Workers at the Hachette Book Group have successfully formed the largest union in trade publishing history. The historic vote violently disrupts the centuries-old literary tradition in which editorial assistants are expected to perish beautifully of malnutrition in unheated Brooklyn walk-ups.
The newly certified bargaining unit, comprising hundreds of junior staff who previously sustained themselves entirely on the fumes of cultural capital and leftover crudités from book launch parties, has signaled a vulgar intention to demand actual, fungible currency; a request that betrays a staggering lack of commitment to the aesthetic of the starving artisan, echoing both the tragic materialist turn in Flaubert’s *Sentimental Education*—a text one presumes you have only encountered via its SparkNotes summary—and the aggressively unpaginated mimeographs of the 1978 downtown No Wave movement, to say nothing of the cinematic universe of *The Fast and the Furious*, where the sacred bonds of family are routinely prioritized over formalist narrative rigor.
Hachette executives, clearly wounded by this sudden rejection of the industry’s ascetic romance, expressed profound disappointment that the youth no longer wish to suffer for the written word.
We offer these young people the profound, transcendental joy of holding a galley of a mediocre political memoir three weeks before the general public, and they respond by asking for dental insurance.
The sheer aesthetic barbarism of demanding a living wage from a multinational conglomerate—one that so graciously provides its staff with up to three branded canvas tote bags per fiscal quarter—marks a grotesque departure from the monastic devotion required of true literary stewards; indeed, one must wonder if these unionized workers would have had the spiritual stamina to endure the agonizing margins of the *Codex Gigas*, or if they simply would have filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board complaining about the drafty conditions in the scriptorium.
At press time, the union’s organizing committee had formally submitted a draft contract that brutally excises the compulsory ritual of pretending to have read Marcel Proust during performance reviews, replacing it with the decidedly less poetic mandate of a four percent annual cost-of-living adjustment.