May 16, 2025, 10:00am

Just in time for another hot labor summer, workers at Abrams Books are voting to form a union, hoping to join other unionized publishers. I’m always excited to see a new union, and I’ve written about organized book workers and booksellers, but mostly at later moments in the process—strikes, successful contracts, ratifications—so I was curious to talk to Abrams workers, who are still in the early stages of unionizing.

Two Abrams workers, Shea Dunlop, an assistant for special sales, and Sarah Robbins, an associate editor, graciously took the time to talk to me about how their effort has been going, and what things feel like on the ground.

Our conversation is also on today’s episode of the Lit Hub Podcast, which you can listen to right here.

The Abrams’ union is in the midst of an election to form their union, overseen by the National Labor Relations Board. Workers announced they were seeking a union last month and management soon agreed to an election. Because some Abrams workers aren’t in New York, voting is happening by mail, and will be counted at the NLRB offices in New York next week on May 22nd.

Workers are voting to form what’s called a wall-to-wall union, which is a broader bargaining unit that includes people in a variety of roles at the shop, in this case “editors, publicists, marketers, production managers, designers, and managing editors, as well as sales, distribution, mailroom, IT, and finance staffers.” Sarah said this model suits their shop, since “publishing, as I always say, is a big group project. We can’t make any of this work if we’re not all in it.”

While the votes are coming in, pro-union Abrams workers have kept up a brisk pace of posting on social media, sharing testimonials from workers and support from their authors and illustrators.

Though it’s early days, Sarah and Shea told me they’ve already noticed more camaraderie at Abrams, which is a rare medium-sized publisher with around 150 employees. Shea described the process as “a coming together experience,” and that it’s been “cathartic to share our views and our hopes and our worries.”

“We have gotten closer as coworkers and gotten to know people in areas that we might not directly work with every day,” Shea said. “Through talking to people about what we want to see, how we want our workplace to be, we’ve opened the door to a lot of new relationships.”

The initial conversations around unionizing started small: “I go to my good friends who I’ve been working with for years, and I’m like, ‘remember how we joked about a union? I mean it this time,’” Sarah said. But the conversations started spreading, and not just among young people or assistants. Sarah and Shea told me that the union effort has buy-in and excitement from workers of all ages and in roles at all levels of the company.

Things got more serious during the 2023 HarperCollins strike, because HarperCollins and Abrams share the same Manhattan office building.

“Their strike line was outside the building every day for months,” Sarah told me, “and I think everyone in publishing, and I think a lot of workers in New York in general, really saw that that was effective, that they won a lot.” More than just their presence, it was inspiring to see how fired up HCP’s workers were.

“I was like, ‘Oh, there’s solutions to the problems,’” Sarah said. Soon they got in touch with UAW Local 2110, and were off to the races.

It’s a little early for a formal list of contract goals, but Sarah and Shea told me compensation and transparency have been big issues. After the successful negotiation and strike at HarperCollins, entry-level salaries at the Big Five publishers are now over $50,000 per year, but at Abrams they remain stuck at $40,000. Sarah emphasized that this isn’t keeping pace with cost of living.

“I was hired in 2019 at 32K… but things are so drastically different now that I think I was doing better on 32K in 2019 than people are on 40K in 2025,” she said. “It’s not Abrams’ fault that the world changed in a crazy way since 2020, but you have to support your employees.” Changes to benefits and staffing have felt abrupt and opaque too, which Sarah described as “changing without a lot of notice.”

Personally, Shea was disappointed that a tuition reimbursement program she was hoping to take advantage of was abruptly paused.

“I’ve pursued it multiple times and I keep hearing it’s on pause,” she said, “And I’m not the only one who’s been through that … it’s not something that’s been communicated to everyone.”

Overall, Shea hopes that a union can foster a more open and fair relationship with the higher-ups.

“Whether it be healthcare, whether it be tuition assistance, whether it be 401k, we want to have open dialogue with management and figure out a way to make those changes, if they’re necessary, in a really fair and equitable way where everyone’s aware of what’s going on at all times, and we can find solutions that benefit everybody.”

Though it’s early, this union drive has already experienced some weird attempts at union busting, a test of the workers’ resolve and solidarity. Abrams brought in an outside anti-union consultant who went by “Max Goodwin,” but after some research, workers discovered that was likely an alias for someone named James Teague.

Workers had been given a heads up that Max/James was coming, and quickly found a 2023 HuffPost article about “‘union avoidance’ consultants using fake names,” including James Teague. Max/James runs something called Sparta Solutions, a subsidiary of International Labor Relations Inc., and Shea and Sarah described finding his “Spartan-themed and very antagonistic” website, which disturbed Shea.

“It was a lot of messaging about how he can be brought in to fight internal threats, and that felt disheartening,” she told me, “because we don’t want to think of ourselves as internal threats to management. We want to have a conversation with management. We don’t want to threaten anybody. And we don’t want to be threatened in return. We want to see the table. We don’t want to take it down.”

But Abrams’ workers were prepared for the meeting, and Max/James was met with “an electric room,” Shea said.

“It was a huge testament to the work we’ve done that almost everyone was educated enough that nothing he said caught anyone off guard or changed any minds,” Sarah said. “A lot of people spoke up to defend ourselves and defend the union.”

Max/James also didn’t seem prepared for questions from people who work with language for a living.

“More than once we questioned him on specific word choice,” Sarah said, “and he seemed really surprised that publishing workers cared deeply about how words are being used.”

Both Max/James and management seemed to have recognized the approach wasn’t working. Sarah told me that, “He said he would be there for a couple of weeks. He was gone after two days.”

For those curious about unionizing at their own workplace, Sarah’s “biggest piece of advice is talk to people and talk honestly.”

“Once you start talking,” she said, “then you see the cracks easily.” These conversations don’t often come naturally, though.

“The culture where you don’t talk about your salary, and you never talk about something that your boss said to you, and you keep everything close to your chest, and you only go to HR if you feel like it’s the most dire situation in the world: throw that away. Throw all of that away,” Sarah said.

This reticence to communicate holds back worker solidarity, and it ultimately holds the company back too. Over and over, Sarah and Shea told me how much they like their work, and how excited they are about the books they’re putting out.

“I love what I do, and I just want everything to be fair for everyone,” Sarah said, “There’s nowhere else like Abrams … We want this to be a sustainable place to be forever.”

Quotes from our interview have been edited for clarity.