Excellent points, John! I’m in complete agreement.

Thanks for your reply, Barbara. This is a lot of think about. I also just finished Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs” last week and found it to be a wonderful book; thank you for recommending it. I would also recommend it to anyone who is interested in 21st century labor and capitalism. To briefly answer your question of why I think that these issues are resurfacing among graduate students is the fact that we are, well, absolutely broke. My generation, despite putting more money into saving than Gen X or Boomers, are the poorest generation (see: https://slate.com/business/2018/05/millennials-are-in-a-deep-financial-hole-compared-to-past-generations.html). This is largely because we are saddled with an unbelievable amount of student loan debt and are contending with a very bleak, highly exploitative job market. Many of us leaving graduate school aren’t even able to secure academic jobs, let alone secure tenure-track positions.

So while my personal politics are more in line with the communitarian aspects of the academic world, we still need to eat. I would love to live in a world where my labor is not reduced to monetary value, but until we destroy capitalism, I’d like to see all of us paid equitably for the labor we’re doing.

But, I agree with you wholeheartedly, we also need to have discussions on how to move past the shackling of labor with monetary value. Theorizing and imagining a better world is incredibly important—as Ursula K. Le Guin said: “We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.”

Thank you for this great discussion!

I remember reading some years ago in a book optimistically titled The Emerging Democratic Majority, that white collar workers who had traditionally sided with management and voted Republican were increasingly finding themselves in the same position as the skilled craftsmen who formed the AFL. Then they were forced to join forces with the unskilled workers’ CIO. The AFL-C
IO grew to become a major force in American politics. But, here’s the rub, the American labor movement has become steadily weaker in the last few decades. The strikes that were powerful weapons when capital was sunk in specific geographical locations have lost their teeth in a world where capital is mobile and outsourcing and robots replace workers who stand down from their jobs.

My reasons for mentioning this example are twofold. First, we need to think outside the boundaries of academic publishing and look for opportunities to form united fronts with other exploited workers. Second, we need to free ourselves from the illusion that if our complaints are loud enough, justice will prevail. The work that Paul Wellstone summed up as “Energize, Mobilize, Organize” still waits for those willing to do it.

Traditionally the primary response to the issue of (no) compensation for publishing work is (1) we work in a kind of communitarian academic world in which I labor on your behalf, refereeing your paper for example, so that you will labor on my behalf; and (2) the rewards are not limited to the salary I am paid — though that is part of it — but a more diffuse set of benefits that include prestige, competitiveness for grants and fellowships, invitations to speak (with honorariums) etc. Research universities with high expectations for publishing and scholarship do pay more than four year colleges at which teaching is the primary job of faculty, so we do, in this sense, get paid for publishing. And I am perhaps naively saddened by the reduction of all labor to its monetary value. (Speaking of which, David Graeber’s new book might be relevant — he stresses the historically curious rise of labor/time/pay in its modern form; those of us who have worked in subsistence communities understand his point…). A giant corporation makes a fortune on academic journals but doesn’t pay me to referee a submission? Why am I not bothered by this, except in the simpler sense that giant corporations are, by definition, evil?

I’m rambling by now, clouded by my need for a second cup of coffee. But I’ll close my approving of your concern for this broad set of issues, since in the end they address the problems of working wages, access to scholarship, etc. that are important issues.

Hi, Barbara. Thank you for this correction. This is something that I (obviously) did not know and I’m glad that you’ve pointed it out!

However, looking at the broader picture of academic publishing, I think that a re-print fee is still pretty minimal compared to the labor it takes for you to actually produce that article. The publisher is still extracting an enormous surplus value from your labor through institutional subscriptions and one-time download fees (not to mention charging us if we want the article to be open-access). And I know that the argument goes that the university pays your salary with the expectation that you’re producing scholarship, therefore a journal publisher doesn’t have to pay for manuscripts, but these days securing a tenure-track university job is like winning the lottery—yet hiring committees still expect to see a record of active publication.

I would also like to quickly mention that journal production is also significantly cheaper than it used to be, especially these days when most publications are online-only. And on top of that, most publishers use unpaid graduate students to do all of the actual work to copy edit, format, design, and publish issues (not to mention some of these steps are now fully automated). A re-print fee paid to the author is the very least they could do.

I would rather see the money redistributed in a more equitable fashion in which you would be paid for your article, the journal staff would be paid for their labor, and the publisher barons would be rendered obsolete. But I doubt I need to rant any more about that! 🙂

Thank you again for your correction! Apologies about the long rant, but your comment sparked some of these additional thoughts that didn’t surface in the interview.

The AAA does pay the author of an article a reprint fee — I’ve received a number of such fees over the years, and in fact, the AAA once paid me a reprint fee for an article that was reprinted in a collection, but the original article had not appeared in an AAA journal! I’ll leave it to the AAA management to provide details of their current policy.