This is a message to FAM-T faculty colleagues from one of our lead organizers, Cathy Wagner.
Yesterday was the first day of bargaining for FAM-L, FAM’s librarian unit. I encourage all of you to keep up with the news on librarian negotiations and to stop by in support of FAM’s joint FAM-T/FAM-L negotiating team at the next session on October 11 (location TBA).
Why: Librarian negotiations don’t just matter to librarians. In ways that might not be immediately obvious, librarian negotiations are vital to all FAM faculty.
Librarians do crucial work at Miami
Miami’s 32 librarians are responsible for an enormous amount of work. Not only are they ensuring the library circulation and technological resources run smoothly, answering questions in person and by phone and chat, ensuring collections are as up to date as possible on a tight budget, and much more — but they do essential work assisting faculty with their research and visiting their classes to teach students how to do research and access information.
Think about this: 800+ faculty are teaching 2 to 4 sections each. If our tiny librarian cohort visits even a tenth of those sections this semester, that’s a ton of teaching. What you see when a librarian visits your class is the tiniest tip of the iceberg. Librarians work so, so hard. Support their efforts to create the working conditions that will enable them to do their jobs better.
Librarians are the backbone of FAM
If the many folks who worked on our organizing drive learned one thing, it was that librarians have superpowers. Their skills gathering and processing information have been critical to FAM’s success, as has their energetic organizing not just for themselves, but for all of us. If you support unionization, thank a librarian.
Librarians are faculty
They do research, they do service, they teach. They go through the same promotion process as tenure-line faculty and must do significant research to be promoted. What’s more, it’s been the national AAUP’s position that librarians should have faculty status since 1972. Librarians are us.
Librarian negotiations are strategically crucial for FAM
Librarians voted unanimously to support unionization; their obvious unity means that the administration’s lawyers won’t be able to exploit divisions to weaken and delay them. The outside legal team will understand that if they take unfair positions and push librarians too far, the librarian unit will be formidably united in response. Because of that strategic strength, solidarity with FAM-L is a key pathway to FAM’s overall success.
In the work I’ve done toward unionizing as a professor at Miami, I have learned that librarian labor and librarian needs are too often invisibilized here. I have also learned how important librarians are to the institution and to our future as a union. They are faculty. They are our colleagues. We need them and they need us. They deserve your support.
And they’re amazing, strong people. Drop your librarian a line to let them know you support them. And mark your calendar to drop by and watch our negotiating team on October 11!
Cathy Wagner
PS: Read science librarian Ginny Boehme’s stirring opening statement.
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