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This may sound like it’s out of left field, but thank you for helping me understand why my daughter stays in her adequately paying, benefit giving job instead of reaching “higher.” Although I’m a baby boomer, I got caught up in the “do work that you are passionate about” frenzy FOR HER and have been advocating a career change. That stops now. Although she has experienced the burden of being asked to do more for the same money, she also gets occasional bonuses and fair treatment from her boss. Her value to the company is recognized. It’s not an ideal situation, but I know she wants that stability. It’s time for mom to mind her own business.
I'm a public librarian - a branch manager specifically. My overriding feeling throughout the pandemic was rage. Rage at everyone else who got to go home and work from there. Rage at the decision makers who recognized that not everything could be accomplished from home but didn't go further along that process. Rage at the people who decided public librarians were somehow the best people to do all of those things that couldn't be accomplished from home. Rage at the decision makers who just didn't care at all if people fell through the cracks because they needed help in person. And, so on and on and on. Why was I the one who had to come into work during a pandemic so people had a place to go, when I wasn't actually the person who could help them? I could do absolutely nothing for the homeless man who qualified for social security but couldn't get in the system because no one was working in the office and he was relying on a crappy cellphone to try and be available at the random times they assigned him "phone appointments". I felt like I was managing a holding pen for people who were just hoping they could hang on long enough to make it to the point when the people who work in those offices that actually do the things that help them come back to those offices. I know I'm supposed to think that it was great that all those other employees got to work from home because it helped prevent greater spread? Or something? But, if it wasn't important for me to be safe at home, why was it more important for them, the people who could actually do the necessary things? Ugh. This was a mess of thoughts. I really am not okay.
This hit me so hard! I left/got thrown out of a profession that's not okay (medical transcriptionists) and I'm currently working my ass off to get into another profession that's not okay (museum workers). And it seems like at least once a week I find myself looking at my computer wondering if my time would be better spent doing schoolwork (I'm scheduled to finish my MA in art history/museum studies this fall) or filling out yet another job application, and then find myself wondering if I might not be better off chucking it all and trying to get hired on at Costco!
I spent most of my life thinking that I just wasn't suited to live in capitalism, and I'm probably not, but it's only recently that I've come to see that it's not all my fault.
I can relate so much to this Jason! I'm also a graduate student who has spent my life thinking I wasn't suited to live in capitalism, but since reading AHP's book about millennial burnout, I think that was mostly what was happening. My "chuck it all" option is Trader Joe's, and my radiologist cousins' is Jet Blue lol
I am not a librarian, but this makes so much sense. I watched the IG stories flood in about expanding work and thought about my past career a lot. I left the nonprofit world (mostly development) after 10 years, and it was the best decision. The goals, often driven by out-of-touch leadership/boards (and then by executive directors feeling board pressure), just kept expanding with no resources for the people doing the actual work. No wonder directors of development are the most burnt out/turned over roles in nonprofits. I think the audience of this talk was academic librarians, but it's also true of public librarians as well.
I did end up making a complete sector/career change, but this piece made me realize I just ended up in another passion field, and my burnout might actually be worse than I thought. I thought my burnout was pandemic-related, then I realized it's pandemic + career change related (the last 3+ years), and then I realized it's directly related to the job market trauma of graduating in 2009 with an arts/humanities degree. That Great Recession/need to be constantly productive is so so so real.
It's Sunday, I have a pile of work to do if I don't want to burst into tears tomorrow, and I'm resentful as hell. Just put Bailey's in my coffee.
No, the librarians are definitely not okay. And that's bad news for all of us.
As someone who, until recently, was working in an academic library and studying to become an academic librarian, I saw it firsthand. Librarians are society's "wives" (to borrow a concept from your excellent last newsletter). As you point out, they're primary caretakers to some of our most vulnerable and under-resourced people (like children, students and the poor). They're usually financially dependent on the most miserly and ungrateful "spouses" (e.g., state-funded institutions). They're also a societal bellwether--When the community is ill, our librarians are among the first to feel the fever rise.
Public libraries are essential community hubs. They are often the place where people who don't have any other place to go come for assistance. They were cash strapped and under-resourced before the pandemic. Now it's even worse. My local public library, for instance, serves many unhoused patrons and our city's large immigrant population. It has a full-time, onsite social worker and offers ESL classes and legal aid. It has a fantastic children's library popular with kids who don't have after-school care. It hosted a full suite of daily virtual programming for kids during the height of the pandemic so parents with kids stuck at home (like me) could have an hour sanity break. I recently learned the library does all this and much more with the same level of state funding it has had since 1992. (You know, before the internet, when it's biggest expense was presumably John Grisham novels.)
Meanwhile, school libraries are facing an unprecedented number of book challenges and bans, and yet school media specialists are being sidelined by administrators, school boards and even by the media. (I've read a ton of coverage of the book bans and virtually none of it includes voices of the librarians who are responsible for the collections being targeted.) Undervalued on a good day, these educators are being made even more invisible, and yet simultaneously increasingly harassed and threatened, by the current political climate around books.
Speaking of undervalued educators, then there are the academic librarians--who are often educators, too. (According to one 2012 study, 97% of entry-level academic librarians do instruction work. And at some schools, academic librarians are faculty. Often we have two master's degrees or a PhD.) Despite this, academic librarians are often treated by other faculty like "the help," and when they do get to teach, they're expected to give students the information literacy skills needed to parse credible sources in the era of social media and YouTube in a single "one-shot" class. IMHO, critical information literacy--the ability to evaluate information and interrogate the structures and systems that created it--might be the single most important thing we can teach our students in the age of mis/dis/mal-information. And yet, we often have no resources, no training and no institutional support to teach it. (Because we're just the "wives" for the real academics. Who cares about us?)
So, no, librarians aren't okay. Thanks for acknowledging that and spreading the word about what librarians do and why it matters. You're one of the only journalists with a platform outside of the library community I've seen acknowledge us in this way. Thanks for shedding light on the exhausted, "invisible" workers propping up everyone else. Librarians, and other "care" workers, need to know people care about them, too.
I’m a public librarian and we are really not okay, thank you for this. (If it’s available for non-subscribers to read, I’d really like to share it with my coworkers, we are demoralized and worried and tired and scared.)
May 1, 2022·edited May 1, 2022Liked by Anne Helen Petersen
It's interesting to read this as a nascent academic librarian, because although I know all this to be true about the field, I have been So. Much. Happier as a precariously employed contract worker librarian than I was as a permanent salaried librarian in a professional services firm (which I did for four years before leaving for higher ed). Still, it's undeniable that good jobs in this field are few and far between unless you're willing to move to another city or province (or another state if you're in the US), and my most recent employer prefers to hire 10 part-time librarians on 4-6 month part-time contracts than to hire 4 or 5 FTE librarians. That same employer talks a big game about progressive politics and labour solidarity, but their library staffing model really puts the lie to that. It's shit, frankly. We need to do better.
Yeah the hiring a bunch of PT employees is absolutely true at the library I recently started at (public, also working part time). I’m considering academic libraries, but I don’t have the MLS (I do have a PhD).
Thank you. And thank you especially for acknowledging that clergy are also not okay! I’m a former clergy person for the reasons detailed in your article, and most of the people in my life are clergy or nonprofit workers who actually, legitimately, want to help people in need and do the work of social justice.
But the structures we’ve created for this passion work are quite literally killing us; I have lost three friends in their 40s to stress-related illnesses. Because I’ve left, I get calls all the time asking “how did you get out?”
Thank you for naming this, detailing it, and giving those of us in the midst of it some tools and a little light to see by.
Thank you for this! I recently moved from publishing to a government job and the difference is like night and day. There's something about NOT being stretched past capacity all the time that is so life-affirming. Being stretched beyond capacity shouldn't be a daily requirement of any job, but for so many jobs, it is.
thank you for this wording -- you're right that stretching beyond capacity is a daily requirement for many jobs. As a graduate student, it's almost a moral failing if you don't. Pushing back on this will be my mantra for the week!
It extends across the entire range of modern professions, I think.
I've worked since the 1980's in computer software development. I've always been a technical lead and one of the top performers. None of that protected me from an infant child's death, divorce, cancer, two national financial collapses (2001 and 2008) that wiped out investments, personal bankruptcy, and companies that went out of business under me. I grew up in the middle class, and will die in the middle class, living on Social Security (if it continues to exist) just like most people. If I'm fortunate, I'll be able to pass a house on to our children, for them to sell and split the funds. And in that, I AM fortunate. A huge chunk of what used to be the middle class will fall into poverty, like a calving glacier falling into the ocean.
The core issue in this whole mess is unrestrained capitalism. Our current model of capitalism is built on two fallacies.
The first is that capitalism results in proportional investment growth, which is the same thing as exponential growth, which is the same thing as doubling growth. A two-percent annual growth has a doubling-time of about 35 years. Every 35 years, we have to double "productivity." Twice as many cars. Twice as many restaurants. Twice as many movies. Twice as many computers. In the next 35 years, it has to double again. And in the next 35, it has to double again. Nothing in nature supports even the possibility of sustaining this. It's a ticking time bomb.
The second fallacy is that the wealth of unrestrained capitalism will, by its own nature, "trickle down" and perform all the needful work to support individuals and a society. This is nonsense. It doesn't trickle down, it fountains upward, where it is caught in "investment accounts" that re-invest in high-growth industries -- as they must, to sustain that 2% exponential growth rate. Food, housing, libraries, concert halls, and the like, are not high-growth investments, and when food can't be sold, it is destroyed. It doesn't matter if half the population is starving: if they can't pay market prices for it, they don't exist.
COVID has been a slap in the side of the head for the whole system. People working at sub-living wages for years, essentially suffocating and compensating by taking smaller and smaller breaths, got a huge flood of fresh air in the form of a government check to tide them over. They could buy groceries, AND spend a month looking at new job prospects. Caring for their own children. Or just ... breathing.
All of that money fountained straight up to the investment class. Elon Musk's net worth increased by a factor of ten, as did Jeff Bezos'. Everyone who bought mail-order from Amazon and paid for it with Paypal sent money directly to these two individuals.
It's not clear to me that capitalism shouldn't be destroyed, but it's obvious that it needs to be tightly constrained and tethered to reality.
I teared up a bit while reading "the graduate students are not ok. the social workers are not ok." I'm a graduate student and my partner is a social worker. I'm planning to leave grad school and am currently job searching so we can have a fighting chance at financial stability and maybe a family one day soon. For me the promised "life of the mind" is no longer worth having no life at all. My heart goes out to all the precarious workers, particularly librarians. May we find our way to how we're meant to live -- in peace.
My doctors pushed me to leave my teaching career six years ago due to the number it was doing on my health. I'm still not done crying about it! Just needed to shout that here!
Thank you AHP, this was dead on! I’m a professional archivist and have been in the library/museum/archives world for 20+ years. The good news is that there has been A LOT of activism in the field in recent years over these and other issues. I was personally involved in a union (UC-AFT) grievance, filed together with five colleagues, against the University of California over the misuse of temporary labor at the UCLA Library—we ultimately lost in arbitration but the open letter we posted to the profession was widely read (it’s here: https://zenodo.org/record/5159944#.YnANxNPMJhE) and the conversation continues. I’m happy to share other resources on the contingent labor issue if anyone is interested.
I'm one of the academic librarians who was present for this talk at CALM, and I'm grateful for your choice to share it as your newsletter this week.
This work IS hard. We are not okay. I can't begin to describe the moral injury I sustained in my previous positions from standing up for my team, in front of policies and procedures that put them at risk. Public services/access services/user services teams are typically the most diverse in age, racial/ethnic background, and paid the least because there are usually not many or ANY faculty roles in them. Ten days before the pandemic shut us down, my team and I put together a "what-if" document in case of full closure. It was a way for us to take some ownership over a spiraling situation that saw our upper leadership in the library and the wider institution in deep denial about the impending crisis. We wanted to know that at least WE could figure out something to keep us safe, that we could provide a modest level of support to bewildered students and faculty. I ended up being castigated. It was the beginning of the end in that role for me. Perhaps I overstepped, and an administrator (I was faculty at the time) should have done something. But they were not talking with us, and we were filling the vacuum with something productive to keep our work going and to make sure we wouldn't all be laid off or furloughed for "lack of work", because there was no shortage of projects to be done!
In the end, I left my position for another institution altogether. Job hunting and starting a new role in the pandemic is not easy. My family and I had to move as well, leaving behind the mutual care network that my spouse and I had painstakingly built when I took the job.
I live 2000 miles away from my immediate family members because the work isn't there for me. My parents are struggling with significant health problems, and my 92-year-old grandmother is deteriorating rapidly. I feel sick that I can't be there to help; my job is too new and I am on my third boss since starting last July (provost-type position, I'm the library director). I am in my library daily, working on the reference desk to cover absences from faculty and staff who are burning out because of the brokenness of our society's structures for care.
We are not okay. We are grieving the losses of our colleagues who've died from COVID, our family and friends who have suffered, the erosion of boundaries and guardrails in the rush to "back to normal" behavior, and the increasing pressure and persecution from interests that literally want to burn books that represent the diversity of our communities. I don't blame those who decide that enough is enough and walk away from the profession, and I support your decisions to do what is right for your health and wellbeing. Just know that there are hundreds of librarians who were in that keynote and at the conference last week who are focused on making change, even as we are fighting broader authoritarian forces in our society. <3
This was very insightful--I'm an English professor, and this all really hit home. I've known that "I'm not ok" but I haven't been able to articulate why other than "gestures at everything"
This may sound like it’s out of left field, but thank you for helping me understand why my daughter stays in her adequately paying, benefit giving job instead of reaching “higher.” Although I’m a baby boomer, I got caught up in the “do work that you are passionate about” frenzy FOR HER and have been advocating a career change. That stops now. Although she has experienced the burden of being asked to do more for the same money, she also gets occasional bonuses and fair treatment from her boss. Her value to the company is recognized. It’s not an ideal situation, but I know she wants that stability. It’s time for mom to mind her own business.
YOU'RE A GREAT MOM, GINNY!
Love this!
I'm a public librarian - a branch manager specifically. My overriding feeling throughout the pandemic was rage. Rage at everyone else who got to go home and work from there. Rage at the decision makers who recognized that not everything could be accomplished from home but didn't go further along that process. Rage at the people who decided public librarians were somehow the best people to do all of those things that couldn't be accomplished from home. Rage at the decision makers who just didn't care at all if people fell through the cracks because they needed help in person. And, so on and on and on. Why was I the one who had to come into work during a pandemic so people had a place to go, when I wasn't actually the person who could help them? I could do absolutely nothing for the homeless man who qualified for social security but couldn't get in the system because no one was working in the office and he was relying on a crappy cellphone to try and be available at the random times they assigned him "phone appointments". I felt like I was managing a holding pen for people who were just hoping they could hang on long enough to make it to the point when the people who work in those offices that actually do the things that help them come back to those offices. I know I'm supposed to think that it was great that all those other employees got to work from home because it helped prevent greater spread? Or something? But, if it wasn't important for me to be safe at home, why was it more important for them, the people who could actually do the necessary things? Ugh. This was a mess of thoughts. I really am not okay.
This hit me so hard! I left/got thrown out of a profession that's not okay (medical transcriptionists) and I'm currently working my ass off to get into another profession that's not okay (museum workers). And it seems like at least once a week I find myself looking at my computer wondering if my time would be better spent doing schoolwork (I'm scheduled to finish my MA in art history/museum studies this fall) or filling out yet another job application, and then find myself wondering if I might not be better off chucking it all and trying to get hired on at Costco!
I spent most of my life thinking that I just wasn't suited to live in capitalism, and I'm probably not, but it's only recently that I've come to see that it's not all my fault.
I can relate so much to this Jason! I'm also a graduate student who has spent my life thinking I wasn't suited to live in capitalism, but since reading AHP's book about millennial burnout, I think that was mostly what was happening. My "chuck it all" option is Trader Joe's, and my radiologist cousins' is Jet Blue lol
I am not a librarian, but this makes so much sense. I watched the IG stories flood in about expanding work and thought about my past career a lot. I left the nonprofit world (mostly development) after 10 years, and it was the best decision. The goals, often driven by out-of-touch leadership/boards (and then by executive directors feeling board pressure), just kept expanding with no resources for the people doing the actual work. No wonder directors of development are the most burnt out/turned over roles in nonprofits. I think the audience of this talk was academic librarians, but it's also true of public librarians as well.
I did end up making a complete sector/career change, but this piece made me realize I just ended up in another passion field, and my burnout might actually be worse than I thought. I thought my burnout was pandemic-related, then I realized it's pandemic + career change related (the last 3+ years), and then I realized it's directly related to the job market trauma of graduating in 2009 with an arts/humanities degree. That Great Recession/need to be constantly productive is so so so real.
It's Sunday, I have a pile of work to do if I don't want to burst into tears tomorrow, and I'm resentful as hell. Just put Bailey's in my coffee.
No, the librarians are definitely not okay. And that's bad news for all of us.
As someone who, until recently, was working in an academic library and studying to become an academic librarian, I saw it firsthand. Librarians are society's "wives" (to borrow a concept from your excellent last newsletter). As you point out, they're primary caretakers to some of our most vulnerable and under-resourced people (like children, students and the poor). They're usually financially dependent on the most miserly and ungrateful "spouses" (e.g., state-funded institutions). They're also a societal bellwether--When the community is ill, our librarians are among the first to feel the fever rise.
Public libraries are essential community hubs. They are often the place where people who don't have any other place to go come for assistance. They were cash strapped and under-resourced before the pandemic. Now it's even worse. My local public library, for instance, serves many unhoused patrons and our city's large immigrant population. It has a full-time, onsite social worker and offers ESL classes and legal aid. It has a fantastic children's library popular with kids who don't have after-school care. It hosted a full suite of daily virtual programming for kids during the height of the pandemic so parents with kids stuck at home (like me) could have an hour sanity break. I recently learned the library does all this and much more with the same level of state funding it has had since 1992. (You know, before the internet, when it's biggest expense was presumably John Grisham novels.)
Meanwhile, school libraries are facing an unprecedented number of book challenges and bans, and yet school media specialists are being sidelined by administrators, school boards and even by the media. (I've read a ton of coverage of the book bans and virtually none of it includes voices of the librarians who are responsible for the collections being targeted.) Undervalued on a good day, these educators are being made even more invisible, and yet simultaneously increasingly harassed and threatened, by the current political climate around books.
Speaking of undervalued educators, then there are the academic librarians--who are often educators, too. (According to one 2012 study, 97% of entry-level academic librarians do instruction work. And at some schools, academic librarians are faculty. Often we have two master's degrees or a PhD.) Despite this, academic librarians are often treated by other faculty like "the help," and when they do get to teach, they're expected to give students the information literacy skills needed to parse credible sources in the era of social media and YouTube in a single "one-shot" class. IMHO, critical information literacy--the ability to evaluate information and interrogate the structures and systems that created it--might be the single most important thing we can teach our students in the age of mis/dis/mal-information. And yet, we often have no resources, no training and no institutional support to teach it. (Because we're just the "wives" for the real academics. Who cares about us?)
So, no, librarians aren't okay. Thanks for acknowledging that and spreading the word about what librarians do and why it matters. You're one of the only journalists with a platform outside of the library community I've seen acknowledge us in this way. Thanks for shedding light on the exhausted, "invisible" workers propping up everyone else. Librarians, and other "care" workers, need to know people care about them, too.
I’m a public librarian and we are really not okay, thank you for this. (If it’s available for non-subscribers to read, I’d really like to share it with my coworkers, we are demoralized and worried and tired and scared.)
Yes! I accidentally sent it to subscribers in the beginning, but now it's available to all. Please forward away.
It's interesting to read this as a nascent academic librarian, because although I know all this to be true about the field, I have been So. Much. Happier as a precariously employed contract worker librarian than I was as a permanent salaried librarian in a professional services firm (which I did for four years before leaving for higher ed). Still, it's undeniable that good jobs in this field are few and far between unless you're willing to move to another city or province (or another state if you're in the US), and my most recent employer prefers to hire 10 part-time librarians on 4-6 month part-time contracts than to hire 4 or 5 FTE librarians. That same employer talks a big game about progressive politics and labour solidarity, but their library staffing model really puts the lie to that. It's shit, frankly. We need to do better.
Yeah the hiring a bunch of PT employees is absolutely true at the library I recently started at (public, also working part time). I’m considering academic libraries, but I don’t have the MLS (I do have a PhD).
Thank you so much for sharing this -- I was one of the librarians tearing up during this talk and frantically scribbling notes to share with my team.
Thank you. And thank you especially for acknowledging that clergy are also not okay! I’m a former clergy person for the reasons detailed in your article, and most of the people in my life are clergy or nonprofit workers who actually, legitimately, want to help people in need and do the work of social justice.
But the structures we’ve created for this passion work are quite literally killing us; I have lost three friends in their 40s to stress-related illnesses. Because I’ve left, I get calls all the time asking “how did you get out?”
Thank you for naming this, detailing it, and giving those of us in the midst of it some tools and a little light to see by.
I’m clergy, and I cried reading this. It’s exactly what our lives are like right now.
I also spoke to a group of clergy (and lots of burnt out former clergy) at Mockingbird this weekend, so it was very much top of mind
Thank you for this! I recently moved from publishing to a government job and the difference is like night and day. There's something about NOT being stretched past capacity all the time that is so life-affirming. Being stretched beyond capacity shouldn't be a daily requirement of any job, but for so many jobs, it is.
thank you for this wording -- you're right that stretching beyond capacity is a daily requirement for many jobs. As a graduate student, it's almost a moral failing if you don't. Pushing back on this will be my mantra for the week!
It extends across the entire range of modern professions, I think.
I've worked since the 1980's in computer software development. I've always been a technical lead and one of the top performers. None of that protected me from an infant child's death, divorce, cancer, two national financial collapses (2001 and 2008) that wiped out investments, personal bankruptcy, and companies that went out of business under me. I grew up in the middle class, and will die in the middle class, living on Social Security (if it continues to exist) just like most people. If I'm fortunate, I'll be able to pass a house on to our children, for them to sell and split the funds. And in that, I AM fortunate. A huge chunk of what used to be the middle class will fall into poverty, like a calving glacier falling into the ocean.
The core issue in this whole mess is unrestrained capitalism. Our current model of capitalism is built on two fallacies.
The first is that capitalism results in proportional investment growth, which is the same thing as exponential growth, which is the same thing as doubling growth. A two-percent annual growth has a doubling-time of about 35 years. Every 35 years, we have to double "productivity." Twice as many cars. Twice as many restaurants. Twice as many movies. Twice as many computers. In the next 35 years, it has to double again. And in the next 35, it has to double again. Nothing in nature supports even the possibility of sustaining this. It's a ticking time bomb.
The second fallacy is that the wealth of unrestrained capitalism will, by its own nature, "trickle down" and perform all the needful work to support individuals and a society. This is nonsense. It doesn't trickle down, it fountains upward, where it is caught in "investment accounts" that re-invest in high-growth industries -- as they must, to sustain that 2% exponential growth rate. Food, housing, libraries, concert halls, and the like, are not high-growth investments, and when food can't be sold, it is destroyed. It doesn't matter if half the population is starving: if they can't pay market prices for it, they don't exist.
COVID has been a slap in the side of the head for the whole system. People working at sub-living wages for years, essentially suffocating and compensating by taking smaller and smaller breaths, got a huge flood of fresh air in the form of a government check to tide them over. They could buy groceries, AND spend a month looking at new job prospects. Caring for their own children. Or just ... breathing.
All of that money fountained straight up to the investment class. Elon Musk's net worth increased by a factor of ten, as did Jeff Bezos'. Everyone who bought mail-order from Amazon and paid for it with Paypal sent money directly to these two individuals.
It's not clear to me that capitalism shouldn't be destroyed, but it's obvious that it needs to be tightly constrained and tethered to reality.
I teared up a bit while reading "the graduate students are not ok. the social workers are not ok." I'm a graduate student and my partner is a social worker. I'm planning to leave grad school and am currently job searching so we can have a fighting chance at financial stability and maybe a family one day soon. For me the promised "life of the mind" is no longer worth having no life at all. My heart goes out to all the precarious workers, particularly librarians. May we find our way to how we're meant to live -- in peace.
My doctors pushed me to leave my teaching career six years ago due to the number it was doing on my health. I'm still not done crying about it! Just needed to shout that here!
Thank you AHP, this was dead on! I’m a professional archivist and have been in the library/museum/archives world for 20+ years. The good news is that there has been A LOT of activism in the field in recent years over these and other issues. I was personally involved in a union (UC-AFT) grievance, filed together with five colleagues, against the University of California over the misuse of temporary labor at the UCLA Library—we ultimately lost in arbitration but the open letter we posted to the profession was widely read (it’s here: https://zenodo.org/record/5159944#.YnANxNPMJhE) and the conversation continues. I’m happy to share other resources on the contingent labor issue if anyone is interested.
In other good news, the American Library Association (ALA) has just elected a very pro-union president, Emily Drabinski: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/04/emily-drabinski-socialist-ala-president-race-worker-organizing
I'm one of the academic librarians who was present for this talk at CALM, and I'm grateful for your choice to share it as your newsletter this week.
This work IS hard. We are not okay. I can't begin to describe the moral injury I sustained in my previous positions from standing up for my team, in front of policies and procedures that put them at risk. Public services/access services/user services teams are typically the most diverse in age, racial/ethnic background, and paid the least because there are usually not many or ANY faculty roles in them. Ten days before the pandemic shut us down, my team and I put together a "what-if" document in case of full closure. It was a way for us to take some ownership over a spiraling situation that saw our upper leadership in the library and the wider institution in deep denial about the impending crisis. We wanted to know that at least WE could figure out something to keep us safe, that we could provide a modest level of support to bewildered students and faculty. I ended up being castigated. It was the beginning of the end in that role for me. Perhaps I overstepped, and an administrator (I was faculty at the time) should have done something. But they were not talking with us, and we were filling the vacuum with something productive to keep our work going and to make sure we wouldn't all be laid off or furloughed for "lack of work", because there was no shortage of projects to be done!
In the end, I left my position for another institution altogether. Job hunting and starting a new role in the pandemic is not easy. My family and I had to move as well, leaving behind the mutual care network that my spouse and I had painstakingly built when I took the job.
I live 2000 miles away from my immediate family members because the work isn't there for me. My parents are struggling with significant health problems, and my 92-year-old grandmother is deteriorating rapidly. I feel sick that I can't be there to help; my job is too new and I am on my third boss since starting last July (provost-type position, I'm the library director). I am in my library daily, working on the reference desk to cover absences from faculty and staff who are burning out because of the brokenness of our society's structures for care.
We are not okay. We are grieving the losses of our colleagues who've died from COVID, our family and friends who have suffered, the erosion of boundaries and guardrails in the rush to "back to normal" behavior, and the increasing pressure and persecution from interests that literally want to burn books that represent the diversity of our communities. I don't blame those who decide that enough is enough and walk away from the profession, and I support your decisions to do what is right for your health and wellbeing. Just know that there are hundreds of librarians who were in that keynote and at the conference last week who are focused on making change, even as we are fighting broader authoritarian forces in our society. <3
This was very insightful--I'm an English professor, and this all really hit home. I've known that "I'm not ok" but I haven't been able to articulate why other than "gestures at everything"