OUP is completely toxic. Staff are treated as disposable, and turnover is constant. The company has gone through so many rounds of layoffs and restructures that current staff are still dealing with the effects. Meanwhile, hiring freezes make it impossible to manage workloads as more people flee. The brunt of the workload is pushed down onto assistants and lower level staff, many of whom are doing the work of 3-4 people. Unpaid overtime is rampant among non-exempt employees and enforced by managers.
Stress levels are at a constant high. I worked with a team of lovely people who rarely interacted with each other because their workloads were so precarious. Many people never took lunch breaks.
Sexual harassment is a serious problem here. I faced harassment from another employee (with a history of harassment complaints against them). When I alerted my manager, nothing changed. I was put into the same situation with them repeatedly, despite providing documentation and other staff members coming forward. The harassment did not stop until the employee was promoted. To OUP's managers, perhaps this was an acceptable cost of doing business. To me, this was a time of terrible stress that began to manifest in other health problems.
OUP runs on outdated technology that is literally painful to use. Their budget cuts made it impossible to work at times. Basic needs (a mouse with a working right-click button, software listed in my job description) were denied to me citing lack of budget. (How demoralizing do you think it is to have to build a case and put in multiple requests for a mouse? Do you want to find out?) When a company is counting paperclips, you know things are bad. The entire business regularly loses email and Internet for hours at a time. Once again, the brunt of this is pushed onto assistants, who are expected to navigate these problems and lack of infrastructure every day. Another of many reasons this company makes people burn out.
In the end, I left because I felt this company was making too many unacceptable compromises. My job increasingly involved putting out embarrassing and avoidable fires (delayed publications, quality assurance mishaps, failing to pay authors), and all of this while dealing with other serious challenges (toxic work environment, constant pressure from management, lack of IT support, and byzantine company structure meaning no one is accountable). I took a job at a nonprofit publisher because I wanted a job in publishing, and I believed in its mission. If you cannot advance, and you cannot even take pride in your work, then what is left?
OUP may be kept alive because of its prestigious name. Yet OUP today is a company with no vision, making unacceptable compromises, whose talent is leaving. I do not recommend working with them, as an employee, contractor, or customer.
