HarperCollins reviews

Pay is the lowest of any NYC publishing house. Lateral movement very difficult -- if you start in production and want to switch into design, you're out of luck. Management is astoundingly out of touch. Sure, we're flushing your department and replacing you with new people we can pay an even lower salary, but here's a new coffee maker for the break room; wait, what do you *mean* morale is low?

I have never been treated with such disrespect by senior management and HR (or rather, "People," such a joke), who gaslight anyone who raises their voice about pay inequity and/or diversity, writing them off as disgruntled and delusional. The way the HMH merger was handled was thoughtless, with no respect to the legacy and contributions its employees were bringing to the company. More than 50 HMH employees were laid off and the remaining were relocated to other departments in a restructuring that made little sense (employees were promoted, demoted, and/or moved to different jobs based on job titles and no performance/job responsibility information). Many of us have since left due to being fed up with how we were treated, low compensation, and burnout. Everyone else remaining has to scramble harder than they've ever scrambled before in a layoff/acquisition (and I've lived through a few) and it is at a breaking point that HarperCollins is doing nothing to fix. And it's not just the typical growing pains of an acquisition; HarperCollins employees below the senior management level (non-HMH) are also stressed and demoralized, handling unrealistic amounts of work for little pay, which of course means there's low retention there too. People in publishing have highly transferable skillsets that other companies will be glad to compensate fairly for, and it's about time publishers realize they can't get away with overworking and underpaying their employees if they want the industry to be sustainable.