Last month, the Trump administration issued an Executive Order seeking to eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Studies (IMLS), the federal agency funding programming and research for all types of libraries. Just days later, the White House issued another Executive Order to begin dismantling the Department of Education. In libraries, there have been crises building over recent years—the astronomical rise in censorship via book challenges, and the threat to university libraries' existence through the slashing of federal research grants and their associated overhead, which helps fund our library operations.
Libraries have been the focus of culture wars and moral panics in recent years because they offer a unique and valuable space for members of the public to access the information they need to become informed citizens and learn about worlds beyond their own. Public libraries throughout the country offer books, news sources, programming, and much more in response to community needs. School libraries help children develop literacy skills and a love of reading, which serve them throughout their educational journey. Academic libraries collect and make accessible the materials necessary for the creation of new knowledge, a key part of educational institutions' ability to fulfill their missions of teaching, learning, and research. All libraries, regardless of their type, uphold the principle of the freedom to read, which is essential to our ability to exercise our rights under the First Amendment. But in order to protect your rights as readers, library workers need to secure our rights as employees. In order to do our jobs without undue political influence or the capricious interference of management, we must be able to act without fear of retaliation. We believe a union and collective bargaining are the best way to achieve these protections.
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Our new book, Organize Your Library!, equips readers with the knowledge, skills, and strategies necessary for organizing and maintaining a union at their library. The book outlines the real benefits that unions can bring to library workers. We walk readers through how to organize a union drive, key issues relating to contracts, negotiation, and arbitration, strategies for dealing with supervisors and administrators in the context of your union work, and more.
There’s no time like the present to organize your workplace. Sure, perhaps the best time would have been five (or fifty) years ago, but you are here today! We’re not the only ones who think this— interest in unions is high, and the past few years have seen higher rates of certification of new unions. This has included highly visible campaigns in the private sector, including Starbucks and Amazon, as well as less publicized wins in the higher education sector, where we both work.
Of course, all of these wins also means there’s a threat of backlash. After notable organizing successes in the private sector, the current presidential administration removed worker-friendly appointees from the National Labor Relations Board – the agency which enforces collective bargaining rights for most private sector workers – sparking a legal battle that remains unresolved as of early April. In the public sector, the Department of Homeland Security has unilaterally canceled the collective bargaining agreement for TSA workers, a move which their union decried as "unconstitutional" and "retaliatory." In late March, the president signed an Executive Order directing the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and several other agencies to end collective bargaining with their employees’ unions – a move that would strip hundreds of thousands of workers of their right to union representation.
This all sounds terrible, so why organize today? First, the backlash indicates the power in a union—the Trump administration would not be seeking to limit labor if we weren’t making progress for working people. Second, the wins that can be achieved via union representation and collective bargaining include both immediate benefits and long-term ones. In the present moment, coming together with your colleagues in the service of improving your working conditions can have a surprising effect on morale—even in these gloomy times! Both of us were deeply involved in union organizing in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the camaraderie this work brought us was profound. We got to know our coworkers in acutely personal ways by hearing about their concerns and talking through how we might address them together. In a moment when many people struggled with loneliness and isolation, we were instead able to connect and build solidarity.
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The protections we won in our contracts have prepared us well for the current crisis, and will be part of the tools we employ to protect ourselves, our workplaces, and our educational mission in the longer term. With a union and a contract, we are no longer at-will employees. In order to fire us, the boss must follow progressive discipline and the principle of just cause. Our contracts also contain provisions for layoff and recall, creating more equitable (and predictable) systems governing reductions in our staffing levels. If the boss fails to follow the procedures set forth in our contracts, our unions can push back by pursuing grievances and even binding arbitration. The whims of management are limited by the rules we have all agreed on in the contract.
In this way, while our initial union organizing efforts and our first contract campaigns were informed by the twin crises of COVID-19 and the austerity that followed, our power and the tools we have to wield and protect it are not constrained by the particulars of the moment. There will always be another crisis on the horizon, and institutional responses to uncertain times lean heavily on the ideology of austerity. By building member-led unions on a foundation of workplace democracy, we can be ready to respond to a variety of difficult situations.
This lesson applies not just to new unions, but to existing ones as well. As we explain in our book, it is never too late to build these skills. In our chapter on successful campaigns, we discuss how library workers at a community college challenged union leadership to open up bargaining sessions to members, bringing both greater transparency and member engagement to the negotiations. We also tell the story of public library workers who succeeded in ousting their director after a hastily executed return-to-office mandate. Throughout the book we pair real stories from library workers across the country with discussions of how to build power in the workplace and how to exercise it—with guidance for building new unions, democratizing existing ones, successfully negotiating contracts, and how to deal with the boss.
We wrote this book for library workers, but we think it has lessons for other professions that include public sector workers, those in the "caring professions," and people for whom their jobs are often a source of both pride and burnout. Library workers share much with other kinds of workers, and the organizing techniques that are effective for all workers are applicable—the importance of one-on-one conversations, the need to listen to one's colleagues more than one talks at them, and the importance of confronting apathy and fear. In addition, library workers can find themselves in the same union locals as a variety of other kinds of workers, like teachers, municipal employees, and higher education professionals. If there is anything that makes library workers unique, it is that we have found ourselves at the center of recent controversies at a time in which nearly all of us in the public sector have been operating under the regime of right to work thanks to Janus v. AFSCME. As a result, we need to hone our skills as organizers and union activists at a time in which organized labor faces restrictions on our ability to mobilize politically. But recent events have shown that more workers will likely find themselves in similar situations, as the Trump administration continues its assault on federal agencies, their workers, and labor protections for the private sector.
In difficult times, it can be tempting to lose oneself in doomscrolling, dread, and inertia. And even those of us who want to take action can be overwhelmed by feeling unsure where to start or what to do. But taking concrete action, even when it feels small, helps build the path. With each coworker you talk to, each union meeting you attend, you are practicing the skills of democratic decision-making and building power. We wrote this book before things got quite so bleak, but we stand by its message. The best day to start organizing is today, and you already have what you need: the willingness to get out and talk to your coworkers and start making a plan together.
Organize Your Library! Developing the Collective Power of Library Workers by Angelo Moreno, Kelly McElroy, Meredith Kahn, and Emily Drabinski is currently available for pre-order before its release this fall.
