On May 4th, a super-majority of the almost 140 eligible workers at the University of Chicago Press, one of the country’s largest and oldest academic publishers, announced that they would be unionizing as part of the Chicago News Guild.
A few days before, I’d been invited to a virtual town hall, where the organizers would tell us the plans for going public. I read the email and told myself that I needed to go, and then work came in, and my mind quickly moved on. It was only when the meeting notes appeared in my inbox that I realized I’d completely forgotten. I felt ashamed. I read the notes and asked friends if they had gone and what I should know. I had seen the mention of the organizers’ plan for the public announcement but hadn’t realized how soon it would come.
I knew that it was impending, however vaguely. There were clandestine requests to talk over coffee, Zoom calls, monthly newsletters, people asking if I was coming to this or that happy hour, a number of picnics, half-conversations over lunch, people asking one another in sly ways if they’d come to any of the meetings, if they’d signed their cards yet. Months calved by months. But the announcement itself felt sudden. After simmering for a year (likely longer), it happened Monday morning. Someone posted a notice on the all-staff board, people commented about their excitement, replied with notes of solidarity. It was on a day that most employees work remotely, and so the effects of the reveal felt smaller to me, another thing on a screen.
But the next day, people came into the office; we had a picnic in the midway, and passed out branded t-shirts. The week after, some workers went around campus putting up posters. A week after that, they proliferated further out into the neighborhoods where we all lived—Logan, Andersonville, Ravenswood, so on. Everything felt more real seeing it in person.
In the years before I began working at the press, I was a freelancer. Money was always tight. Everything needed to be done quickly, so I could get paid, cover rent, and move on to the next job. It was fulfilling work, but there was never enough to go around. No matter how much I felt I was doing, there was always a lingering anxiety about what I would do when this project was done, what I would do next, how much that next thing would pay me, if it would be enough. When I got the job at UCP, I was excited to work somewhere established, historic, who published writers like Berlant and Derrida and Foucault. I was grateful for the consistent paycheck. It was a relief not to think so ceaselessly about rent, even if there was not much beyond that. It was better than I’d been doing.
During the initial union meetings, there was a lot of talk about how now is a particularly difficult time to start a union. Jobs are increasingly scarce. The economy (however vague a construct) is no good. The current administration is cutting funding to universities across the country. Inconveniencing your bosses (however many abstractions of boss they are above you) seems unwise. Such gestures could lead to unwanted observation or added pressure. But in this precarity is the crux of the union’s usefulness. Workers standing together, a united front, everyone towards the same goal, the needs of the many.
The union asks for what should not need to be asked for. A more livable wage floor, a manageable workload, better PTO, a clear understanding of remote opportunities, of paths to promotion, to know what influence the university exerts over the press and its decisions. These are demands that, made by the individual, carry little weight—that have almost no chance of being forfeited to us.
Thus far, the university has not responded to the union’s request for recognition. They’ve remained silent while quietly retaining Anna Wermuth, an anti-union lawyer attached to Cozen O’Connor—writing a check that would have been better put towards their employees’ well-being. Seeing gestures like this does not paint the university leadership in a favorable light. It foreshadows attack ads and heavy resistance to the union—more funds misallocated. At the time of writing, they have yet to send workers a ‘pls don’t unionize’ email, but it’s appearance feels imminent and inevitable.
According to the university’s 2024 tax filings, fourteen individuals were paid over one million dollars that year, with the current president, Paul Alivisatos, receiving just under two million on paper. The former president, Robert Zimmer, received 4.7 million. Mark Anderson, the Dean of the Pritzker School of Medicine, 2.9 million. I see these salaries and I think about what my coworkers are paid, I think about V who hasn’t gotten a raise in three years, about people working in higher positions than me making only a few grand more a year. People working unpaid overtime so the university doesn’t have to hire another employee.
I think about other publishers doing the same, about the workers at Hachette who announced their union campaign at the end of last month. Wanting the same things that we want. I think about more radical presses like Haymarket, and the history they’re named after—the 1886 Haymarket strike’s famous, “Eight Hours for Work. Eight Hours for Rest. Eight Hours for What We Will” slogan. Chicago’s long history of union efforts. The Pullman Strike put on by the rail workers in the mid-1890s. Pullman’s company town, long defunct, where the University of Chicago Press’ distribution center is now housed. The Memorial Day strike in 1937 that demanded the most basic living and safety conditions, only for the police to respond by killing ten demonstrators, beating many more. Efforts like this that feel so large in retrospect. A body of workers held down by the same hand. Acts of resistance and solidarity so often met with violent response. 1
And seeing all of this laid out before me, I feel melodramatic. These workers who came before wanted such foundational labor rights which I now take for granted. Eight hour work day, forty hour work week. When I look at my phone after work, everything is atrocities. Palestine is flattened, evaporated, burrowed into by settlers. Trans people die and disappear. ICE raids an apartment complex, converts a dozen more warehouses into illegal detention centers. The climate disintegrates. Forest fires crawl across Canada. My friends balance their part-time jobs to make sure they can still get their medicine through the state. My pain and dissatisfaction feels absurd in these moments. I think about what I have and others do not. What suffering is beyond my understanding, the little usefulness my empathy can offer. It feels selfish to want. But it shouldn’t. People think—people tell other people, people decide for themselves—that they must pick what to care about. That if you cannot hold tight each of these causes in your hand, that if you cannot name their every detail, the stone’s every groove and demarcation, that you must let them go so you can hold more perfectly just one. You must ‘pick a cause.’ But this is a myth. It is the illusion of a monstrous future that wants to swallow you whole.
In its nascent form, that future churns slowly. Detail after detail. One thousand notifications. One thousand iterations of the same impish pecking. What stones you must hold onto and which ones you must let go. Each vying for its moment—progress made single-file. But this is not the reality of our situation. All of these struggles are interconnected. They often share the same perpetrators, the same beneficiaries. Being-towards-profit. Wanting only for themselves.
And then come Friday, the university sends out an email saying that they will be separating the press into ‘professional’ and ‘nonprofessional’ employees. Maybe as an attempt to divide the workforce, maybe as an attempt to limit how many people really get to unionize. They’ve introduced a secondary vote to our election about whether the former would like to include the latter in their collective bargaining. The distinction between who is and is not ‘professional’ appears to have been decided at random. Some production and design roles are professional, some editorial roles, but not all. The university has said that this classification is required by the National Labor Relations Board, but organizers were quick to reveal that this is not the case. The university had stipulated it as part of the election agreement.
Elections are going to be happening at the press offices in early June. Remote workers will mail in their ballots by sometime in early July. I’m not sure when the results will come in. I feel hopeful that the people of the press will vote in favor of the union—a feeling that has only been emboldened by the introduction of this ‘nonprofessional’ typification. I am not sure what the negotiations after that will be like, if we will have to go on strike, what kind of subterfuge we should expect from Anna Wermuth and Cozen O’Connor, but I feel a slow simmering hope that things will move, inch by inch, towards something better.
- If the university leadership would like to learn more about unions and their benefits, they can refer to Union by Law by Michael W. McCann, Union Power by Carmela Patrias and Larry Savage, Unions, Equity, and the Path to Renewal by Janice R. Foley and Patricia L. Baker, Our Union by Jason Russell, or a half a dozen more titles all published by the University of Chicago Press.
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