Five Waterstones booksellers who delivered a petition to head office calling for the introduction of a living wage in April have all now resigned, citing low pay and pressure as reasons for their departure.

The news comes in the week that Waterstones’ owner, the investment firm Elliott Advisors, completes its acquisition of US book chain Barnes & Noble in a $683m (£566m) deal. Waterstones chief executive and managing director James Daunt will become chief executive of the 627-branch Barnes & Noble, while also heading up 293 Waterstones shops.

The petition, started by staff member April Newton, was signed by 9,300 people and called on the UK’s largest bookselling chain to pay its staff an hourly wage of £9, or £10.55 in Greater London, saying that the “current rate of pay … does not reflect the energy, erudition and skill a bookseller brings to the role”.

While Waterstones said at the time that it welcomed the petition, Newton and the four colleagues who accompanied her to a face-to-face meeting with Daunt have since resigned.

“I decided I was no longer willing to tolerate the low pay and difficult working conditions,” said Newton, who is now working for the RSPB in Scotland. She had been working at Waterstones’ London headquarters in Piccadilly for £8.37 an hour.

“I absolutely loved working in a bookshop. If the pay, working environment and prospects for career progression had been good, I would have stayed and tried to make a career out of bookselling or in the publishing industry,” she said. “But living in London on the pay I received was taking a huge toll on my health and happiness, and I saw no sign of things improving if I stayed with the company.”

Newton said the meeting with Daunt initially felt positive, but “after a while it seemed like nothing would change, and an internal Q&A in response to the petition and the meeting seemed to dismiss all the concerns we’d raised”.

“The acquisition of Barnes & Noble by Elliott Advisors felt like a particularly hard blow, as it suggests that the money is there, the company just doesn’t want to spend it on its staff,” she added.

Kimi Wright, who was on £8.71 an hour in Manchester and joined Newton in delivering the petition, leaves Waterstones this week. Wright spoke of the toll that working there had taken on her mental health, despite describing bookselling as her dream job.

If sitting with the MD for several hours trying to get our point across doesn’t make things better, nothing’s going to Kimi Wright, former Waterstones bookseller

“In the meeting, I told James my whole reason for doing this is I want to continue to be a bookseller, I want to be able to get to the end of the month without having to turn to family to cover a last-minute bill … I showed him that the sole of my shoe was starting to wear through,” she said. “I’ve done everything in my power to make things better. If sitting in a boardroom with the managing director for several hours trying to get our point across doesn’t, nothing’s going to.”

Stefan Pace, who was on around £8.70 an hour at the Shrewsbury branch, left in mid-June, and is now working for a digital media company in London. “The job was incredibly high pressure for the pay, requiring … knowledge across a variety of genres,” he said. “If working at Waterstones was a viable long-term career, I’m sure there wouldn’t be as much disgruntlement among the ranks as there is.”

But Daunt said the attitude of the departing booksellers was not prevalent. “We’d be in trouble were that the case,” he said, adding that Waterstones had awarded a 3% pay rise in September 2018 for those above the starting grade, then 4.85% to all in April, as well as a recent 4% bonus.

“Do I think there are a number of people who feel very aggrieved? Yes absolutely. Have most of those people left, if not all? Yes. Does it characterise a wider problem in the company as a whole? No, but I’m not remotely complacent, I think pay in all retail is very low,” said Daunt.

Daunt, who took over at Waterstones in 2011 after founding independent bookseller Daunt Books in 1990, has promoted a progressive pay scale at the chain﻿, but admitted that there is “still a problem with [pay for] people when they first start”.

“Is it imperative on us to improve that pay? Absolutely. But we’re constantly having a balancing act which we articulate and do debate very openly. I think we’ve got it about as well as we can in terms of the balance but we need to keep on pushing the company forward and making the pay rises,” he said. “We’re working our way through this in the best way we can. I wouldn’t characterise [the mood] as wholesale dissatisfaction but it is quite rightly an issue that a number of people feel very passionately about. And I don’t I disagree with them, I completely agree.”

Usman Mohamed from campaigning platform Organise, which supported the booksellers’ petition, said that: “Daunt needs to understand that Waterstones’ success depends on talented, caring booksellers. Token gestures like the 4% bonus aren’t enough when booksellers can’t afford food and rent. Daunt and his billionaire bosses need to realise that without paying a living wage they’re driving their booksellers out of bookselling and their customers to Amazon.”