On April 28, 2026, 600 employees at Hachette Book Group—the Big Five publisher that includes imprints such as Little, Brown and Company, Alg
"... a huge part of the culture is the expectation that you will just work outside of your regular hours. You’ll work through your lunch break, you will give 110% to every single thing that you do always, and that you won’t really be able to say no. And for such low wages. There’s very much this idea of a passion tax, where you’re expected to have your passion and your love for books carry you through your work, and have that be the thing that fulfills you in place of a livable wage."
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"... to me, really the bigger problem ... is the issue of overwork and lack of protections from overwork. If, as an editor, you’re getting 10 manuscripts a week, but all of a sudden it jumps to 15 to 20 because you’ve lost an assistant, because someone has taken an early retirement option and has left the team, how much time do you have to really authentically read your work to engage, to think carefully about what you’re publishing? And how much time do you have to then pass on to people throughout production to think about what it is we’re engaging with? What do we want to tell readers? How much protection and time do we want to take to check that our works are authentically produced, or at least honor the contract under which they were made? We need a cap on these workload hours, protections from things like AI, and a clear pathway to increasing diversity and retaining diversity. These are things that will make publishing, especially at Hachette, something that is really appealing. As an author, you want to ensure that your book is going to be protected from AI, that the people who are going to be working on your book are not going to make mistakes because they’re overworked. Our goal is to protect workers, but that will trickle down into protecting our authors."
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"I hope we see more of these movements within other houses as well. I think that this will inspire other houses to be more adamant about organizing as well within their own workplaces. And I believe that the precedent that we set with our contract will have ripple effects within the larger publishing."
