Six Hundred Reasons to Unionise: The Hachette Workers Are Done Waiting

A number that concentrates minds: six hundred. That is how many of Hachette's employees have signed cards to join the Washington-Baltimore NewsGuild-CWA Local 32035 — which, if recognised, would become the largest trade publishing union in the United States. Not the largest union in a particular imprint, or a particular city. The largest trade publishing union, full stop. The Hachette Workers Coalition has been quiet about its existence until now. The announcement lands at a peculiar moment for the industry: record profits at several of the Big Five publishers, alongside layoffs and restructurings that have affected thousands of editorial jobs in the past two years. Bloomsbury cut fifty-five posts earlier this month. FSG closed its MCD experimental imprint. And yet, one gathers, the books keep coming. What makes the Hachette drive notable — beyond the sheer number — is what it says about where the industry actually stands in 2026. The union question in publishing has long been dismissed as a niche concern, the province of small presses and academic imprints. Now it sits at the centre of one of the five largest trade houses in the English-speaking world, a publisher that owns Little, Brown, Grand Central, and Orbit, among others. Publishing has long maintained a peculiar myth about itself: that it is a vocation rather than an industry, that people who work in books should expect to subsidise their passion with their paycheques. This myth has, for generations, allowed publishers to pay entry-level staff poorly, rely on unpaid internships to filter the workforce by class, and treat editorial careers as aspirational rather than professional. The Hachette 600 are, in their way, a formal answer to that myth. The timing matters for another reason: 2026 has quietly become the year publishing workers found their voice in concert. The Catapult Book Group unionised earlier this month. PEN America staff organised in 2022. Now Hachette. The question is no longer whether trade publishing workers will organise, but how fast — and how the houses will respond when they can no longer pretend the movement belongs only to smaller, more politically obvious publishers. Dickens, who understood a thing or two about labour and its discontents, once wrote that a person could bear pain better than no wages. One suspects the Hachette Workers Coalition would settle, for now, for fair wages alone.