At the Board of Trustees meeting the morning of Friday, December 13, Miami University librarian Ken Irwin spoke about the challenges librarians have faced in getting their concerns heard at the table. Management refused to consider limiting librarian working hours to 40 hours a week and would not consider essential professional activity librarians do to be part of their recognized duties. What’s more, their pay is very low compared to peers in the state.
Update: While pay remains an issue, the first two issues are now resolved! After Ken’s speech and FAM’s direct action Friday morning, management’s team took an abrupt U-turn at the table on Friday afternoon. They agreed to a 40-hour workweek and will consider professional activity as part of librarian’s duties. Direct action works!
For more on FAM’s direct action at the Board meeting and links to other speeches members made to the Board, click here.
Good morning. My name is Ken Irwin – I’ve been a Web Services Librarian at Miami for the past five years. I’m here this morning to speak on behalf of the librarians who unanimously voted to unionize a year and a half ago and who are still fighting for a fair contract.
Prior to my time at Miami, I worked in academic libraries for over 20 years and I frequently looked to Miami’s libraries as leaders and innovators. When I applied for this job, I was proud to join a team with such a strong national reputation. As the body that provides final approval for librarian promotion and continuing contract every year, I know that you must also be familiar with my colleagues’ accomplishments.
In our contract negotiations, Miami is proposing that we scale back our scholarship and professional leadership to 20% of our time. That’s an enormous change in our duties, and one that is out of step with the libraries’ strategic goals and Miami’s academic mission. Specialized knowledge and innovative solutions don’t develop in a vacuum – they result from engaging with our colleagues and growing our capabilities beyond the borders of Miami University. Diminishing our professional involvement will decrease our effectiveness as innovators, and we will have less to offer the students and teacher-scholars who rely on our expertise.
The university’s pretext for proposing a reduction in our scholarship and professional leadership is that we have expressed concerns about librarian workloads. Let’s be clear: the problem with workloads is not that we are too involved with our professional organizations or the scholarship we produce. It is that we are critically understaffed in some key areas, and library leadership has been unwilling to work with overworked librarians to create more manageable workloads. But when we raise this at the table, we are told that it’s ok if we’re routinely working 60 or 70 hour weeks, and that we can leave if we don’t like it. Is this how you retain a great library staff?
At the same time that we’re told to expect longer hours, the university has been unwilling to meaningfully engage on librarian salaries. Most librarians at Miami are significantly underpaid compared to our colleagues at other state universities in Ohio. Our median salary as librarians at a research institution is less than the starting salary for a librarian at Cincinnati State Community College. We need competitive minimum salaries and raises that don’t leave us further behind our peers every year.
We unionized because our working conditions were unsustainable. The university has met our efforts with foot-dragging, low-balling, and gaslighting. Every day, those tactics further damage your relationship with your employees.
Before slashing what serves this institution and its students, make sure you understand what you stand to lose. Librarians’ work makes our academic mission possible, and we won’t give up until we have the fair compensation and contract we deserve.
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