The Better Salaries Effort

A Long Train Running

By Carol Brey-Casiano

Adapted and updated from article titled "Taking Our Salary Fight to the Streets: Why We Need a New Campaign for America’s Librarians," which appeared in a Library Journal opinion piece dated April 15, 2002.

In April of 2002, Library Journal published an opinion piece I wrote called "Taking Our Library Salary Fight To the Streets," about the importance of advocating for better pay for librarians and library workers.¹ Two years later it seems that, (with apologies to the Doobie Brothers) we are now facing a "Long Train Running" as we recognize that turning around years of traditionally low pay will take still more years of dedication and effort.

When I began serving on ALA Past President Mitch Freedman’s Better Salaries and Pay Equity Task Force in 2001, studies showed that librarians’ salaries were lower than those for comparable jobs in professions requiring similar qualifications and skills. What’s more, public librarians’ salaries still lagged way behind salaries in other types of libraries, and salaries were lower in certain parts of the country-particularly the Southwest, where I live, and the Southeast.

The ALA Survey of Librarian Salaries, 2001 reported a mean salary range for librarians with an ALA-accredited master’s degree from $32,891 (beginning) to $72,384 (director).² The latest study, published in American Libraries in October of 2003, indicated a mean salary range from $36,198 (beginning) to $79,385 (director).³ In two years, progress has clearly been made with increases ranging from 10.0% to 9.7% in the mean salaries as reported. Nevertheless, when comparing these figures to starting salaries for systems analysts and database administrators, we began to see why many graduate schools are dropping the word "Library" from their Library & Information Science degrees. According to the Occupational Outlook Handbook, starting offers for graduates with a degree in computer science averaged $61,453 at the master’s level and $52,723 at the bachelor’s level in the year 2001.⁴

Dr. Vicki L. Gregory, Professor and Director of the School of Library and Information Science for the University of South Florida, provided additional information on salaries for the year 2000 in a presentation to the Better Salaries and Pay Equity Task Force: "The Salary Issue: Beginning Salaries and Overall Salaries.⁵ Certainly another salary survey for non-librarian library workers would be quite beneficial but as yet has not been undertaken.

The overall average salary for beginning librarians in the year 2000 as reported by Dr. Gregory was $34,871. This varied somewhat according to region (see chart below.)

Public libraries pay by far the lowest salaries, according to this information from Dr. Gregory:

Low Salaries Hit Home

Low salaries paid by public libraries in the Southwest make recruitment one of my most difficult tasks as an urban public library director. At El Paso Public Library, we have tried many different tactics: recruiting at conferences, placing ads in national journals, sending job notices out on electronic discussion lists, and "growing our own." This last tactic has proven to be the most successful, although it requires us to rely on a somewhat limited pool of applicants, and makes it more difficult to fill specialized positions. For example, our Collection Development Specialist position had until last fall remained open and unfilled for at least five years, due to the difficulty in recruiting candidates with the necessary skills and experience.

The starting salary for librarians at El Paso Public Library is $31,596, which is directly in line with the average salary for public librarians in the Southwest. But even though I pull out beautiful pictures of our mountains in El Paso, and tell potential recruits about the new facilities we are constructing, our progressive strategic plan, and our low cost of living (a nice two-bedroom apartment in El Paso still rents for around $500), I rarely am successful in bringing in anyone from outside the El Paso area.

We lose potential recruits to major metropolitan areas that pay slightly higher salaries and offer a wider variety of cultural activities-although my colleagues from those areas tell me they struggle with the same recruitment issues. When I was the Director of the Oak Park (IL) Public Library in the Chicago metro area, I remember receiving over 100 applications for a beginning level librarian position during the early 1990’s that paid about $27,000 annually. In El Paso today, I am fortunate to have three or four candidates to choose from for the same type of position.

A Grass Roots Effort

What are some strategies that we can use to address the current salary situation? Playing politics does not always come naturally to librarians, but to improve salaries we must become politically savvy and learn to speak up for ourselves.

A good place to start is the Pay Equity and Action Manual for Library Workers, published by the American Library Association in 1989. Margaret Myers, former Director of what is now the ALA Office of Human Resource Development and Recruitment pushed the book into my hands during the first meeting I attended of the Better Salaries Task Force. "Read this," she said, "It will tell you much of what you need to know about improving salaries." The book approaches the whole pay equity issue in a very organized fashion, starting with the idea of conducting a job evaluation study to see how librarian pay measures up to jobs requiring comparable skills in other professions.

Librarians are excellent organizers by nature, and we should use that skill to our advantage. By partnering with Human Resource Departments, our peers, unions, and others dedicated to fair pay, library employees can make a difference in their salaries.

The ALA Allied Professional Association (ALA-APA)

The Better Salaries and Pay Equity Task Force accomplished an immense amount under Mitch Freedman’s leadership, and their work continues today through the Salaries and Status Committee of the ALA Allied Professional Association (ALA-APA), formed in 2002. The Task Force instituted a "Campaign for America’s Librarians", to spread the word about higher salaries and pay equity for library employees. Like the Campaign for America’s Libraries and other similar advocacy campaigns, the Campaign for America’s Librarians provides a very complete "toolkit" filled with resources such as key messages about the campaign, training guides, a bibliography and success stories from around the country. This toolkit continues to be used at national, regional, and state conferences to train library employees and others to effectively advocate for increased status, better salaries, and pay equity.

The ALA-APA is also developing a videotape that will show the great things libraries do, and why the work of library employees requires special skills and expertise. The overall message: funding libraries and librarians is everyone’s responsibility. The first draft of the video is expected to be completed by National Library Week and a screening will be held at the ALA Annual Conference in Orlando, FL.

Last but not least, ALA-APA has now hired a Director, Jenifer Grady, who comes to us with experience in public, special and medical libraries. Ms. Grady holds an M.S.L.S. (1993) from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and an M.B.A. (2003) from Case Western Reserve University. I had the opportunity to meet her at the ALA Midwinter meeting in San Diego, and found her to be very knowledgeable, smart and enthusiastic-exactly the characteristics we need in the person who will lead the charge forward on the issue of better salaries.

Since the Campaign for America’s Librarians began, numerous success stories have been told about improved library salaries, from coast to coast. There is good news on the Texas salary front as well, with a salary study being conducted by the Texas Library Association Salary Compensation Task Force. The purpose of the study is to define competitive salary levels for library employees throughout the state, in public and academic libraries. It also includes a comparison of library agency personnel to comparable personnel in other public and academic agencies under the same organizational jurisdiction as the library. The Salary Compensation Task Force has been working to collect data on salaries paid by academic and public libraries across the state, and plans to present their final report soon. This information will give local libraries like El Paso leverage as we work on our own plan for higher salaries.

Presidential Initiative: 2004–2005

My presidential year begins at the end of the Annual Conference, and I plan to continue the better salaries effort as part of my presidential initiative, "Stand Up and Speak Out for Libraries." My initiative will focus on grassroots advocacy for libraries and the people who work in them. Within the framework of advocacy, we will focus on the following areas: literacy, equity of access (continuing Carla Hayden’s initiative), salaries and recruitment, international relations, diversity, building library communities, and intellectual freedom.

My Presidential Advisory Committee met last fall to work on the Strategic Plan for my presidential year (2004-2005), and came up with the following action steps in the area of salaries and recruitment:

Salaries:

1. Mobilize the advocacy groups already established;
2. Identify coalitions to work with the Union Subcommittee of the ALA-APA Salaries and Status Committee, to advocate for library issues;
3. Continue advocacy training;
4. Upgrade and revise Toolkit;
5. Fill in any gaps in the training;
6. Add support staff to existing annual survey on salaries - can be promoted and used to increase salaries based on existing salaries;
7. Work to increase salaries for PhD’s in our library schools

Recruitment:

Apply for IMLS grants to fund recruiting;

1. Develop a "Recruitment Showcase" in the Exhibits Area during ALA Annual Conference; develop poster sessions and website;
2. Assess current recruitment tools and look for gaps, (librarians and support staff)
3. Continue promoting the Spectrum Scholarships to encourage cultural diversity
4. Assess other minority recruitment tools for professionals and support staff and look for gaps

Work on the Strategic Plan continued at the Midwinter Meeting, when it was decided that a Web cast planned for my presidential year would focus on better salaries for librarians and library workers.

Due to the excellent work of the ALA-APA Salaries and Status Standing Committee, it is clear that increased attention is being paid to the salaries of library employees. Now it is time to take that "Long Train Running" and bring our story to the local, state and national officials who can make a difference in library salaries. The people we serve in our communities have long known the value of libraries and those who work in them. We need to paint a more vivid picture of who we are and what we are worth, speaking "loudly and clearly" so that even the most highly placed decision-makers listen, and take action on our behalf.

References

1. "Taking Our Salary Fight to the Streets," Library Journal (Apr. 15, 2002): 38–39.

2. ALA Survey of Librarian Salaries, 2001 (Chicago: ALA, 2001).

3. "Librarian Salaries Increase 0.7% More Than Other Civilian Workers," American Libraries (Oct. 2003): 64.

4. Occupational Outlook Handbook: http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos042.htm#earnings.

5. Vicki L. Gregory,"The Salary Issue: Beginning Salaries and Overall Salaries" (Univ. of South Florida, 2001).

Copyright 2004–2008 ALA-APA. Contact Jenifer Grady, 50 E. Huron, Chicago, IL 60611, 312-280-2424, jgrady@ala.org for more information.