[Publib] Monday thoughts on Sunday

[Sharon Foster]

I was a software engineer, and if I hadn't been laid off 5 years ago,
I might still be one. I lied about the part of what I would have done
if I'd won the lottery 4 years ago. We're talking about a big win,
right, not a measly $2000? I'd be living in a small village in
Greece--maybe in Crete, maybe in northern Greece--tending a small
flock of chickens and a few goats, and painting. If I could have
foreseen the future, 4 years ago I would have sold my house and
accomplished the same goal. But I didn't, so here I am.

Sharon M. Foster, JD, MLS
Librarians bring order out of chaos.
http://www.vsa-software.com/mlsportfolio/






On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 2:33 PM, Lynne
Ingersoll<lingersoll at blueislandlibrary.org> wrote:
> 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-worth/?scp=1&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 recipes for the grill.
>
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