Staff at the U.K. arm of Springer Nature, publisher of the Nature family of academic journals, walked out for a second day of strikes today as part of a continuing standoff over compensation.
The strikes—the first in the 155-year history of Nature’s publication—are the latest escalation in a 9-month dispute that has attracted significant attention from the research community. Workers have rejected the company’s offer of a 5.8% raise and are instead demanding “fair” salary increases to cope with the rising cost of living.
An open letter in support of the staff, posted on 20 June to coincide with the first strike, has so far garnered more than 900 signatures, including from Nobel Prize winners and directors of major research institutes, as well as British celebrity and actor Stephen Fry, who published an account of his cancer diagnosis and treatment in Nature Reviews Urology in 2019. Signatories urge the publisher to “return to the negotiating table with an offer which recognises the hard work of the staff who make the journals what they are today.”
End-of-year salary negotiations began in September 2023 between the publishing giant and the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), which represents about 380 U.K.-based editors, journalists, and production staff at Springer Nature. (More than 200 of these staff are union members, though NUJ also negotiates on behalf of nonmembers.) Workers rejected the company’s offers of a 5% pay rise last year, 5.75% in early March, and finally 5.8% later that month, after which talks broke down, according to NUJ representatives. In a ballot held in May and June that had a turnout of 90%, strike action was approved with 93% of the vote.
Speaking from the picket line, an editor at a Nature Reviews journal who asked not to be named for fear of repercussions from Springer Nature, says that although the mood is “buoyant,” neither she nor her colleagues had wanted to be in this position. “We love our jobs, we love what we do, we love the people that we work with and the communities we serve,” she says. But with most staff seeing mortgages or rents increase alongside utility and food bills, she adds, the gap between “what we’re earning and what we’re having to pay out has got … so tight, that we feel like we need to say something.”
Springer Nature tells ScienceInsider in an emailed statement that its offer of 5.8% represents an “above-inflation salary increase,” adding that the organization has announced “additional measures to assist with increased commuting and living costs … which builds on further cost-of-living payments we made in 2022 and 2023.” The offer “is a fair one and remains open to all members of the NUJ bargaining unit, many of whom have now accepted it,” the company adds.
However, union officials dispute the publisher’s characterization, noting that although inflation in the United Kingdom currently stands at 2%, it was above 6% when negotiations began last year. The union has also criticized what it says has been a heel-dragging approach and the company’s decision to contact individual members of the bargaining unit with pay offers rather than continuing collective negotiations. “Our members feel very strongly that they’ve been very disrespected in this process,” says NUJ General Secretary Michelle Stanistreet.
The sense of unfairness is accentuated by Springer Nature’s own financial success, she notes. The company—owned by the family-run Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and British investment firm BC Partners—posted an operating profit of more than €480 million in its last annual report, charges thousands of pounds each for many of the articles it processes, and has been mooted to be pursuing an initial public offering worth billions of euros.
Many in the scientific community have shared their support for staff on social media and through signing the open letter. “The staff of high-impact journals have an extremely responsible job and should be paid accordingly,” says signatory Ben List, director at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research who shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, adding that he is concerned about the growing discrepancy between the “free and publicly funded world of science” and the “ultracapitalistic scientific publishing business.”
The impact of the industrial action remains to be seen. On nonstrike days, employees are “working to rule,” meaning they won’t go above and beyond their contracts. As staff frequently work extra on the weekends and evenings, keeping to 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. “is going to have a huge impact on the ability to get things out quickly,” says Yann Sweeney, an NUJ workplace representative and a senior editor at Nature.
Another 6 days of strikes are planned in July should the standoff continue, but NUJ representatives say they are keen to come to an agreement. An NUJ spokesperson says an “inflation-proof” rise would need to be at least 11%, but that members are also “realistic” about the economic pressures on the company and want to find a sensible way forward. Springer Nature says it, too, hopes for a quick resolution and “have clearly indicated our willingness to come to the table for further discussion.”
Springer Nature tells ScienceInsider the strikes have not affected normal operations at the journals, and “weekly publication of Nature will continue, supported by our global team."
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/nature-journals-u-k-staff-stage-second-day-strikes-over-pay
