The Hachette Workers Coalition is a union consisting of employees across departments, imprints, levels, and locations fighting for better benefits, protections, and rights and increased equity, transparency, and agency at Hachette Book Group.

We are affiliated with the Washington-Baltimore arm of NewsGuild. NewsGuild is a branch of the AFL-CIO. They represent Verso Books, various branches of the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center, many newspapers and media outlets, teachers, nurses, and postal workers. You can learn more about NewsGuild here.

Non-managerial employees are eligible. Legally, managers are determined by their job duties, not their job title. This means that someone with the word “manager,” “coordinator,” or “director” in their job title could still be eligible to be included in the bargaining unit. If you don’t have the ability to unilaterally hire, fire, or discipline a direct report, then you’re likely not a manager. (And interns don’t count as direct reports!) If you’re unsure of your eligibility or someone else’s, feel free to reach out to us and ask!

A majority of the bargaining unit (aka union-eligible employees) need to sign cards seeking union representation (the “card campaign,” the reason we are currently collecting these card signatures). With these signatures, workers can ask the company to voluntarily recognize their union.

If the company refuses to recognize the union, workers may file a petition for an election through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). A majority of HBG workers participating in the election will need to vote in favor of a union for the NLRB to certify our union. At that point, HBG has to recognize the union as our legally certified representative for collective bargaining.

Your right to organize and participate in a union is legally protected. Here are some of the things that management, by law, cannot do to you:

Threaten: They cannot threaten you with adverse action if you support a union.

Interrogate: Your manager cannot ask you about the union or your union activity.

Promise: They cannot promise you benefits if you vote against a union.

Spy: They cannot spy on your union activities.

Importantly, there is safety—and power—in numbers: The more of us who participate in a union, the harder it is to retaliate against any one of us.

We have talked to union organizers at Verso, Oxford University Press, the Center for Reproductive Rights, HarperCollins, Abrams, and Scholastic Magazine, and more. All have been adamant that unionizing improved relationships between their union-eligible peers at work, gave them better protections on the job, empowered them to voice concerns to management without fear of retaliation, strengthened their benefits, and increased the size of their paychecks.

Union dues go towards making sure your union is well resourced. You won’t start paying dues (1.44% of your base annual salary) until our collective bargaining agreement is ratified by a majority vote and finalized; and you and your coworkers wouldn’t accept a contract that doesn’t account for dues in the annual pay increase. The greater benefits we’ll win will more than cover any dues, and will put more money back in everyone’s pockets.

Union dues pay for staffing, legal counsel, strike funds, and other resources that support us workers. Union workers consistently earn higher wages and better benefits than their nonunion counterparts, and having a well-resourced union is crucial to helping you and your coworkers win better working conditions, including better pay.

You can find us at the links below. We’d love to hear from you, and have you on board!

Email: Contact Page

X/Twitter: @HBGWorkers

Instagram: @hachetteworkerscoalition

Tiktok: @hbgworkers

Head over to our Sign a Card! page and follow the instructions. It’s as easy as signing a PDF!

Signing a card means that you want to have a union at Hachette and that you’re helping us achieve the first step of the process! After we get enough cards (a minimum of 30% of our bargaining unit), we’ll submit them to the NLRB to file for a union election. We can’t get to the next stage without getting a sufficient number of cards signed first. So while signing a card makes you a union member in one sense, we don’t become dues-paying union members until much later in the process. 

Every union card is confidential, and the only people who have access to the cards are members of the HWC Organizing Committee, the Washington-Baltimore NewsGuild, and the National Labor Review Board (NLRB).

Hachette Book Group will never see your card. HBG will NOT know who signed. Even when cards are securely reviewed by the NLRB, HBG will not see any cards.

This field is optional because we can get this information during contract negotiations, but it’s helpful to provide anyway because it helps us prepare for bargaining ahead of time by getting a sense of what the current salary situation is and what we might want to get in a contract!

You should put the date that you were originally hired by Workman/Union Square