On April 27, roughly 600 employees of Hachette Book Group walked into the office, hit publish on a website nobody at HQ had pre-approved, and announced themselves as the largest union in the history of trade publishing. The Hachette Workers Coalition. Five years of quiet organizing across every American and Canadian office, plus the remote workforce, finally surfacing on a Monday morning with a website, a logo, and a list of demands long enough to fold into a paperback. The reaction in publishing circles was somewhere between “finally” and “wait, all of them?”. Hachette is one of the Big Five, the company behind James Patterson and Stephen King and a sizable chunk of the books your in-laws give you for Christmas. It has also spent the last two years insisting AI is an exciting frontier while declining to specify what that means for the people who edit, design, copyedit, market, and ship the books. Six hundred is the number that does the heavy lifting Trade publishing has flirted with unions before.…