The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Free labor from authors, parents sends message about value of work
It’s that time again, when my children’s school sends them home with the paper book order sheets alongside pleas to parents to volunteer to work the Scholastic Book Fair. Last year, I signed up, excited to be part of the tradition that I loved so much as a kid, and to see my own kids’ thrill at their love of reading manifest in physical form.
We love the idea of Scholastic Book Fairs and Scholastic itself as a warm, fuzzy company, excited to share this tradition with our own children while reminiscing about Mustang posters, the smell of colorful erasers, and photo-laden biographies of our favorite ’90s stars.
As a parent who is also a writer, I see parallels between the free labor expected of parents and the free labor expected of writers. But whereas a bake sale fundraiser might have the end goal of directly supporting our kids’ extracurricular activities, a Scholastic book fair first and foremost benefits Scholastic.
This makes sense, as Scholastic is a corporation like any other. In 2023, the company reported returning $161 million to shareholders. According to Publisher’s Weekly, “Revenue rose 4 percent over fiscal 2022, to $1.70 billion, and operating income increased 9 percent, to $106.3 million. The company had a particularly good fourth quarter: Operating income jumped 40 percent on a 3 percent increase in sales.” Book fairs were particularly profitable, with a 29% jump in revenue to $553.1 million. Certainly a company with these numbers could pay the people who run their book fairs, but paying people would reduce profits. In fact, it is this very model of unpaid labor that allows Scholastic to be profitable.
Scholastic’s model is not outside the norm for school fundraisers, nor for the publishing industry. Unpaid and underpaid labor abound when it comes to books. Those who work to put books into the world and to get them into readers’ hands are largely unpaid or underpaid, and they often put up with it because they are passionate about the work they do.
As I wrote for this column in 2023, “Writers have been tricked into feeling like our labor is different from that of most workers. We are special and creative. We are desperate to succeed for the love of it. The work is worth it for its own inherent value. We would be lucky to have it acknowledged at all.”
When we accept this, though, as authors, as editors, or as parents who give a few hours in the school cafeteria working a point of sale system for free, we send a message that we, as a society, do not value this resource that we supposedly love so much.
This year I will not be working the book fair, though I will still send my children there with money to pick books. My own abstinence does little to solve the problem on its own, but if parents en masse refuse to work for free, Scholastic will be forced to rethink their model, not unlike the Writer’s
Strike and the Harper Collins Union wins. Parent labor, like literary labor, is real labor, because our time and talent provides real value.
The Scholastic book fair is a time-honored tradition that supports our schools while promoting a love of books and reading. Can Scholastic afford to also fairly compensate those who work the fair? Of course they can, but there will be trade-offs.
I leave you with this: Imagine a world economy where writers are well-compensated and students are provided high-quality books outside of the private economy.
Imagine: A book fair with shelves of colorful covers, books brimming with stories and knowledge, free for the taking — the birthright of every child born into this world of human thoughts and ideas. I would work that fair for free any day.