[Publib] Monday thoughts on Sunday

[Lynne Ingersoll]

I spent 23 years in banking before I went to library school.  After spending
all the profit sharing from my last bank job, I took a 50% pay cut at my
first (and so far only) library.  I think last year I finally got back to
the salary I left 17 years ago to become a librarian.  Financially not the
most astute move I've ever made but much more satisfying every other way.
Of course, I suppose being a bank auditor doesn't count as real work either,
since it was in a well-lit and relatively comfortable office.  On the other
hand, no one likes auditors and that gets wearing after awhile.  My father
was a carpenter-millwright and he would have liked to see me be a carpenter
too.  Unfortunately, the unions in those days didn't let women into the
apprenticeship programs.

 

I doubt if this answers the final question in the post from M. McGrorty.

 

Lynne S. Ingersoll

Lynne S. Ingersoll

Reference Services Manager

Technical Services Manager

Blue Island Public Library

2433 York Street

Blue Island, IL 60406

(708) 388-1078 x21

(708) 388-9301 Fax

 

  _____  

From: publib-bounces at webjunction.org [mailto:publib-bounces at webjunction.org]
On Behalf Of Backwage at aol.com
Sent: Sunday, July 05, 2009 3:55 PM
To: publib at webjunction.org
Subject: [Publib] Monday thoughts on Sunday

 

Recently the New York Times has offered an article about the worth of a
modern-day master's degree.  The link follows--if as happens it doesn't
function you can always look the piece up yourselves.

 

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/what-is-a-masters-degree-w
orth/?scp=1
<http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/what-is-a-masters-degree-
worth/?scp=1&sq=masters%20degree&st=cse> &sq=masters%20degree&st=cse

 

The Times has received quite a few comments on topic.  Reading through them
we find the usual themes, many of which have been worked to death by
newly-minted librarians over the years:  lack of jobs, student loan burdens,
terrific competition and of course, the lack of recognition by society in
general.

 

Most of these gripes ring about as true as the signs of the beggars on
freeway on-ramps.   They more or less say "Will Work For Food" but the
reality is somewhat at variance with this claim.  I recall years ago when
there was a teacher's strike in Los Angeles, the longshore locals invited
the strikers to work the docks on a temporary basis.  Very few did, and
those who did evaporated pretty quickly.  

 

Here in the building trades we often get inquiries by laid-off teachers and
other educated folk about apprenticeships.  They sometimes fill out
applications, and they always pass the tests, but they almost never stick
around, even though the starting apprentice pay meets or exceeds beginning
teacher salaries, and the top pay (after only five years!) beats the heck
out of what almost any teacher gets.  The hourly wage for an electrician is
$35.95 and the plumber wage is almost 34 dollars, not counting the benefit
packages.  Things are a bit slow right now, but anybody can apply for the
apprenticeship program.  In fact, the laborers union is always hiring, and
you can go to work ASAP.  

 

The reason that these folks don't is because they don't want to.  Work, that
is.  Today they will use the excuse of the recession, but a year or so ago
when things were going fine they just griped about something else.  Why is
this so?  Well, we might look at a time when this wasn't so.

 

The schoolteachers and librarians of my childhood mostly had other careers
before getting their college degrees.  I had teachers who were previously
plumbers, landscapers and carpenters.  They even went back to the trades in
summer.  A librarian I knew had been a laborer; another was a tech writer in
an aircraft plant.  Another packed fruit in a cannery.  These weren't
summer-break jobs but what they did and would have done forever if they
hadn't gotten an M.A. degree.  My own father taught school but was an
aircraft mechanic before that.  By the time I did my own librarian
internships I found that none of my superiors had done anything in the way
of manual work at all.  Over the course of a couple of generations, the
working class connections had withered away.  

 

Side note:  I worked as a clerk in a public library where none of the
librarians had ever worked outside the cloister.  All of them had gone from
college to college to the library.  In this same place the clerks were all
working class people, most with only a bit of college done.  Talk about a
culture chasm.  Sometimes I had to translate so the two sides could
understand each other.  I could do this because the librarians figured I was
going to be a librarian, and because the clerks were the parents of kids I'd
grown up with.  I could write a book just from the conversations each side
had about the other.

 

Nowadays the educated classes look down on manual labor.  This is not to say
that they don't give lip service to it, but the real measure of their
feeling comes through in how they raise their own kids.  I've seen dozens of
librarians and teachers who would tell you "Whatever my kid does is fine
with me," but then they sit up late filling out applications to Yale so
little Dingbat doesn't have to dirty his hands among the lower classes.
Mind you, the trade union officials I work with are the same--they direct
their own kids to college unless the kid is a very dim bulb, at which point
they finance his entry into a "music school" where the kid can learn the
rudiments of guitar playing until he finds himself (on the couch at home).

 

[As I look down the street where I live, not a single householder mows his
own lawn or washes his own windows.  The trucks come around from the diaper
service, the laundry and even to deliver groceries.  They look at me like
I'm crazy because I do my own gardening--they can't even name the flowers in
their own yards.  I have yet to meet a young person in these parts who was
not destined for college--the kids wear college sweatshirts from junior high
school onward.  What will happen to those who don't get into college?  Will
they hate themselves or feel betrayed, like the folks with degrees who can't
find the job they want?]

 

And tell me, what is it about actual work that the educated classes dislike?
Is it the duties or the milieu, or perhaps the label?  My own Pop left the
aircraft business to take a two-thirds cut in pay to be a schoolteacher.
For a smart man he was an idiot.  And very proud to be an intellectual.
Sometimes I wonder exactly what that means.

 

Once we had masses of people demanding jobs; now we have masses of educated
folk demanding jobs that won't dirty their hands--and also that these jobs
be located in clean, well-lit offices among others of their kind.  Tell me
the truth:  would you work at something other than librarianship for the
same money or better?  And why don't you now?  

 

M. McGrorty

 

  _____  

Make your summer sizzle with fast and easy
<http://food.aol.com/grilling?ncid=emlcntusfood00000005>  recipes for the
grill.

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