John Maher at Publishers Weekly writes about yesterday's Hachette employee walkouts:

Three days after Grand Central Publishing announced that it would publish director Woody Allen's forthcoming memoir *Apropos of Nothing*, employees at the imprint and at Little, Brown, a sister imprint at Hachette Book Group, staged a walkout in protest of the acquisition. The walkouts, which have affected both the New York and Boston offices, have been joined by select HBG employees at other imprints as well, including Basic, Hachette Books, Forever, and Orbit. Allen has been accused by his adoptive daughter, Dylan Farrow, of molesting her in 1992, when she was seven years old.

Today, Allen's memoir has been officially canceled. In my nearly 25 years in the book industry, I've never seen this kind of action from the staff of a corporate publisher, and I've never seen such a quick reversal from a corporate publisher. It is remarkable, and it definitely would not have happened before the #MeToo movement.

Let's be clear: unlike what a few concern trolls online might say, this has nothing to do with impinging on Woody Allen's right to free speech. Now that Hachette has dropped Allen's memoir, Allen is free to take it elsewhere, or to self-publish it, or to read it aloud from a soapbox in Central Park. His free speech is totally intact. Nobody has taken it from him.

This is a #MeToo issue. It's also a labor issue. These workers took collective action to protest the platforming of someone who has been accused of being a sexual predator. They protested the fact that their employer did not, according to Ronan Farrow, bother to fact-check the book. They are standing with victims of sexual abuse. And I stand with them.

Let's also hope that this successful collective action has convinced the editors and assistants and PR staff of the publishing industry to consider unionizing. Publishing has not had a long history of unionization, and it's why the industry's power dynamic is so unbalanced. Women overwhelmingly fill jobs in lower-level publishing positions while men overwhelmingly occupy high-level positions. The industry is largely white. And publishers keep consolidating into larger and larger corporate behemoths with little to no accountability to their workers.

Nobody ever got into publishing to get rich, it's true. But unions are about more than just money. Unions get workers a seat at the tables of power. They give workers a voice. If the workers of the publishing industry want to fight decisions like Hachette's purchase of Allen's memoir in the future, the best way to do that is to form a union.