By Jason Steger
It was only a couple of years ago that staff at Penguin Random House and representatives from the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance had their first meeting with management to discuss a proposed enterprise bargaining agreement. Despite a few hiccups along the way it was eventually agreed upon and became the first in the Australian publishing industry.
Now there’s another push for an EBA, this time by staff at Readings who are represented by the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union. If successful, it would be the first such agreement in a bookshop. There are seven Readings shops in Melbourne and the company has some very active union members, with the majority of the staff said to be backing the idea.
Mark Rubbo, owner of Readings, says an EBA isn’t warranted in a company the size of his.Credit: Eddie Jim
According to one, “Readings is a great place to work and does a lot of things that other employers don’t do. But we would like a concrete equitable agreement.” They said they were keen to ensure that decisions in the workplace are made in the fairest and most democratic way. Other demands include minimum wage, pay transparency, job security, and abolition of the junior rate.
The union has approached management to open negotiations “in good faith about reasonable claims” but so far has had no response. Earlier this week, staff received an email that said owner Mark Rubbo was not interested in negotiations and didn’t acknowledge the claims.
Rubbo told Bookmarks 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. I don’t see the need for negotiations. We pay above award rates and we give 10 per cent of our profit back to staff as well.″
Credit: Andrew Dyson
There have been some changes at Readings, though. Joe Rubbo, son of Mark, has moved on from managing the flagship Carlton shop to become operations manager, and Louise Ryan, who was publishing manager at Penguin until she resigned last year after 16 years with the publisher, has taken over. Mark Rubbo says it’s all part of his “transition to retirement – the idea is to work four days a week instead of seven”.
Of course one of the problems for staff in any bookshop is the appeal of the idea rather than the reality. A recent article in Jacobin magazine described it as the most persistent canard in the book trade “that the work itself is pleasurable enough to justify low wages and precarity”.
Jacobin quoted James Daunt, who runs Waterstones and Daunt bookshops in Britain and Barnes and Noble in the US – not much time left for reading, you would think – in The Financial Times last year: “To retain the best and most talented booksellers, we have to reward them, and we reward them as well as we can with pay, but we mainly reward them with a stimulating job.”
The Seuss factor
What sort of impact did the decision of the estate of the late Theodor Seuss Geisel to cease publication of six of his books that it said portrayed people “in ways that are hurtful and wrong” have on sales? According to data from NPD in the US that was reported in the Publishing Perspectives newsletter, overall print sales were up by more than 2 million units in the week ending March 6 – the Seuss announcement was on March 2, the anniversary of the author’s birth – and “juvenile fiction” accounted for 70 per cent of that jump.
NPD Books’ Kristen McLean said Seuss titles always got a boost this particular week, but this year sales were triple what they were in the same week in 2020. In the NPD bestseller list for ″juvenile fiction″, she said there were six Dr Seuss titles in the top 10 compared with four last year.
The return of Chloe Hooper
Chloe Hooper’s next book of non-fiction is very different from her last. That was The Arsonist, you will recall, about the man who set fires in the Latrobe Valley on Black Saturday in 2009. Bedtime Story bounces off the cancer diagnosis her partner, writer Don Watson, received. (He’s in remission now.) How would she explain what was happening to her young sons?
According to Scribner, which will publish the book next year, “In Bedtime Story, Hooper explores how to talk with children about death, this most taboo of subjects, in ways that won’t leave them afraid of life. Part memoir, part literary quest, Hooper examines how mortality is explored in children’s literature from the Brothers Grimm to J.K. Rowling, and how the writers’ own lives and losses informed their work.” Hooper has followed her publisher at Penguin Random House, Ben Ball, to Simon & Schuster’s literary imprint.
The Ishiguro influencers
There will be two Ishiguro novels on bookshop shelves soon, from Nobel winner Kazuo and his daughter Naomi. His latest, Klara and the Sun, came out last month; her first, Common Ground, is out in Australia in 10 days.
She was asked in Britain’s Daily Telegraph during an interview involving both Ishiguros what sort of influence he had been.
“Mostly in me just wanting to do it in the first place,” she replied. “The idea of sitting in a room in silence runs absolutely contrary to my nature. But having a writer as a parent gives you a model for what books can do: they give you a voice that carries on into the world; it’s a way of emotionally communicating across all sorts of boundaries. To see the magic of that as a child is amazing.”
And he found his daughter had a surprising influence on him. “I have to say that I have been influenced a lot, not just by the fact we had a child, but by Naomi and her influences. You start to see things through her eyes and become open to different ways of telling stories, to different genres.
“Part of the reason I was able to move into sci-fi in Never Let Me Go was because I had a young daughter who was incredibly enthusiastic about these things. Klara and the Sun is actually quite influenced by those illustrated hardback books for three-year-olds. In a way it’s my flirtation with that genre.″
Kazuo Ishiguro is a guest at Sydney Writers’ Festival (swf.org.au).
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