[Publib] WI Librarians Demoted: "Librarians today do lesscomplexwork"

[James Casey]

Sue Kamm is right.  With health insurance premiums increasing rapidly,
the budgetary pressures are intense.  Using various expedients and
dressing them up to look like service improvements is not a new tactic.
Universities have been doing this kind of thing for years by using
Adjunct Faculty to teach numerous classes at ridiculously low rates of
compensation and zero benefits.  For many decades we have seen legions
of Ph.D.s and MAs in various liberal arts fields piecing together three
or four adjunct positions in order to make ends meet while hoping that
their spouses have some kind of medical insurance.  Back in the 1970s,
Cleveland Public Library stopped hiring MLS librarians and decided to
use the MLS degree only for department head and assistant department
head positions.  The positions that had previously been held by MLS
librarians were filled by para-professionals without the MLS.  The
department I worked in went from 8 MLS Librarians down to 2 via
attrition.   That was some 30 years ago.  

 

I don't see things getting worse, but continuation of a situation that
is already pretty bad.   Michael Moore talks about 47 million Americans
without health insurance and librarians/academics make up a portion of
that figure.  

 

James B. Casey --- My own views.

Director of Oak Lawn Public Library

ALA Council Member

 

 

 

 

 

 

One advantage to hiring part-timers is the employer may not have to
provide benefits.

 

Your friendly neighborhood CyberGoddess and ALA Councilor at Large, 

Sue Kamm

Email: suekamm[at]mindspring.com

Inglewood/Los Angeles, CA

Los Angeles Dodgers Truest of the Blue, 2000

Visit my blog: http://suekamm.blogspot.com

"I'm not comfortable being preachy, but more people need to start
spending as much time in the library as they do on the basketball
court." -- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

 

 

	----- Original Message ----- 

	From: Allyson Legg <mailto:allysonlegg at yahoo.com>  

	To: Publib at webjunction.org

	Sent: 2/25/2008 4:22:17 PM 

	Subject: Re: [Publib] WI Librarians Demoted: "Librarians today
do less complexwork"

	 

	What exactly does the director mean by "less complex work," of
course the work librarians do today is different from what they did in
the past but that does not make it less complex. It seems to me that a
lot of library positions available today are for part time
semi-professional librarians, which of course pay less than the
librarian 1 jobs.. It's hard to get experienced librarians with MLS
degrees to take these lower positions. I only hope that the Marathon
County Public Library incident is not an example of a slippery slope
leading to the deprofessionalization of librarianship. I think it's
important to examine the fact that public libraries do not operate in a
vacuum. They are institutions that are part of a larger social/cultural
climate. In my opinion America's current zeitgeist is one of
anti-intellectualism and I hate to be a doomsayer but the future does
not bode well for librarians. 

	
	
	

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