At the end of last year, Emily Powell, owner and president of Powell’s Books, talked about magic. Specifically, she wondered how to create a whimsical web sales experience that matched the joy of wading through her family’s city-block-size wonderland of 1 million books. Most customers love Powell’s precisely because it isn’t the internet—because they can run their fingers along its gently sloped shelves, smell the aroma of books and coffee, and be pointed to a shelf by an experienced bookseller.

Except not on Monday, when all 500 Powell's employees are striking. It’s a daylong “No Labor Day” strike on September 4, preceding more negotiations between the union and Powell’s leadership on September 5, over a contract that expired in June. Negotiations began back in January. Powell’s announced via Instagram that it will close all its locations for the day “due to the lack of staffing.” Portlanders are concerned: the post garnered hundreds of comments and nearly 4,000 likes in a day.

On the surface, union members are fighting for more money. Powell’s pays most employees a peak of $19 an hour, and is reluctant to raise wages. The union, which is represented by IWLU Local 5, points to MIT data on the minimum livable income in Multnomah County, which is $21.85 per hour, or just over $45,000 annually. “Your maximum earning potential shouldn’t be the bare minimum required to live in your city,” says Myka Dubay, a member of the Powell’s union’s bargaining team, who is not optimistic that an agreement is forthcoming. “[Powell's] said it’s not about how affordable our proposals are, it’s about them wanting to be competitive.”

Competitive with whom? Powell’s perceives booksellers as retail associates, with wages comparable to department-store and fast-food workers, while the union wants employees to be compensated for the education, talents, and specialized expertise they bring to the job. They also want to be able to pay their rent. “I wish there was more of a feeling of respect for the very real knowledge and skills that employees are bringing,” says Annabel Jankovic, a bookseller who moved to Portland to work at Powell’s after receiving her master's in comparative literature from Dartmouth College.

What’s Really Driving the Rift?

The current conflict dates to the beginning of the pandemic, when Powell’s laid off most of its staff. Many workers were rehired after the union contract’s six-month recall period expired, and though they retained their prior compensation levels they lost tenure benefits like accrued paid leave. Booksellers with decades at the company were forced to reapply for their jobs, and enroll in training and probationary new-hire programs. “It was all horrible,” says Lori Blumenthal, a bookseller with the company since 2000, after leaving a career as a record company promotion manager. “I had to develop a résumé—Powell’s was the only thing on it—and do a Zoom interview.”

Workers also lost seniority perks like vacation time, including bookseller Nicholas Yandell, a poet and novelist who started at Powell’s in 2013. His benefits were reset in October 2020, when he was rehired. “If things were as they should be at 10 years, I would expand into a new set of benefits this September—you get an extensively larger amount of time off per year.”

Powell’s did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, and instead provided a statement noting that its current negotiation proposal would raise the wages of all employees and lower health care premiums. As a private company, Powell’s finances are not publicly available, nor has the firm released any indication of their financial standing. Yet very few other large, independent, brick-and-mortar bookstores remain in business in the US after years of squeezing by online competitors. (Powell’s itself stopped selling books on Amazon in 2020.) Emily Powell previously called the pandemic layoffs “excruciating,” and explained that the company was simply following the union’s contract. The union says that other companies, like uniform and food service supplier Aramark, simply extended the length of their employee recall clauses (the time period in which an employer must, when reinstating an an eliminated position, offer to rehire), and Powell’s could’ve done the same. 

A series of interviews with employees reveals another goal: autonomy over day-to-day tasks. Shifts in work life that ensued are at the core of employees’ ire. Booksellers are now deemed “generalists” who lend a hand where needed. Blumenthal, previously a fixture in the travel department where she could lean on her own travels to Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and Rwanda, says that, today, “the store assigns each person three different sections. Now travel is just one of my three.” This makes her feel “expendable,” she says. During the pandemic, workers understood the need for that flexibility. “Now we’re significantly past that moment in time,” says Dubay. But booksellers with decades of experience, and often advanced degrees in specialized departments, are set to roam the floors instead of sharing their specific knowledge with customers.

Many say this is not the job they used to love. And to booksellers, this really is about love. “The people who work there are what makes it magical,” says Katherine D. Morgan, a bookseller who holds down two additional jobs to subsidize working at Powells. “The company itself is whatever; it’s my coworkers that I love the most.”

Jankovic concurs. “I don’t think I would have stayed nearly as long if the people were not as excellent as they are. I think that’s what keeps a lot of people in less-than-ideal circumstances.”