Sam has an explanation for why wages just won't rise.

In the late 1970s, a handful of unionists and communists studied the rules of an elite gentlemens' club on the waterfront of Semaphore, Adelaide. They carried out a coup, taking over formal outright owneship of the beautiful grand old social club. They turned the establishment into the Semaphore Workers Club ...

I am cautiously optimistic about the return of the artist as worker. Legislated fair pay, workplace safety, collective bargaining, public value, and yes, access to unemployment benefits offer a steady way forward for a troubled sector. It’s no surprise that more radical plans for a post-work utopia are not in Labor’s sights: it remains our (essential) work to imagine them.

Readings can afford to pay a living wage to its workers. This is a multi-store business that, until 2021, posted profits for 25 consecutive years, and which in the past year has spent considerable amounts of money opening both a new store branch and a warehouse, without consulting workers. As authors, we stand in solidarity with the booksellers at Readings in their fight for fair pay and conditions.

These Books+Publishing surveys capture important and otherwise invisible data about the true conditions of the book industry, which is notorious for keeping salaries and profits private for the sake of ‘competitive advantage’.

The NSW government set the conditions for the slowly spreading recruitment poverty in its own public education system back in 2011, when it became the first state or territory to impose an austerity measure in the form of a wages cap of 2.5 per cent on all public sector employees (including teachers and nurses). This remarkable act of economic vandalism has overseen a year-on-year decline in teacher wages in relation to inflation and the cost of living.

Perhaps, the last best hope in this sorry and sordid saga is that this may be a wake-up call to workers in the videogame industry. It’s a strong argument for unionisation, an example of how passion alone cannot create a safe work environment, and motivation to hold abusive bosses to the fire.

Many of us on income support payments end up denying we are on such payments when our friends and whānau ask about our economic situations, let alone strangers. We have learned over time that most people hate poor people more than they hate poverty. This constant pretence only adds to the feelings of social isolation that are created when you are paid income support payments that are deliberately set at least 20 per cent below the poverty line, making it all but impossible to participate in society.

The union campaign at Better Read Than Dead is a litmus test for Australian literature and for retail working conditions across the continent. The publishing industry – of which bookselling is one part – likes to congratulate itself on its social progressivism, but this means nothing without material conditions for workers in the industry that grant those workers job security and dignity of life.

‘Your shift tomorrow has been cancelled pending further investigation from today’s incident involving yourself sitting on a chair behind the bar.’

COVID-19 is one crisis among many, along with those that invest the climate, democracy and capitalism. Even as it subsides, those others will remain and intensify. If COVID-19 can have any lasting, constructive impact, it will be in teaching the working classes how to handle a crisis. The pandemic’s most significant legacy is the lessons workers globally take from this experience.

Staff who do the bulk of university work know that wage theft is standard practice. For any senior manager to deny this suggests they are either wilfully ignorant, or they have been so far away from the ground of everyday teaching, research and administration for so long that they don’t know how universities actually work.

For insecure workers, ‘going back to normal’ is not possible or desired. What the pandemic has shown us is that in order to sustain the rural workforce, we need to improve the material and structural conditions that put precarious workers at risk.

True security and safety only comes through people acting together. Legal rights and entitlements are the shadows, the remnants and echoes of the great motor of history: workers uniting in the struggle for safety, dignity and democracy.

For every extra day of lockdown, for every extra quarantine measure, and for every additional restriction placed on Victorians, it is the corporations pushing insecure work and forcing workers to turn up to work who must bear ultimate responsibility.

Is it possible for some of the most precariously-employed yet essential university workers to have a conversation with management? Do the two groups have common interests, a shared language? What happens when they meet face-to-face – or, as is necessary during a pandemic, over Zoom?