Publishing: quality is a union issue

WORKERS from six major UK publishers gathered at an NUJ meeting in Oxford in an unprecedented attempt to establish common cause over job satisfaction, standards and job security in the publishing industry.

The meeting, Stand Up for Quality in Academic and Educational Publishing, was attended by more than 70 journal and book editors, designers, production and new media staff and freelances from Pearson Education, Elsevier, Oxford University Press, Macmillan Education, Wiley and Taylor & Francis.

They crowded into Oxford Town Hall to hear Steve Ball of Oxford Brookes University, who has more than 30 years of editorial experience in publishing, lead a discussion on how the industry, its products and its employees, have been affected by globalisation.

With routine outsourcing to cheaper suppliers around the globe, Steve Ball argued that quality is becoming harder to maintain and that the supply of expertise at home is in danger of withering away.

Senior managers under pressure to control costs are increasingly judging that the returns on high quality do not add up. Budgets for commissioning and editing are being downgraded to “soft costs”, where savings are being made at the cost of quality.

Quality is the essence of publishing, he said, not an optional selling point. In the discussion, a consensus emerged that publishing workers need to stand up to managers attempting to impose unreasonable demands and slipshod working practices.

Freelance editor Kathleen Lyle said that experience was being outsourced as well as the work, as editors went freelance.

Fiona Swarbrick and Anna Wagstaff of the NUJ made the point that collective action can often be the best way to safeguard quality.

Steve Ball agreed to investigate the possibility of setting up a website where publishing workers could submit information from their own experience as part of the campaign.

Sally Bolton