Australian bookselling industry, which is in the final stages of approval. It is set to modestly lift pay, abolish junior rates after three months and significantly improve various conditions. RAFFWU hopes it will set a new benchmark for the sector.
Some workers are dissatisfied with their working conditions, while others are satisfied but wish to solidify their conditions and democratise corporate decision-making.
While BRTD and Readings are the only two Australian bookstores to bargain for an EBA so far, RAFFWU also represents members at Dymocks, Gleebooks and a handful of other bookstores. Some workers are dissatisfied with their working conditions, while others are satisfied but wish to solidify their conditions and democratise corporate decision-making. They aren’t the only part of the book supply chain unionising either—the Australian arm of Penguin Random House unionised and won an enterprise agreement in 2019; printing factory workers have long been unionised. And overseas, booksellers at renowned bookstores such as New York’s The Strand and London’s Waterstones have also taken industrial action. It was perhaps only a matter of time until booksellers joined their adjacent comrades.
Their feeling of being undervalued highlights a tension in the nature of bookselling labour—it straddles the retail and publishing sectors, requiring customer service skills but also deep literary knowledge. Latham puts it rather pompously in The Bookseller’s Tale: ‘Bookshop staff combine being shop assistants and literary experts. The job feels more expansive than the word ‘career’…It’s a philosophic path.’ It is this intellectual labour which RAFFWU Secretary Josh Cullinan highlighted when I spoke to him as being ‘exploited for often very low wages’.
As Zachary Moore-Boyle, a bookseller and former BTRD employee, told me, ‘the work booksellers perform sits in this ambiguous position between physical labour and intellectual labour.’ In 2021, Moore-Boyle addressed a rally for striking BRTD workers alongside writer and critic Anwen Crawford, who reiterated how this hybrid nature of bookselling work can be weaponised to diminish booksellers’ intellectual contributions.
Readings worker Jack Rowland concurs. ‘There’s an enormous amount of work that needs to be done outside the workplace to be a good bookseller,’ he told me, ‘and there’s an enormous amount of passion, dedication and care. I think that a lot of that goes undervalued in the sector and we are treated no different to a retail teller who is just expected to man a counter.’
The required skill level has only increased as bookstores have moved from simple shopfronts to ‘hubs’ for events and classes, often including online components. The average bookseller, Moore-Boyle told Green Left Weekly, has to be a ‘jack of all trades, expected to run social media campaigns, book clubs, podcasts and build complex displays’. Other higher-order tasks include writing book reviews for newsletters and signage.
‘There’s an enormous amount of work that needs to be done outside the workplace to be a good bookseller…I think that a lot of that goes undervalued in the sector.’
According to Moore-Boyle, BRTD workers started organising ‘after realising how undervalued and exploited they were’ given the breadth of their expertise. ‘We were being asked to take on tasks that were way beyond what a Level 1 retail employee should reasonably be expected to do,’ he told me. ‘It made people exhausted to be paid minimum wage and take on those tasks, and be punished by getting shifts cut if you refused to do them… Multiple staff members left because they were burned out.’
‘We are dealing with a workforce who are learners, who are interested in all sorts of views being spoken about,’ RAFFWU’s Cullinan told me. ‘But for many of them, they are also powerless.’
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Confronted with workers banding together to demand better conditions, some bookstore owners have responded in a hostile manner. Given industrial action in the sector has been barely heard of until recently, many managers are reluctantly becoming accustomed to what is an established norm in many other industries—sharing industrial power. And their efforts to ward off employee activism have often rested on the supposed ‘privilege’ of toiling amid the cherished smell of freshly-inked books—Cullinan claimed managers at Readings have stated in bargaining meetings ‘that, in essence, it is a privilege to work for Readings’.
As unionists Bethany Patch and Joshua Barnes wrote in Jacobin, this attitude reflects ‘the most persistent canard in the book trade… the idea that the work itself is pleasurable enough to justify low wages and precarity’. Leveraging an organisation’s prestige is a common employer tactic to stifle dissent in desirable sectors, such as the arts and trendy cafes.
Accusations of ‘union busting’ have also been levelled at employers. For instance, as reported in the Guardian, multiple BRTD staff were selected for redundancy, which RAFFWU claims was due to their union activism. RAFFWU pursued unfair dismissal actions, which they claim were ‘resolved to the satisfaction of the staff members’. And after RAFFWU posted on social media about the bargaining process, BRTD management threatened the union and workers who shared the post with defamation action. The post was subsequently removed.
The literary community responded to these provocations, with an open letter signed by 245 Australian authors including Di Morrissey, Christos Tsiolkas, Melissa Lucashenko and Michelle de Kretser calling on BRTD’s management to ‘end its union busting and its lockout of unionised workers’.
The question of unionisation presents a unique tension for erstwhile progressive cultural leaders…it demands a turn from mere benevolence toward a decentralisation of power.
The question of unionisation presents a unique tension for erstwhile progressive cultural leaders. Many bookshop owners have treated their workers well in many instances, such as Rubbo financially supporting staff who were ineligible for government COVID payments. But unionisation demands a turn from mere benevolence toward a decentralisation of power. In long-unionised sectors, many owners take this as a given. But the bookstore sector seems on the inevitably fractious cusp of establishing a new industrial norm.
‘It is certainly noted by members that these stores are often in progressive communities, catering to a progressive customer base, with the employers purporting to a kind of small-l liberal approach,’ Cullinan told me. ‘Members have wanted to give their employers every opportunity, but these claims are what all progressive-minded people would accept. They’re not asking for $40 an hour, these are basic living wages’.
As Moore-Boyle said, ‘The biggest lesson for me is that there is power in the union, that solidarity works.’
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Better Read Than Dead were contacted to provide their perspective, but did not respond in time for publication.
