Tag: protect library workers

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librev

woburned

I’ve been trying to explain the situation in Woburn to folks who are outside the Massachusetts library world and it’s getting tough to do so succinctly, but here’s an attempt at pulling together what’s happening. tl;dr: A library director with a questionable past is trying to union-bust and furlough 17 of her employees not for budgetary reasons but because, in her words, “many skills of library staff do not translate to the digital world of the pandemic” and an increasing number of people both in the city and in the wider library community are begging to differ.

This is quite a story, and I want to stress a few things before we get started:
1) I do not represent the views or speak as a representative of my employer here or in any other context online, aside from the necessary stuff like having my CV and LinkedIn up to date. If you take issue with the contents of this post, I am solely responsible for them. Please DO NOT contact my employer, whose name I have specifically retracted from this post, right now; they are busily contending with anti-student ICE shenanigans and safely reopening the campus for the fall. Send me an email at callan.bignoli AT gmail DOT com
2) The sources I refer to throughout are people that I do not wish to identify here for fear that they’ll be retaliated against, as I already was during the weekend of July 4 (more on that later).
3) I am not deliberately spreading dis- or misinformation. Everything I am reporting here I have heard from multiple reliable sources. But it is also all second hand knowledge, and therefore I am prefacing all of this by saying the following post is made up of credible allegations. That being said, I acknowledge that I misstated information regarding the circulation desk at Dedham Public Library in a recent letter to the editor of the Woburn Daily Times. The desk there was not destroyed, but was allegedly unexpectedly moved to a different location in the library, making it difficult for staff to do their work. Multiple sources say that parts of the circulation desk in Woburn were also removed, some found in the dumpster. This was an unintended misunderstanding on my part.

Before coming to Woburn, Bonnie Roalsen, a 2007 LibraryJournal Mover & Shaker, was director at another Boston-area library, Dedham. I don’t know all of the details, but staff report many issues with her managerial style, particularly around miscommunication. There was also an investigation about her conducted by the town which still may be ongoing. If you look through the Dedham Trustees minutes from Ms. Roalsen’s time as director (the end of 2016 to Spring 2019), you’ll immediately see eyebrow-raising things like staff being silenced at meetings and the police being called on staff members. More on those trustees later.

As is often the way of the library world, that didn’t prevent Ms. Roalsen from getting the Woburn job. According to staff from Dedham and Woburn, once she got there, she created a new assistant director-level job for a fellow named John Walsh who went to library school with her and worked with her in Dedham. This was instead of a head of the understaffed reference department, which only has two people in a city of over 40,000 (at similarly sized nearby libraries, this number is more like 6-10; on the whole, Woburn is woefully understaffed compared to peer libraries). I’m bringing this up because what Ms. Roalsen and, presumably, Mr. Walsh call an innovative focus on technology and digital services appears to be impacting the value, or lack thereof, they place on staff.

Folks at Dedham and Woburn have both said Ms. Roalsen and Mr. Walsh want to replace staff with machines, and it seems plausible–after all, nothing says “I want to replace my staff with robots” quite like “having bad relationships with staff, furloughing them, then giving a talk at Computers in Libraries about replacing staff with robots” –but that’s not the only thing they’re replacing them with. Fast forward to the last few months.

The Woburn Public Library, along with countless others throughout the state and nation, sensibly closed its doors to both the public and staff as COVID-19 took its first pass at Massachusetts in March. Unlike their neighboring libraries, though, for some amount of time during the building closure, they’ve been using volunteers to do home delivery of books and many other tasks while claiming there is no work for library staff to do.

The following screenshots show library staff attempting to help from home, being told there was nothing to do, and being removed from contributing to the library’s Facebook page.

One volunteer group that worked with the library is Social Capital, Inc., a well-known org in Woburn that helps provide opportunities for at-risk youth. According to multiple sources close to the situation, they previously had a long-standing positive relationship with the library, but retracted the volunteers they had sent to the library when they found out they were working in lieu of staff instead of in support of them. In other words, when they found out they were doing this work instead of staff employed by the library, they said no thanks.

Speaking of long-standing community partnerships, sources say that library administration put enough pressure on the Library’s 24-year-old Friends group for them to begin the process of dissolution in June. Considering the impacts of this, it’s a cruel attack on the city’s residents, particularly its children. The loss of support for museum passes, the Teddy Bear Picnic, Woburn Reads, and other Friends-sponsored events leaves a hole in the community that robots seem pretty unlikely to fill. (I’ll note that the trustees have said that the museum pass program will continue but now funded by city money. This seems like a poor allocation of resources, given the amount of financial turmoil the trustees point to elsewhere.)

Around the same time came the announcement of the furlough of 17 of the library’s non-administrative employees, despite a documented increase of the library’s FY21 budget. The following is a screenshot of the library’s union lawyer explaining exactly what was proposed by the city:

According to the union and library staff, none of the city’s other departments are being targeted for layoffs or furloughs. The thing I want to draw attention to in the above, though, is the idea that this furlough needs to happen “until such time as there is more work available at the library.” Here’s what’s going on at fellow Minuteman Library Network libraries in the area:

This chart was sourced from a member of the Support Woburn Librarians Facebook group and may have some inaccuracies in the hours of operation columns. It is intended to contrast Woburn’s service offerings with those of their peers in Minuteman.
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“Yesterday saw our 2nd highest Encore (online catalog) page view count for the past year (shown above), falling just shy of September 3rd. So this activity spike we’ve been seeing is real. We also saw just over 12,000 holds placed, which is the highest single day total since I’ve been collecting these numbers (going back to 2/12/20). Though as a reference point I looked up transactions for September 3rd 2019 (day after labor day) and there were only 10,627 holds placed then.” – Minuteman Data Curation Librarian Jeremy Goldstein in an email sent to the network staff on June 30

In a widely distributed email, the executive director of Minuteman, Phil McNulty, said, “I just think that collectively we are not in any shape to meet this demand level without deploying very extensive pickup hours… I think we can make a very compelling case that there is very strong patron demand and that we can meet it – if we have the staffing levels and organization to do so. As to that organization, it is becoming clear that page is the fundamentally most important job in the library now and we are all going to have to be pages and that circulation is our world this summer and we will all have to be circulation librarians.”

Everyone I know working in libraries around Boston is telling me about days where they can’t keep up with circulation traffic, phones ringing off the hook, and email and chat reference questions piling up by the dozens. When they aren’t all being circulation staff, they’re still offering hours of programming and activities for all ages from home each week. Saying there’s not enough work to do at the library right now is, simply put, a lie. It’s also frankly insulting to our colleagues who are scrambling, with slashed budgets and furloughs they tried as hard as they could to avoid, to keep up with patron demand.

As the union and city continue to find a path forward, an advocacy group on Facebook, Support Woburn Librarians, has drawn over 1,700 members both from the city and beyond, including many library workers like me who are standing in solidarity with Woburn’s staff. Numerous Woburn residents have been trying to get in touch with Ms. Roalsen, who is not returning phone calls and emails. The trustees decided to not meet for their scheduled July 7 board meeting or in August, and a kerfuffle around the June meeting’s Zoom password not being made publicly available prevented members of the community from attending. Instead, Ms. Roalsen and a handful of Woburn trustees have taken to accusing the members of the Facebook group of engaging in a “deliberate campaign of misinformation,” being “unhinged from any reality,” and “threatening” and “slandering” in the Woburn Daily Times.

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“I saw that Ms. Roalsen and Ms. Seitz (library trustee) both said in editorials that many of the public’s concerns are based on misinformation, and I would welcome any responses or information they can provide,” reads one letter to the mayor, director, and trustees shared in the Support Woburn Librarians group. “Unfortunately, those same editorials fail to identify or respond to any specific pieces of misinformation beyond some controversy around the circulation desk. The op-eds are mostly vague generalities and empty rhetoric while the more egregious questions and concerns are left unaddressed. Until the community members get the answers they seek, they have a right to keep asking important questions and voicing their concerns, and the library administration, board of trustees and city officials have a responsibility to address them.”

A letter jointly written by a number of library workers in the area specifically focused on Ms. Roalsen’s insistence that “many skills of library staff do not translate to the digital world of the pandemic:”

Library employees in neighboring towns like Winchester and Burlington were providing remote reference help, Zoom storytimes, book clubs, and activities for tweens and teens. These libraries had no trouble translating to the digital world. We have questions for Ms. Roalsen to “set straight.” Why do you hold your employees in such low esteem? Why, unlike fellow directors, did you decide they were incapable of doing work in the “digital world” without giving them any chance? And why are you not standing up for them now?

The availability of subscription products from for-profit, private companies that many libraries also subscribe to is not all that library patrons expect and deserve for their community. Providing streaming video or ebooks is not “groundbreaking” when most fellow Minuteman libraries have been on that “cutting edge” for a decade. Ms. Roalsen is again using a narrative of “innovation” to shift focus away from leaving her staff unemployed during a pandemic.

Concerned library workers in the Woburn area

One would think that with a newly created assistant director for technology position and what looks like an organizational dedication to providing innovative new services, the staff would have the resources and empowerment to be trained and ready for whatever this “digital world of the pandemic” has in store. As a person who helped a staff of 100 beef up their tech skills in the years before we found ourselves in this current moment, I can tell you it’s possible to get just about every library worker prepped, ready, and comfortable for the “digital world.” Am I saying 100% of them will be pumping out professional videos and web guides? Of course not, and it’s never going to be like that anywhere. But I would have worked with them to figure it out, using a list like this one plugged in LibraryJournal of tasks for public library workers to do from home. And now, with libraries in Massachusetts reopened for curbside pickup, there is no excuse.

Not only do we have accusations of spreading misinformation and no lines of communication with the decision makers, and not only do we have a library director who’s selling her own staff short, we also have the work and voices of advocates being threatened. Just after we created a Change.org petition in support of the library’s workers, we found out that Ms. Roalsen requested all of her staff’s email address passwords be changed, locking them all out of their inboxes and contact lists. While there may not be a connection, it comes off like more union-busting behavior, cutting off staff from their main means of communication with each other, the city, and the union.

And, circling back to the Dedham Board of Library Trustees, they weren’t too happy with my involvement in the business up in Woburn, so they sent this to the brand-new president of my employer on or around July 4:

I am currently on the Board of Library Trustees in Dedham, an elected position I have held for the past seven years. I am writing to you today because I am extremely distressed by Blank College’s decision to insert themselves in matters related to the Dedham Public Library, as represented by their Library Director, Callan Bignoli. Ms. Bignoli, not only serves as the library director of Blank College but, as you might be aware, is the head of #LIBREV(olution) a protect and pay library workers group. Ms. Bignoli has been using her platform as Library Director for Blank College to push out through social media outlets, discussion groups, Change.org petitions and letters, fabricated accusations regarding Dedham Public Library’s former director, now the Woburn Public Library Director. In addition, Ms. Bignoli has ignited a smear campaign against the Woburn Director and also the Dedham Library Trustees by encouraging and then amplifying these accusations that have been officially proven untrue. It is unclear to me why Blank College, through their Library Director, is taking this action.

In March, 2020, the Dedham Public Library Trustees fought to ensure their employees would be paid their full salary when the library’s doors closed due to the COVID19 pandemic. When they returned to the library to work one day a week on June 15, 2020, they continued to be paid fully. Not all libraries or municipalities have been as fortunate as ours and furloughs have taken place. However, it is abundantly clear that most people in this country have been effected financially by this pandemic. For [Blank] College, through their Library Director, to harass and bully public libraries that find themselves unable to sustain their budget is disgraceful. As an elected official, I understand I have little recourse, but I urge you, as you are represented through your Library Director, to stop engaging in this less than professional manner. 

Nameless (to me, at least) member of the Dedham Board of Library Trustees

That was a great time! Luckily, my boss could see through the gaslighting here as my personal web presence has nothing to do with my position at Blank. I also can’t help but point out the absurdity of calling me a harasser and bully of libraries that can’t sustain their budget when the Woburn Public Library received a budgetary increase, yet is still pursuing these furloughs. But I was nowhere near standing alone. This week, the Minuteman Library Network’s executive board issued a stern warning to the Woburn trustees, mayor, and Ms. Roalsen explaining their concerns about the library’s administrative behavior and future as a network member:

The majority or the entirety of Woburn’s non-management staff is in the process of being furloughed or laid off as of July 17, 2020 for reasons other than lack of budgeted funds. It is the considered opinion of the Board of Directors of the Minuteman Library Network that these staff members are knowledgeable, capable and dedicated librarians and library assistants…

The Board of Directors will bring before the Minuteman Membership as a whole the question of whether the Woburn Public Library is continuing to act as a viable member eligible for continued membership.

Letter from the Minuteman Library Network Board of Directors

Before long, the Woburn trustees were denouncing the MLN Board, a group of nearly a dozen library directors and administrators who represent some of the busiest and most well-loved libraries in New England, for spreading misinformation:

So that’s where we’re at! The union was supposed to meet with the city again today, but that was postponed. I’ll leave you with the words of another member of the advocacy group, urging us to now focus on the irresponsibility and negligence of the mayor, director, and trustees regarding the questions and requests for information from community members:

By characterizing concerned community members as “unhinged,” [the trustees and director] are showing the lack of respect they have for the community they are supposed to serve. By characterizing the staff as incapable of adjusting or disgruntled, they are really revealing the director’s lack of leadership and inability to connect with caring people who have served the Woburn community long before she showed up. By continually describing community discourse as a campaign of misinformation, the Trustees are actually revealing the lack of transparency and back-channel dealings that have been in since the current director was hired; not to mention a coordinated plan to gaslight the citizens of Woburn and turn attention away from the real issue.

Member of the Support Woburn Librarians Facebook group

I don’t know about you, but I’m a whole heck of a lot more concerned about this failure of democracy than I am about cancel culture. As we’re seeing protestors jailed and injured for exercising their rights and we’re watching the impacts of doublespeak when it comes from the highest office in the country unfold in the form of stoked racial violence and unnecessary sickness and death, we need to be on high alert when we see the word “misinformation” tossed around when citizens are merely asking questions. We also need to remember that our elected officials have an obligation to their constituents and need to hold them to it. That includes listening, and not calling them disgruntled and unhinged when they’re just looking for answers.

Want to take action? You can…

Categories
librev navel gazing

the view from the ivory tower

The first time anyone ever accused me of being “Ivory Tower” happened in the last 24 hours, and I was leaving MPOW when I saw this statement for the first time. I had just stopped by to check on our book drop because I knew a lot of seniors were coming back to town to move their stuff out of the dorms and I had reminded them about dropping their library items off while they were around for that. I also got some measurements and mental models in my head for the sake of coming up with a concrete plan for social distancing, and practiced running between my office and the downstairs workroom, knowing it may well be part of my job to be vigilant on two floors very soon. Thing is, I have only two staff members, may have no student workers in the fall, and the library is one of the most well-loved and well-used places on our little campus.

I initially only got through the first few paragraphs of this post, a rebuttal to my LibraryJournal piece from earlier this week, and as I biked back to Boston, this is the part that stuck with me:

“The Ivory Tower mentality of privilege is blowing my mind. The emotional argument of ‘librarian as sacred being’ will come back to haunt us…No one else is in government work is exempt from doing that.”

There are two reasons why it stuck: one is that positioning a nationwide campaign to advocate for library workers’ safety in this moment as an “emotional argument of ‘librarian as sacred being'” is misleading, unfair, and wrong. As Donna Lanclos said more eloquently than I can right now, “#VocationalAwe is not a “double edged sword,” it is a description of the constructs used to oppress library workers when they attempt to assert that they have rights. ‘Don’t you care for your community??’ when library workers shelter at home is straight-up [vocational awe].” This accusatory language of “librarian (notice not ‘library worker’) as sacred being” is more of the same construct. And lest you think think this is a quote taken out of context, or that I didn’t read the rest of it when I got home, the post goes on to say, “There is a heavy and heartbreaking dose of privilege that comes with librarians expressing they are too precious to roll up their sleeves and get to work.” Is this what we are saying, or are we saying that library workers deserve basic dignity, rights, and safety before they roll up said sleeves? Is it fair to say that in advocating for ourselves, we’re ignoring every other type of worker out there? Or is this another fence drawn around cutting us off from broader labor solidarity?

The other sticking point is that to accuse me of being Ivory Tower is just absurd. I’m a fucking millennial daughter of the Rust Belt with crooked teeth and tattoos, not some pant-suited dean who hasn’t been on the front lines in 20 years. I empty the book drop, open the mail, and help my students with every single thing they come to me with, whether or not it’s “library-related.” Did I mention I have two staff members? I’ve used my position, privilege in being a director and at an institution where we’re expected to stay home, and connections to the Massachusetts library community to try to affect some kind of meaningful protection for my colleagues for the last two months. It’s defined many of my weeks, I’ve given it every brain cell I didn’t allocate for my day-to-day job, and it still seems like it’s been a drop in the bucket against the rapid pressure to reopen right this second. This image of me kicking up my (sneaker) heels and saying “nah, I’m too precious for this shit” is offensive, so belittling and dismissive of how I approach my work, and the path I’ve taken to get to this current job (though my LinkedIn profile is, intriguingly, linked to in the post).

But I wonder if there’s something more to this, something that even goes beyond the fixation of me as an academic library director up in my ivory tower, when we get to this part:

And why should people listen to “people who are no longer working making declarations about how we should direct our energy in the first place?” Because we just may have a clarity of vision about what it is really like, on the other side, to use the services libraries are providing their communities.

To me this sounds at best like, “We have decided who has privilege and voice in this current system and it is not you, o young academic library director who is putting uncomfortable pressure on those of us already in power,” and at worst like, “Oh honey, someday you’ll understand.” I have been in this game long enough to see this pattern of certain female-identifying directors worshiping the ground walked on by young male-identifying directors, but treating young female-identifying directors as if they are problematic trash that should be disposed of forthwith. I know this when I see it, just as I know the public vs. academic crap when I see it.

I was on the other side of the public vs. academic line not long ago, and I will readily confess that my perception of academic library life was way off base. Maybe I also believed in this ivory tower, but didn’t call it as such; I thought academic librarians had a work experience at a distance from their patrons and didn’t form relationships like we did with them at the public library I worked for at the time. I thought that there was a privilege and stability in academia that blanketed over all of the myriad realities of staff and students. I was wrong. I have developed deep relationships with my patrons now that go far and beyond what I experienced in the public world. And I am out on the floor in sensible shoes, not only emptying the book drop and opening the mail but reshelving the books, weeding, ordering, cataloging, working with student groups both in “traditional” instructional services and in the role of a community organizer, of sorts–we read books about systemic oppression’s influence on technology, and have long meandering conversations about the better world we dream of. I challenge students to fight their way through the anodyne trappings of engineering education and embrace activism. And you know what? I had no idea this kind of work was possible as an academic library director until I saw the need and found myself doing it.

My point here is, I get the divisiveness between public/academic, but SHUT. UP. Have you seen the common refrain on library Twitter that we need a national union like, a thousand times over by yesterday? While I’m not going to be the person to provide that, I can say that if we’re going to be pitting publics vs. academics, we’re getting nowhere fast – certainly not to the “disrupted, innovative” future. This past week, everyone’s favorite grievance bot had some juicy posts about the notion of vocational awe being a mechanism for academic librarians to oppress and criticize their public counterparts from positions of relative safety. Guess what? No matter what your thoughts are about the application of that term, you’re fundamentally undermining the future of your field by making unsubstantiated, intentionally polarizing claims like it’s an academics vs publics thing. And similarly, to claim that you are interested in innovation for libraries right now but do not want to produce this in alignment with worker needs, you are not acting in the best interest of your field! Like, I’m sorry that you’ve worked with people who have been “resistant to change,” but as a wise librarian once said on Twitter,

“I resist changes that are done to me, for me, in spite of me. I am usually a reliable booster of change done with me, alongside me.”

I’ve had employees who’ve refused to meet baseline expectations, too, but no matter how much they pissed me off on a day-to-day, I would NEVER want them on the frontlines with no protection and no cohesive guidelines for safe operation. The argument I can’t help but hear in this post isn’t so very different from the GOP ghouls who think it’s okay to sacrifice COVID-prone folks for the good of the economy. Wouldn’t it be convenient for some directors to get rid of the workers “who want to do a job that doesn’t exist any more, if it ever really did?” And the thought that haunts me through all of this is one Ruha Benjamin quotes in Race After Technology:

“[To] take the place of progress, ‘innovation,’ a smaller, and morally neutral, concept arose. Innovation provided a way to celebrate the accomplishments of a high-tech age without expecting…too much in the way of moral & social improvement.”

We’re in the same boat if we keep lionizing these stories of perseverance with no context about the jobs, health, and emotional and financial stability lost. But do go on about me being up here in the ivory tower. If we can’t band together behind the acknowledgment that 6,000-10,000 layoffs and furloughs is a professional crisis, all of our realities are about to get a whoooooooole lot more miserable.

Categories
librev

we’re here because we’re here

Protesters outside Hennepin County Library branches where staff were asked to do curbside delivery after being laid off and encouraged to reapply for jobs at temporary shelters. Photo credit: Brad Sigal

There’s been a trend of articles coming out in major publications that are all about how excited people are to get back to their libraries, how resilient libraries are, all kinds of happy-go-lucky “we’re doing just fine!” stuff. It’s all well and good except for the fact that these narratives do nothing to a) tell the truth about the miserable realities that library workers are actually experiencing, and b) incite any kind of action to be taken in our defense.

Let’s start with the American Library Association, who have seemingly been going out of their way to come across as tone-deaf in this moment. On May 1, amidst thousands of layoffs and furloughs of library workers happening all around the country, ALA President Wanda Brown wrote a piece congratulating the resilience and stick-to-it-iveness of “librarians and library workers” in American Libraries magazine. There was no mention of lost jobs, slashed budgets, unsafe working conditions, managers censoring and punishing employees for speaking up for themselves, or threats of placement in riskier positions–in other words, none of what has defined this crisis for many of our colleagues.

Next up, we have a piece in PBS News Hour. The reporter did reach out to me to talk about the less savory parts of the story, but the narrative here is very much about the extra miles library workers feel like they’re expected to go because there’s no other options for their patrons. There’s a celebration of curbside pickup and enhanced social media use–and a more understandable and laudable effort to make the internet more accessible–but not much in the way of questioning why it is that libraries are the only shred of social safety left for citizens, and not much exploration of how austerity/disaster politics are currently decimating our field. Same went for this April 22 piece about Australia’s libraries in The Guardian, which quotes a public official who said, “The longer we keep our library branches closed, the deeper and more entrenched that digital divide will become.” Blaming library closures for the digital divide is like blaming our immune systems for succumbing to the virus.

A few days ago, an opinion piece written by a retired library worker ran in The Washington Post, titled “Local libraries will look a lot different when they reopen.” The author does mention furloughs, but says “some jurisdictions” have decided to do them and links to one system (this despite the over 5,600 layoffs and furloughs estimated via data collected in a tracking document, a number that is likely much higher but difficult to accurately count because of ambiguous reporting and fear of retaliation). What’s remarkable about this piece is that the writer is focused on the changes public libraries will need to contend with as they reopen, but doesn’t mention how a skeleton staff and the health risks to employees will impact those changes (I guess this is where our “librarians and library workers” resilience comes in). There’s also theorizing about print collections being supplanted by electronic ones, but no discussion of how impossible that feat is likely to be.

I’m sure there are other examples out there; feel free to share them with me and I’ll swipe at them, too. 😉 But I want to turn this to what I actually see happening right now, which is this:

  • Libraries are reopening to the public in states that are rushing forward to “get back to normal.” Workers at these libraries are scared for their health and safety, not only because of the covid-19 transmission risk but also because patrons are unpredictable, may not comply with rules, and may become violent and unruly, as has already been seen at public places and restaurants that are trying to operate “normally.”
  • The impacts I’ve seen on people who’ve contacted me or are posting about their experiences on Twitter are anxiety, depression, anger, frustration, sleeplessness, feelings of helplessness, thinking of leaving the field, contemplating quitting even during a tanked economy for the sake of their own safety and sanity, low morale, fear for family members, feelings that nothing they do will be enough to prevent furloughs or layoffs, and general malaise and purposelessness. Folks who have not yet been directly impacted (including me) are feeling a collective survivor’s guilt, and/or a sensation that the other shoe is going to drop at any moment.
  • In many states, libraries or their towns are acting in opposition to stay-at-home orders. The local offenders I’ve heard of that are engaging in this are the public libraries in Dedham, Watertown, and Cambridge; in Massachusetts, we are awaiting updates and a reopening plan from Governor Charlie Baker. These places are jumping the gun, and it leads one to wonder what’s motivating this: Furloughs and layoffs in nearby towns? Political or public pressure? (Or, at least in the case of Dedham, an embarrassing history of mismanagement and corruption?) In any case, we need to ask why both municipal managers and leaders of our professional organizations seem to think that putting our colleagues at risk is the most politically expedient thing to do.
  • Library workers are concerned about using PPE and cleaning supplies when there are still nationwide shortages of these items that should be prioritized for essential workers and people in vulnerable populations, such as in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and residences where there are sick or immunocompromised household members. They are also concerned about encouraging their community members to leave home and run errands before a determination of whether or not it’s safe to do that.
  • During the beginning and height of the #closethelibraries campaign, which started when many academic and public libraries were continuing to either operate as usual, refusing to provide telework options, or operating with scaled-down in-person services, it quickly became clear that many workers were being punished or threatened by library or municipal/institutional leadership if they attempted to speak about their unsafe conditions and stand up for their personal safety. As I was working with journalists trying to cover the movement, it was challenging to find people who were comfortable speaking on the record about their experiences for fear of retaliation. Leaders were exploiting the uncertainty and scariness of the job market to control these library workers and thus control the narrative of what was going on. And what was going on was not good, and continues to be very bad.

I’m only scratching the surface with what’s going on here based on the stories people are sharing with me and on social media (mostly with fear of retaliation or anxiety about how helpless they feel) and things I’m coming across in my home state. But the flipside of all of these digital storytimes and boosted WiFi signals in the parking lot is library workers forced to do jobs they never signed up for, scolded for their attempts to fight for their well-being, and the reality of slashed budgets they’re staring down from now until…who knows? What guarantee do we have of bouncing back?

Long before our lives began to be redefined by this global pandemic, library workers had plenty to worry about, specifically with their proclivity for self-sacrifice, overwork, and low morale. Our leaders are cashing in on our instincts for martyrdom and hesitance to make a fuss about our own needs, and you know what? It’s time to say not anymore. Ignoring our very real plight and slapping happy stories on top of it isn’t going to save us.

It’s not an end-all, be-all, but to at least throw something out there that you can do, consider signing this petition demanding safe reopening conditions for library workers. And push back on these stories of unmitigated success and unqualified resilience. Anyone who wants libraries to survive this needs to fight hard for library workers to survive it, too.

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