Booksellers at City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, San Francisco, Calif., are unionizing, KQED reported. And last Friday, the day after staff requested the union be recognized, management did voluntarily recognize the union.
"Most of the 16 or so eligible employees recently signed union-authorization cards," KQED noted, and they've joined Local 660 of the Industrial Workers of the World, which also represents booksellers at Moe's Books in Berkeley, Copperfield's Books in Petaluma, and Page 1 Books in Albuquerque, N.Mex.
City Lights publisher and executive director Elaine Katzenberger told KQED, "City Lights has always been actively engaged in the project of creating and evolving a fulfilling, equitable, and humane workplace. This is a key to our institutional philosophy, and it has informed our practice from the beginning. If unionization can provide us with new tools for helping us to better achieve these ideals, we absolutely welcome them."
City Lights bookseller Decca Muldowney, who KQED said makes San Francisco's minimum wage of $18.07 per hour, told the station, "What we want more than anything is for City Lights to be a sustainable, thriving community. We think that the union is a way to protect City Lights for the future and to help further the original radical vision of the bookstore and the publishing house."
Noah Ross, a delegate with the IWW who worked at Moe's Books, said, "We are at a moment in labor at large where people want more voice in their contracts. They want a seat at the table in negotiating how they are treated at their workplace." Ross added that collective bargaining at City Lights would be "huge for the larger bookstore union wave we've seen and also for labor."