By Jason Steger
A slim majority of staff at Readings in Melbourne voted last month to negotiate an Enterprise Bargaining Agreement with management through the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union. Of the 133 Readings staff eligible to vote, 67 were in favour, while 53 opposed. The votes of the 13 people who chose not to express a view were counted as no votes, which resulted in an overall majority of one.
Managing director Mark Rubbo said management would be meeting with the Fair Work Commission next week. “We absolutely want to get a result that works for staff and ensures Readings remains viable,” he said. “That’s what I’d like the outcome to be.”
Since the advent of the pandemic, bookshops have, like many businesses, struggled to keep going by boosting online sales, introducing click-and-collect operations, and even home delivering.
The vote was clearly divisive for the seven-shop chain, with one bookseller saying they didn’t think bringing in the union to negotiate an EBA was required. “Quite a few of us don’t think it’s necessary. Everything Readings does is by the book or more.”
But staff in favour issued a statement saying the push for an EBA did not represent a threat to the bookshop: “An EBA represents a great opportunity for Readings to enshrine its legacy as a progressive cultural institution that values its people. This EBA would be the first of its kind for booksellers in Australia – a point of pride for all involved.”
Credit: Andrew Dyson
Meanwhile at Newtown’s Better Read than Dead bookshop staff are voting in a Fair Work Commission protected-action ballot as they attempt to bring management to the negotiating table. Among the union’s EBA demands are a $25-per-hour base rate, 5 per cent annual pay rise during the terms of the agreement and 25 days of holiday.
Trauma cleaner dies
When author and lawyer Sarah Krasnostein first encountered Sandra Pankhurst, she felt “clobbered”. It was at a conference: “I saw her sitting at this card table,” Krasnostein said, “and she looked so striking and beautiful, and her business is something I’d never thought of ... I wasn’t wearing my writer’s hat and I just thought, I need to know this person.”
Pankhurst, who died on Thursday, had been a sex worker, a wife, a husband, a father, had undergone gender-reassignment surgery and had become a successful businesswoman running a Specialised Trauma Cleaning Services.
Krasnostein told her story in The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in Death, Decay & Disaster for which she won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s non-fiction prize.
Keep calm and carry on
Melbourne Writers Festival artistic director Michaela McGuire remains her usual sanguine self with two months until the festival begins – despite lockdowns in Sydney that could derail an influx of local guests in early September. McGuire has a right to be nervous – she was director of Sydney’s festival last year when it was cancelled due to the pandemic. But she says a lot can change in those two months and while “we are focusing on Plan A” she does have some contingencies in place, including 10 pre-recorded conversations with international guests including Jhumpa Lahiri and Maggie Nelson. The program will be launched on July 28 and a festival liftout will appear in The Age on July 31.
Is this a dagger I see before me?
Michael Robotham has a thing for daggers, but not as his chosen method of killing in his best-selling crime novels. Last week he won the British Crime Writers’ Association Steel Dagger award for the best thriller of the year for When She Was Good, pipping one Robert Galbraith – aka J.K. Rowling – to the award.
Serial dagger winner Michael Robotham.Credit: Wolter Peeters
Robotham was surprised to win as last year he won his second Gold Dagger for the best crime novel for Good Girl Bad Girl. (He first won the big one in 2015 for Life or Death over Galbraith and Stephen King.) Robotham didn’t expect to win and unlike last year hadn’t been given a hint. Nevertheless he dragged himself out of bed around 4.30am to log on to the video link. He made a coffee and just before being revealed as the winner managed to spill it down his front. Not a good look in anybody’s book, crime or not.
He’s come a long way since he started his first novel, The Suspect, almost exactly 20 years ago. His latest, When You are Mine, has just come out, he is writing a third in the Evie Cormac/ Cyrus Haven series and later this year production begins on a sequel to The Secrets She Keeps and a series based on his novels featuring his psychologist protagonist, Joe O’Loughlin.
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