Britta Larson, a shift supervisor at Half Price Books in Roseville, Minnesota, has worked there for over 12 years but has only recently considered joining a union.
“With the pandemic going on, we were all just tired of the constant dismissals we were getting when we raised concerns about staffing and workload to upper management,” Larson said, noting that the staff had been reduced when the store closed for a time and was “stretched extremely thin” when it reopened.
“Before the epidemic, I’d say we just thought, ‘Things aren’t great,’ since that’s all we’d ever known.” We learned a lot from the pandemic because it compelled us to do things differently.”
Over the last two years, labor movement has exploded in a variety of industries, including bookselling, where unions were previously uncommon. Employees at Printed Matter in New York City, Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, and Bookshop Santa Cruz in California have all attempted to unionize since 2020. Workers at four Half Price Books locations in Minnesota have declared plans to join locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers union.