The library no longer has a leader who knows his few thousand employees. His personal failings, and those of the library’s administration as a whole, don’t mean staff can’t be made to feel part of a team again, but that has felt impossible for years now. Regaining a sense of community within the library organization should be a priority, but management wants to build outward. You can only build so much when the foundation is hollow. First, the high turnover and elimination of good staff must end. Management must actually listen to employee complaints and concerns. Staff morale is down the toilet. It’s a feeling that’s library-wide, because we’re treated like waste. It’s hard to choose to be happy when you’re stuck in a place that constantly asks you to take on more work and then is hellbent on reducing your paycheck , all while the senior leadership rakes it in. What is the incentive to perform? To hold onto a job you loathe? Out of devotion to the patrons? Why should the rank and file be devoted to the patrons any more than the leadership? Why would we look positively on cuts when we know they’re for the ultimate purpose of getting a handful of people outlandish bonuses? Especially when these people prove repeatedly that they don’t have a clue what they’re doing while better staff are shown the door for questionable reasons.
There are so few people left here with any sense of the library’s history. No one sees the value in that, and that’s a failing on the part of library management. They think they can do better than what came before, but they are making the same mistakes that have already been made. There’s just not as many people around anymore to join in on the chorus of “I told you so,” which might well be by design. For now, casual visitors might not notice many effects of how we’re falling behind. They register them as aberrations. But they will catch on eventually and they will become more discerning, and if upkeep remains shoddy, if more good staff are let go in favor of sycophants and people with no knowledge of library operations, and management continues to ignore its mistakes rather than admit to them, the situation will continue to deteriorate.
Change can be good – if the changes are improvements and not arbitrary decisions just because a new manager wants to show he’s doing something.
