6. Working from home on low pay
"the office is a great equaliser, and in an industry that’s already so skewed, it is one we can’t afford to lose."
Dear Reads,
I am delighted to share my first guest post on In the Read, but I’m also angered by the issues it raises. I knew that working from home for people in flat-shares was hard, but I hadn’t thought about it enough. The below piece has forced me to consider it, and again to realise that publishing is not an industry that understands or respects the reality of life for people on modest incomes.
I really hope you will read this edition of the newsletter and share it with as many powerful and wealthy people in the business as possible.
Working from home on low pay: a junior publishing perspective
Other than through the tried-and-tested medium of angry tweets, I’ve been finding it difficult to know where to raise this issue. It somehow feels as though it’s not serious enough for HR, and too heartfelt for a conversation with a line manager. I know – Sally Rooney would want me to join a union, and I have. But in the meantime, I wondered if sending this to In the Read might be a good place to start.
Working from home has been awful for me. This is because I live in a small two-bedroom flat, which I share with my partner and a friend. Both bedrooms are small – too small to accommodate a desk. The only other room is a combined kitchen and living room, also fairly small, with a modest kitchen table. All three of us have been working from the flat for months now. Although we did all spend the first weeks of lockdown with our own parents, we decided to return: in my case, this was because my parents do not really have space for me anymore, and my younger sister had given up her bedroom to accommodate me. And after all, we are adults – 25, 26, and 28 – and we wanted to go back to living independently.
And so, back in the flat, we have been taking it in turns to use the limited space we have available: one at the kitchen table, one at a fold-up desk (which we collapse and put behind the sofa every evening for a semblance of normality), and one perched on the sofa, bed or floor. It’s far from ideal. It gets worse when one of us needs to work late (and as an assistant in publishing, I often do), as suddenly we are encroaching on our flatmates’ space. It feels unfair to demand silence when the others want to cook, do yoga, or watch TV in their own home.
My situation is particularly bad: the landlord is insisting on carrying out significant structural work on our building, which means loud building work, and floors shaking so much that things fall off shelves, every day between 8 and 5. The landlord says that it’s not their problem if it’s stopping us from working, and it’s up to our employers to make sure we can work. HR says they’re sorry to hear that, but they can’t open the office because of the virus. Have I thought about working in a café?
And so here we are at this frankly bizarre impasse, where I have a job to do but nowhere to feasibly do it, unless I want to pay £3 every few hours for a coffee to buy my seat in a café, where I can’t really concentrate or take video calls. Until last week I was cycling across London a few times a week to work in an acquaintance’s spare room, which was incredibly generous, but also awkward and surreal. And then London was put into tier 2, so options are even more limited than they were at first. (I had also hoped that we could adapt an initiative to encourage industry people with spare rooms to let junior staff come and work in them, but the practicalities were difficult, and that was before tier 2 came in).
I am disappointed and furious that publishers assume their staff have the resources, space, and conditions to work from home, given that they know how little they pay us and how much it costs to live in London. We don’t get paid enough to live somewhere where working from home is possible. We choose our flats based on affordability and proximity to the office, and the London rental market means that our salaries only cover small spaces. I had never complained about my salary until working from home. I don’t mind not having extra disposable income. But I do mind that my salary is now, suddenly, expected to cover both a home and a workspace.
I know that companies are being praised for not forcing anyone to return to work, and for paying for desk chairs, extra screens, and so on. But none of that means anything unless they are also paying for space for us to work in. When my company announced that anyone who wanted one could buy an ergonomic chair on the company account, I wanted to scream in frustration – what about those of us who don’t have space for an office chair? I am sick of Zoom calls where the discrepancy in living conditions is so jarring, as I sit perched on my bed, microphone muted to block out the building noise, while senior colleagues waltz from room to room, from desk to sofa to garden.
I am sorry that this has become such a money issue, but for us, the unfairness is glaring. We already work long, tiring hours for little money. We don’t want to have to give up even more just to continue doing our jobs. I love working in publishing, but it feels as though the industry is determined to keep testing us. If working from home is going to continue any longer, we need salaries that cover the cost of our workspaces too. The office is a great equaliser, and in an industry that’s already so skewed, it is one we can’t afford to lose.
Huge heartfelt thanks to the writer of this piece.
Want to share your experience?
I am interested in sharing other thoughtful pieces of writing on the way money and art intersect in our business – please feel free to pitch me at alwaysintheread@gmail.com
I will continue doing the usual interviews too, so do get in touch if you’d like to participate in that.
Question
A few issues back, one of my readers asked:
“PRH advertises entry level roles as starting on 24k, raising 1k for the next two years. How many entry level staff truly see this rise to 26k after 2 years?”
The answer seems to be – staff do see this raise (seems being the operative word here – I am merely passing on responses; I haven’t checked with PRH).
From one reader:
“I have some anecdotal experience regarding your question: within the last few years, I started at PRH as an editorial assistant when the starting salary was £23k, but I negotiated up to £25k because I was overqualified. Within a year I’d been promoted to assistant editor and was on £27k; a year later when I left the company I was on something like £28.5k due to PRH’s annual adjusted pay rise, not including the Christmas bonus. I genuinely believe they mean to follow through with their new assistant pay levels — their HR team is very conscious of basic pay dignity for assistants. What I’d hope they and other publishers consider moving forward is acknowledging people’s unequal home-working environments and bring in further pay adjustments there. I think it’s unreasonable that they encourage more working from home (post-pandemic) when for many assistants in large house shares this is not a pleasant experience.”
It was interesting to me that this person also raised the WFH problem, which I hadn’t specifically planned to cover as an issue.
From another person at PRH:
“We get good pay rises. #unions.”
Indeed!
Till next time
Niamh x
PS If you like In the Read, please consider contributing. I’d love to keep this conversation going.