Okay, well, for those of us lower on the totem pole who are not ambitious… we could say well so what, right? Are we not happy where we are? True. But what then when people with more experience or higher positions are pushed downward… where are we going to end up?

The pressure is also on support staff and clerical workers to do the work of librarians for no extra compensating pay. The system I work for would like to see all workers do all things. It seems our system at least will do just about anything it can get away with before the Union steps in.

When people are being asked to retire and offered attractive packages to help their coworkers from being laid off, you know these are lean times. But we should not let the fact that jobs were “saved” fool us. Many of these libraries have no intention of ever replacing these workers and have now adopted the new corporate model of trimming the labor force to increase dollars and cents. Only trouble is, last I heard, public libraries were NON-profit organizations of the humanities. From where I work, lately they’ve got everyone fooled. What sad compromises are being made, unfortunately, the public are not yet on to how this is a disservice to them as well.