CLA's Fair Compensation Campaign:
Making the Case for Fair Pay
For a copy of The Case for Fair Compensation for Library Workers, A Survey of Comparative Pay Levels in California, send your request to CLA at info@cla-net.org. Include your complete mailing address with your request.
Librarians and library workers are under-valued, and most people, whether members of the public, elected officials, faculty, corporate executives, or citizen board members, have little or no idea of the complexity of the work we do.
Librarians and library workers are also unfairly compensated for the complexity of the work we do, especially in comparison with other service workers. There are several reasons for this:
- The vast majority of library workers are women, so we suffer from all the years of wage discrimination our gender has endured.
- The standard method (marketplace) used by human resources professionals for classifying and compensating service employees perpetuates low or unfair wage rates for library workers.
- Collective bargaining units representing library employees have often not chosen to use their bargaining power on behalf of their library worker members. Indeed, they often have sacrificed the interests of library workers for those of other members. And unfortunately, their library members have let them get away with it.
- People with the power to make compensation decisions suffer from the lack of understanding of library work identified above.
- We library workers have let this situation develop and perpetuate itself, often sacrificing our own pay rates in favor of preserving the book budget or some other program.
These all are assertions I think many of us would make. But they are claims, not facts. And if we want to address the issue of fair compensation for library workers, we must do more than make claims. We have to prove our case. We have to demonstrate that we are unfairly paid compared to workers with comparable education and experience, doing comparably complex work.
One of the objectives in the Association's Three Year Plan is as follows: CLA will advocate for the fair compensation of all library workers, and will work to ensure that administrators, elected and appointed officials, and the public understand the complexity and value of library work.
The first action step toward achieving that objective was to look at compensation statewide, and compare how library workers are doing compared to comparable positions in other kinds of work. We did that in 2002, developing a report called The Case of Fair Compensation for Library Workers-A Survey of Comparative Pay Levels in California. The Survey presents a selection of job and pay comparisons from around the state. No one will be surprised to learn that in the public sector library workers at all levels are paid substantial percentages less at both the top and the bottom of salary ranges than workers performing comparable jobs in other agencies. The Survey also provides a model for how library workers at the local level can collect their own data to make their case in their own communities.
This is a different fair compensation strategy than the one being undertaken by the American Library Association and 2002/03 President, Mitch Freedman. ALA is pursuing the other half of the equation-endeavoring to publicize the value and complexity of library work and thus the justification for better pay. CLA agrees this work needs to be done, especially on a national scale, and ALA should go for it with our full support.
But I'm a veteran of several local classification and compensation studies in which everyone agreed that library workers do important and complex tasks, often under very trying conditions. Benchmark measures for required skills, knowledge, and abilities demonstrated conclusively that library work ranked way up there with the planners and the civil engineers. But then market rate (what the market is paying these positions) was used to set salaries, and library workers ended up on the bottom once again.
I believe we can make a case that salaries paid to library workers are unfair and unjust in comparison to those of other comparable workers. And although I agree with Frederick Douglass that any change of this sort requires some broken eggs, I think we should start our campaign by being reasonable. We need to present our case in terms of fair play. Here are the facts: you may not have understood the comprehensive nature of the discrimination, but now that you do, it is only right that the injustice be mitigated.
I don't think that we are going to change the world (or even the State of California) overnight. 2002 was Year 1 of a multi-year Campaign for Fair Compensation. Right now, we are exploring alliances and partnerships with (for example) the collective bargaining units that represent our members. We also hope to make sure that every human resources consultant and personnel director in the State gets a copy of our data.
For a copy of The Case for Fair Compensation for Library Workers, A Survey of Comparative Pay Levels in California, send your request to CLA at info@cla-net.org. Include your complete mailing address with your request. Let's set fairness as a standard for compensation of library workers.
---By Anne M. Turner, Fair Compensation Campaign Task Force Chair