librarypunk - 163 - Organize Your Library

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

We’re joined by the authors of Organize Your Library to talk about library labor, the future, the ALA union drive, and more!   Media mentioned Organize Your Library! Developing the Collective Power of Library Workers https://alastore.ala.org/oryrlib ALA union letter: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v8ACD_ltC3ZW1JBJX6qdheD11xq7tBdR/view  ALA union announcement: https://afscme31.org/news/american-library-association-employees-forming-union-afscme  WNBA players association agreement signed https://www.wnba.com/news/wnba-wnbpa-tentative-cba-deal-2026  NYC Plan https://nycplan.org/ All transcripts: https://podscripts.co/podcasts/librarypunk  Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/qWPTurTnkT

I'm Justin. I'm an academic library. My pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are they then. And we have guests. Would you like to introduce yourselves? Hi, everybody. I'm Emily. I am a professor at Queens College in the School of Information Studies. My pronouns are she her. Hey, everybody. My name is Angela. I use he, him pronouns. I am currently full-time organizer of the union in Chicago area, previously a library worker for 13 years. Hi, I'm Meredithis. I'm an academic lay. librarian at the University of Michigan. Yay. Thanks everyone for surviving the trials and tribulations of Zencastr. Yeah.

I didn't know this book was in the works. And so I got just an email out of the blue that says, hey, there's a new book about organizing your library that is done and out and people can read it. So that's exciting. I saw it was in the works while there were, it mentions an ALA conference with the organizing panels. Was that 24 or 23? You remember? We were in Chicago, right?

Chicago, that would have been 23, 23. 23. It's Chicago again this year? Okay, cool. Chicago's the hometown of the American Library Association. It makes sense, it makes sense. We're celebrating our 150th anniversary there this summer. Is it already 150?

Wow. Where is the time go? Yeah, my first ALA was actually last year, because I've done an ACL before, but I started volunteering at the Zine Library, Zine Pavilion, and so now I get in for free, and I'm just like, yeah, let's just go and do that,

and it's a lot of fun. But we did a live show at ALA last year, and I want to, like, kind of do more. We're already doing some more. This panel was rejected at ALA. We're going to talk about it. That's our angle for the live show we're going to do. But anyway,

I'm interested in, if you all would like to talk about your quick pitch about the book and who should read it in wine? A densely organized library sector is key to the world we want. It's necessary, right? It's the ground of everything that we do. Everything that's great about libraries happens because of the people who work in libraries. And so who should read this book? Everybody who works in libraries, because everybody who works in libraries should sign a union card if they haven't already. So that's the audience for this book. And I think our hope would be that every single person who picks it up connects with their coworkers, or

organizes around what's right and what they deserve in the workplace in terms of working conditions as well as a say in what their work looks like. So yeah, that'd be my quick pitch. I can feel like getting long though. When you were working on it, I guess like who did you, who was in your mind when each of you were working on your parts of the book? Maybe that's more personalizing. Well, we ended up interviewing about three dozen library workers across the country, including both public library. workers and academic library workers. And I think a lot of this work was really born from our own experiences in labor in libraries. Three of the four authors started unions in their workplaces. And so we had been through the experience of what happens when you start something new. And what Emily brought is that she had been through the experience of what happens when something goes wrong. And so I think we were thinking about our, our, colleagues and our comrades who we had organized with in our own workplaces. We were thinking at workplaces that maybe we had been at prior points in our careers. And, you know, library land is

kind of like one big, small town. We all kind of know each other. And so we were probably also thinking about people we knew at other kinds of library workplaces. It's interesting that you made that comment about personalizing, right? Because I think what often happens to me is I start talking about why I think a book like this matters or a project like this matters. And I start to sound like a bumper sticker or a t-shirt that you would buy at a union convention, right? When I say that like a densely organized library sector is key to the world, central to the world we want, which I think is language that I stole from Angela in one of our early conversations, you know, like turned on what this vision of the world could be, right? And so like,

I look at the world and imagine then what if all of it was a library, right? Think of the institution of the library as the only institution under our current economic system where an object can come in and become decommodified and shared widely, right? So like this idea of the library as sort of the utopian vision of the future. But those of us who work in libraries know all of that's a bunch of baloney, right? Because you like, you're working like really long hours, you know, or you're like don't have any say in when you work or you have to come to work when you don't have PPE and there's a pandemic and no vaccines or you have to show up to work on the weekends because nobody else will

do it and you're working constantly. I mean, I don't know about you all, but like if I got paid by the actual hour that I worked in terms of the time I've given to libraries, like, you know, I might have the income of somebody who was the boss of a library, right? So like I think it's, you know, it's personal to me because I've been on strike and I've been locked out and I've seen what power can do, what management can do, and it decides that you're disposed. And so I think, like, you know, if you want a working life that where you, where you are not disposable, the only way to do that is to organize. So the book's essential for me. I was busy on the, on the ALA thing, so I didn't get a chance to have a lot of the conversations that my comrades had. But I think reading the book and reading those testimonies, like it's also really important that the voices of people who have done the work of starting unions and libraries across this country, which is a lot of people, right? It's a lot of people. And that work is, like some of the hardest work and the most rewarding work, the most important work that people can do. And so I think also just documenting work that all of us do because we believe in it.

Nobody's getting paid for it, except Angela, you know, right for the second. You know, so documenting those stories, I think it's really essential because nobody's documenting them for us. I mean, we looked around, right? It's not like there's a bunch of documentation testimony of union library workers, right? Do you guys see any, Angela or Meredith? Not really. We did have conversations about that in the beginning, right? Like, oh, at least I remember feeling like, well, can't we just give people labor notes? Can we just give them secrets of a successful organization, which we've all read. Yeah. And like, yeah, like, what's so different, right? And I think that we try to address that, you know, but I think importantly, the book comes out of a moment. that includes Emily becoming president of the LA, right? Like where people are talking about organizing in libraries. And we wanted to be really sure that library workers felt like this was a conversation

that they could be a part of as library workers and that they had the tools to form unions like other places have formed unions, right? Like we're special, but we're not special, I guess is the shorthand way of saying it. Yeah. And there's a lot of literature in sort of information science library studies that's sort of social sciencey that asks the question, like, are unions good for library workers? And I think the difference is we start with the assertion that unions are good for library workers and for libraries themselves. And so I think that's kind of what separated us from a lot of the existing literature. Yeah.

And I imagine a lot of that literature is sort of like what were these KPIs versus these KPIs rather than the libraries. institution, the union as an institution, which is something I want to get back to. But I'm not familiar with what you were reading. It's interesting you mentioned documenting stories because we did two different episodes, one with the Blue Bottle Independent Union, which is a copy shop, which has been organizing and about the American worker pamphlet, which was a long pamphlet that was mostly popular in France, not really popular here, about all of these sort of journal and diaries, sort of like rake and file organizing tool of oral history is the quickest shorthand way of,

these are oral histories of workers, but then saying like, how is the front of the house organized, how is the back of the house organized? What would you fix about the communication between your two groups and three groups and work? I was just complaining today about like how much writing I have had to do for cover letters in the last year trying to get a job. And it's like, you know, why can't I just publish a journal article saying, here's the job I did. I did a good job at and I could just point to the article I wrote about me already doing that job so that I don't have to write another cover letter ever again. And we have the episodes on here where we've had people come on and say like, hey, if you're not a librarian and you work in a library, come on and

tell us what you do, you know, and explain to your work, you know, not to infect everyone who works in a library with vocational awe, but like to just say like, hey, what you do in a library is cool and it matters. And it's like, you know, if you work on databases or you work in facilities or you work on the H-2-X system that's constantly crumbling and trying to like keep everything from developing mold. You know, like that's cool. I like to talk to you because like we all work in the same building. We're all working on the same stuff. So I like the idea of doing an American worker pamphlet for libraries and doing more as a way of also just agitating and just saying, hey, tell me your story and people listen to. So I think this is great. This is a great

approach. Was there an aspect of that, do you think, in doing a book like this? Asking the question. I'm sitting here in New York City, right? But I, which is a union town. I was at a city council hearing this morning and ran into my old executive board friend from the American Library Association, Nick Beeron, who's the chief librarian over at Queens Public Library. And he and I were talking a little bit about unions, right? Because there's a union movement afoot at the American Library Association itself. And so we were sort of chatting about that. And he was talking about how different it is when you live in New York and you come from a union town, right? That like most of my lifetime I've been in a labor union.

That's true for Nick. He's mostly managed in unionized environments. And, you know, I'm sitting out here. But I grew up in Boise, Idaho, which is a, you know, a right to work, quote unquote, state, deeply hostile to unions. And when I was sitting out here and I hear that the Salt Lake City public library workers have organized a union, I want to know how exactly that happened in a place that I grew up and I know how hostile it is to workers and to fair wages. And so, you know, definitely wanting to capture some of those stories,

which the book, you know, does some of, but I think, you know, some other ways to get those stories out. It's really, you know, amplifying them as important. I've tried to do my part, and I think we need more for sure. Yeah, especially because I think, I personally think that in our profession and especially in the public side, the public library side, there's so much deference to leadership and like the bosses and they really set the narrative and set the agenda and like are always front and center and have the spotlight on them and a lot of them do great work and that's fine, but we just are missing so much of what's actually happening by privileging their voice and privileging their perspective.

And there are also some cases where they are, you know, bad actors, right? And so it's really important that we, you know, I agree that we should, we should probably have more of these stories out there. And if we were able to capture some of those in our book, that's great, but that's definitely not the end of it, right? Like, we should try to cultivate more of that. Yeah. I know we're going to have the NYC plan on next week before our little break.

So I'm hoping to talk to them to. about any union stirring as a flood in addition to the work they're doing. Can I say something about NYC plan real quick? Of course. I was at the city council meeting today and the head of the library, I think the head of New York Public Library

said it would be transformational if the mayor would make good, if Mayor Mount Doni would make good on his 0.5% pledge of baseline funding of 5.5% of the city's expense budget for libraries. It would be transformational. It would pump like a 200 million more dollars into the system,

make Sunday hours possible, make fair wage as possible, you know, but only if the union movement is strong on the public library worker's side. But like that 0.5% baseline funding, that is a demand that I have never heard before in 30 years of living in this city. And NYC plan and their organizing made that the mainstream demand coming from the mouths of the heads of the public library systems in just a matter of months. I think it's a model for everywhere. That's my picture for next week's episode.

But it's really impressive how quickly like the messaging on it congealed and sort of, you know, you just heard that number again and again very quickly of like, we just need stable funding. We just need stable funding. Stop having us cut weekend hour. Stop having us cut this and cut that. And it's just like just give us a baseline to work from and stop holding the library budget hostage. Yeah, it's incredible messaging. One thing I am interested in particularly because I've always lived in places hostile, I've always

look, I'm from the south. I've always lived in the south. I've never been in a unionized environment in a workplace. I'm the perpetual at-large I-W-W member kind of going from town, from out-large town to at-large town. And so, and finally, I've gotten a job up in Boston where I am, once again, not in the union, because I think they created the position specifically as a manager position, so they wouldn't have to create a new union position. I've heard of that before. Yep. You know. And so it's, well, that's whatever. But the university, I'm working at now is a citation for other private institutions, particularly private religious institutions across the country, have found this new right that they have, which is to just dissolve

their union. You're just, yeah. Well, were you at St. John's? No, St. Leo. Oh, wow. Okay. St. John's was then codified in St. Leo ruling.

So we, I just, I have a, I have a Google alert for St. Leo to like grab, you know, local news for our vertical file, whatever. And then I get one from the NLRB or whatever saying, like, yeah, you're allowed to just ignore your union if you're, because that's your First Amendment right as a religious institution to union bust. And so when I saw that, we still have monks and nuns on the board of directors. And I kind of want to just go to the dormitories and start beating down the door and beating like, there is a God Zebedee. He's seen you cheat your workers. And so it makes me wish I was a little more pious so that I could say it with conviction when I get in this mood. Anyway, when we're talking about union hostility, you know, there's a lot of concern about like the current administrations in LRB, right?

Which is just like kind of has just turned into a fascist Instagram account and that's kind of all it seems to be doing. So I want to talk about that. Like this kind of the first thing that came to mind is like, well, what about the NLRB? I'm sure people have the same thoughts of like in the, the. current environment, what do we do? What's, what's, or there's a hesitation. So like, what do you say, what's encouragement or, you know, you've all got lots of experience. So there's lots of things we can all pull from, but I want to, that's what I want to hear about. Well, I can say that when, you know, I'm in the middle of an organizing drive right now, spoiler alert, it's the LA and, you know,

it's public. So, and we, we have been proceeding with the same tactics and, you know, strategies and best practices that we would to organize anywhere because those are what build power for whatever sorts of challenges lay in our path, right? And it's talking to people, convincing people to stick up for each other, to do hard things, building a list, et cetera, all the things that we talk about in the book. And, you know, I am not a lawyer. I don't work on the policy side. So I don't really spend a lot of time, like getting into the weeds about what's going on at the NLRB because I feel like that's in a way putting the car before the horse, right? It's like, well, whatever the NLRB is doing doesn't matter if we don't have a strong union,

right? And when I say strong union, I don't mean certified. I mean, we have a strong group of people that are ready to stick up for each other, defend each other, ask each other to do hard things, So that's kind of where I'm at with it, and that's just from everyday work that I do and my coworkers and I are doing. I mean, we, you know, just to, but to get a little bit into the weeds about it, I mean, they're still running elections, right? They're still, at least in the Chicago area, you know, I understand that it's a little bit different based on the region or whatever, but, you know, they're still running elections. So we're not like, I think maybe for merit, it might be a little different, right? Like when you already have a union and you have to file a ULP,

I don't know where we're at with that. Maybe Meredith can speak to that. I mean, I think this is part of what we tried to do in the book is to talk about some of the things that are unique about library workers, which is that a very large number of library workers are public sector workers. If you work at a public academic institution or if you work in a public library, effectively the NLRB doesn't matter for you because the controlling legal regime that you need to worry about is at the state or sometimes even at the local level.

So, you know, here in the state of Michigan, where I work, we are beholden to Para, the Public Employee Relations Act, in the state of Michigan. And Michigan, we have a long history as a state of being a center of labor activity. But then thanks to Rick Snyder, we became a right-to-work state. And then during the Democratic trifecta recently, they repealed right to work. And that's great. But it doesn't mean anything for my comrades at the University of Michigan or for public library workers or for other library workers at public institutions in the state because we're still operating under, you know, Janus VASmi. We're still effectively right to work in that way. And so it's like sort of a good news, bad news situation. The good news is that the NLRV doesn't really matter if you're a public sector worker. The bad news is you might still have to do a lot of work to change local law. And so I think a good story about that recently are the library workers in Maryland who've really been advocating to make it possible for public sector library workers in the state of Maryland to exercise collective bargaining rights. I also think like what's hard about forming a union is the NLRB, is the labor structure, it's capital, all those things.

But like the difficulty of leaving your office and going to the office of someone that you don't know well and asking them. how their days going and how long they've been at the library and how they're doing. And if they have any thoughts about sort of what the boss has said about how we have to now turn on these AI functions in our email or whatever the thing is, right, that's making you nuts right now at work. That, like, and dealing with the hostility that might come from that and getting over your fear of that. I mean, like, we want to say that, like, the boss is the hardest part.

But getting, overcoming that, I think is the hardest part, being willing to have that conversation, step out of who you know, and talking to somebody that you don't ask about that. That's the barrier. I 100% agree. And I also see just in this work, what oftentimes happens is we'll come across workers who are very legitimately worried and afraid about what is happening at the federal level. And also that that hyper attention to what is happening has in a way kind of paralyze them to do exactly what Emily is saying, right? So it's like kind of like a weird snaking its own tail kind of thing, right? It's like, well, I know that things are crazy up top.

So I'm really scared to do anything, right? It's like, it's just it's, I don't have any answers, but I agree with only 100% that the, the hard part is talking to your coworker. It's really hard. People have a really hard time doing it for a variety of reasons. I think going back to what we were talking about earlier too, about union density. I mean, most people are not in union. right? Period, full stop. Most people don't even have anyone in their household as a union. Most people

might not even have anyone in like the generation above or the generation below that have any experience. And so there's this lack of skill in terms of what it means to actually practice solidarity, right? People just don't really have those muscles anymore. And I think that's what makes things really difficult sometimes. There's a loss of the structures to community structures that help bridge those gaps in terms of, you know, if you don't have a union, then why would you have had a reason to meet someone in the other department, except at a union meeting? So it's, you were, you were doing all the legwork. And for a lot of people, that rightly feels pretty unfair because, you know, you're already exhausted from doing your job all day, every day. And on top of that, you've got a, you've got to, you've, you've got to do this like this, this heavy lift. It's not fair, but it is what has to. If you think of it as a heavy lift, like, you're not going to want to do it, right? Like, you know, I get that it's a heavy lift and know what you know.

It's like it's all free labor and all of that. But like the work of transforming your world is like, it's life giving, it's energy giving. It is, you know, it is the times that I have felt most energized have been the times when I am working for free. But with my colleagues to transform our working conditions to make them better for us. So, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I've definitely seen some, like, of the vocational awe,

actually, like, make workers get in their own way kind of thing. Like, we're having trouble with staffing in my library system right now. So it's like if there's not a minimum level of staffing, we have to close, right? And getting people to understand that they can say, no, I can't change my schedule on the drop of a hat. So the library has to close. And that that is a good thing or can be a good thing. thing to show how we are understaffed is really hard because these people are very dedicated. They want to keep their libraries open. They're very embedded in their communities. They're right. The

libraries should not close, right? Like, they're not wrong. You're not wrong. But then having to be like, well, this is kind of a, what's the word, a work to rule kind of thing, right? So, like, I've had to introduce that concept into like my union discord. Like, that's what this, this is what you're doing when you say no to that. You're not actually letting anybody down. The only people that you're, you are letting people down, like maybe your community, but that's letting them know that something's not right. And once they know something's not right, then you can get them on your side to help agitate for something better. And so I think it's hardly your fault that the library has to close. This is the fault of the funders of the library and management who's making the decisions

about how resources are allocated. And so like, it's like if you actually were responsible for the success of the library, you would be getting paid more. You wouldn't be like, you know, so I think we often get caught, and I get caught up in this too, where I imagine that it's my fault or my responsibility or I'm, you know, like, I'm the reason that ALA is under attack, right? Like I, you know, that's like, it's my fault, right? It's not your fault. There are structural conditions that have produced the situation you find yourself in. That's why I think it's very, very helpful to have a political analysis that you build with comrades as you work towards the sort of better world, because like, otherwise just, you know, it can be very easy to personalize it and take it, like, think it's on you.

Yeah, or like, like, they don't want to let down their coworkers because they're very, you know, they're very close with their coworkers in a lot of ways. And so it's, it's like, well, you're not really letting down your coworkers because you don't want to. We have all been let down. Yeah, well, and even if you, yeah, so that's, that's something that I, I think can be not necessarily unique to library workers, but definitely something that, you know, gets in our own way when we're trying to to remember what is actually, like, long-term goals, I guess. Yeah, well, people talk about moral injury, right? And it's like, you have to absorb that sort of the failure of the state, right? It's like on you because you took a sick day.

You know, I get, yeah, I get it. Oh, God. Because you're right, Emily, it should be like an exciting thing to do. actually, this is funny when little conversations you all start to string together into a theme, but like I'm always sort of like a very pro-ante-work person. I'm just very much like, you should be able to comply. Because I grew up in such a Protestant work ethic sort of thing, and it was very, very bad for me,

and, you know, was something I had to break out of, luckily very young. And watching people, you know, get screwed over by their job at the age of 60 and they just fall over and die because that was their mental landscape. And so I am always saying like, yeah, it's unfair that these things happen to you that you feel bad because the library had to close

and that you feel bad that you don't know the people in the next department over. But I was talking to the friend who is like, work gives you meaning. You should love work. Like work is important. You do have to take on an appropriate burden in your life to give it meaning.

And so I should temper depending on the, the conversation to how anti-work I am. But I've always going to have that reflex of like, because the greatest thing about doing this podcast is people have reached out and go, and when I quit my job because of your podcast, because you told me like it was fine to do it. It was like, you know.

And like, good. I am happy because like staying in a job you hate is awful for you. It's bad for you. So I'm very proud of that. Another option is you could stay and organize, which, you know, is not an easy option. But it's an option that I would like people to consider when I'm talking to them and I know there's something afoot, right? Because we do come across that a lot.

We come across people who are like, well, I'm looking for another job, right? It's like, oh, cool. So when does that other job start? I don't know, but I'm looking for one. Oh, okay. I'm going to quit. Oh, when is your last day? I don't know. Okay. So then it's like, I'm giving you an option that's right here right now, you know, that's not high in the sky. And I think you should take it. But I hear you, you know, I know. Go ahead, go ahead. I mean, I'm like a Marxist about work, right? But like I, you know, I remake the world and thereby remake myself, right? That the problem isn't work. The problem is the theft.

The problem is profit, right? It's the theft of the, you know. I love my job, right? Like, I love my work. Like, nobody is more committed to libraries probably than me. Like, you know, I spent my half my day at the city council meeting and then the rest of the day on email. And now it's like almost 9 p.m. and I'm talking to you, you know, like, I'm dedicated. And I think if you look at people who make really effective labor organizers, there are people who really love the work.

And I actually think that's what like the best labor organizers are the best workers. I read this interview with the guy at a what's his name at Amazon, Chris Smalls, who I know that there's plenty of critique of him. But one of the things he said was that like he wanted to say, he wanted Amazon to be better to him because he may have made his life there. Right. And he was very, very good and very effective. Right. And like, you know, like we, we, we, we were. want to remake our workplaces and have democratic workplaces because we care about them and we think they're important and we believe in the mission. And, you know, I think there's nothing wrong with that, right?

The problem is when that is exploited by the boss. But, you know, yeah, your mileage may vary. Yeah, there's definitely a lot that I have ignored in terms of meaning making out of work because I spent so much time, you know, working on my own deprogramming, which is also important. It depends where you're coming from and where you're going, But for sure.

Yeah, it's, you know, we're all growing. We're all learning. It's fine. It's, it's, it's always, there's always time to get a new, new season of the show going where we, we do a, uh, D&O woman of work. Uh, anyway. Yeah, a day where I just relax would be cool. Yeah.

And also just so many times my life watching people who clearly have given a hundred and 20% and are still getting no support from where they work. And it's like, I'm working at a place like that right now, watching people being scraped over two much bread, you know, like, nothing's bad for them. You got to give them our book. You got to give them our book, I think. Yeah. Buy a couple copies, leave them around your workplace on your last day and then bail.

Yeah. And when you, Angela, when you're saying, like, you're looking for a job when you quit, I quit my last job with about 10 minutes notice. It's walked out because I was pissed at the supervisor. But I actually like this job, so I've given a month's notice so that we can get a new person going, but despite all the, the fact that we are a case for anti-unionism in this country, which is a shame, the stain on our name. We were the only private union, private institution in the Florida unions of the universities. We were the only private institution. Amazing. Everything else was a,

was a state union. We were the only ones. And now we're not. And it's shame. I, you hit on something earlier, which is like the, and I think maybe Meredith can come in too. when you're talking about like it's really when you're organizing it's about the people right like it's about having the structure of talking to people knowing people have your back when you already have that what what's the how can we talk about like rank and file organizing when maybe uh you feel like things have gotten you know there there's something that needs to be addressed and and you need to get the union on board to address it as you know from where you are yeah i mean i think library workers in particular, we, in an academic context, but also in a public context, we sometimes find ourselves

in a local or in a bargaining unit with other kinds of workers who don't always understand our needs. And this came through in some of the stories that we heard in the book. You know, at academic institutions, library workers who were in unions with tenure track or even non-tenure track faculty, and, you know, continually having to explain to their fellow union members that, like, we don't just read books all day and that there might be a need for particular kinds of contract language to address particulars of our work. And then I think on the public side, you know, public library workers who find themselves in municipal unions with other kinds of city, county, or municipal employees, you know, a lot of the same, it comes back to the one-on-one conversation, making a list,

talking to everybody on the list. I think the story of library workers in Philadelphia, working for Black Liberation. You know, they had a situation where they didn't feel like their union was doing enough. And so they made a list. They talked to people on the list. They had a very clear idea of what their sort of high-level goals were. And they just kept at it. And I think that, you know, that's part of what we try to do with the book.

It's not just for people who want to start a union. It's also for people who already have a union and want to. to make it better because even if you're in a really great union, you know, you could always make it better. And the way that we make it better, the way that we make it stronger, like Angela was talking about, is by having more people involved,

having more people show up to stuff, having a deeper bench of leadership to draw from, because it is hard work and like people will get tired and they will need to tap out and there needs to be someone coming after them to replace them. Something I know is an issue where Jay works, and he's on the eboard, everything is there's a real disconnect between the people who are really active in the union

and people who they cannot rely for them get to show up to anything. And it's like a, I think a big chunk of people to the point where they're worried. Is there anything in there about sort of like union apathy and sort of like, well, we're in the union, we got it. Call me when it's time to agitate for a raise or, you know, do something like that. But otherwise, no shows. Is there any discussion in the book or anything like from your experiences you'd like to talk about? Or anybody might be experiencing the same thing? Yeah. I mean, there's always going to be, yeah, lethargy, union apathy, an assumption that someone else will do it, that we'll get active when there's a problem.

I mean, I think those are always hard things that you're struggling against. I think sometimes we identify the problems as union problems. There's problems everywhere, right? Like people not pulling their weight in the department, people not pulling their weight in the family. You know, I'm like, got a teenage son over there. Like, that's a problem, right? Like trying to organize people and getting them interested. I mean, part of the, you know, it's definitely something covered in the book and covered in most union literature,

trying to get people activated, finding an issue that you can organize around. That's why I'm so, you know, I'm so interested in that 0.5% organizing asks, like a demand that's really clear and can get people involved and organize around something. But I'm, you know, I have been out of, I'm running for an alternate delegate seat in my union in the Springs elections, but I've kind of been out of the game for a minute. So I don't know, Meredith Tarantula, if you have other observations. I mean, one of the things that we do talk about in the book is just to have low stakes ways for people to engage, like doing fun stuff. Not every way that you get involved has to be the knock down, drag out contract fight. Like, that's the one that people often think of is like, oh, we're going to use bargaining as a way to get people to show up.

Well, spoiler alert, bargaining is boring. It's like hard to pay attention to. So there's some proportion of, there's some portion of your membership that, you know, they love bargaining. They love the show. They want to come for that. But then there's other people who you're never going to get them to do that, but you can get them to sign every petition. You can get them to show up to a lunch. You can get them to show up to a rally.

You can get them to show up to like, we just rebooted our crafting group within our union, and that's going really well. So like giving people fun low stakes ways to get involved, as well as the harder, bigger asks. Because, you know, even if you have good member density, you won't always get everybody to like participate in every activity. Yeah.

I mean, that's normal. sort of Pareto distribution stuff that just happens in groups. But like, I am just interested in, you know, that's great, knowing about a crafting group, knowing low stakes. You mentioned like broad, building broad leadership. Like what does that kind of look like in your, like building like, you know, you get to beat ahead of the crafting group? Like how are we building broad leadership?

And how can we do that? Yeah. So for us, we really try to build a pipeline where people get involved. sort of in a low-stakes way. So like, yeah, you might decide you're going to start the crafting circle in the union, or you might be a committee chair, or you might volunteer for a specific one-off project. And then we try to, we're of course, you know, tracking all of that activity because, you know, you live and die by your lists. So knowing who shows up to every event, having some notes on any conversations you've had with them, having, you know, assessments,

getting your assessments in. And so once you get people involved in the fun stuff, then you can kind of ask them to do other things. Like, oh, maybe you want to be an officer or a steward and get some experience, you know, doing representational work. Maybe, you know, our union, we've had to hire a lot of staff in the last few years. And so we've always been looking for union members to serve on search committees to help us hire union staff.

And then that pipeline, as you, you know, proceed up through it, You go from kind of the lower stakes stuff. Maybe you might share a committee. Maybe you might be a steward. And eventually, there might be an ask to like, oh, do you want to run for the union council? And it's because it's very hard, just like any kind of escalation curve, it's hard to give people the big ask first. They have to have said yes to some smaller asks before you hit them with the like, do you want to be an officer? If they've never shown up for stuff, they're just not going to commit to that.

And so again, that takes time. That takes having a list, doing your assessments, keeping your data. It's all the same tools. We talked about unions as like part of building the world we want to see. What does that model of unionization look like for you? Say you get the union you want. You're getting the engagement you want. We're talking about utopian views of the future.

I always encourage people to dream about like, what do you actually want to see this look like? What do you want your union to look like? So when you imagine that sort of like you're getting the things you want, what is the role of the union in this sort of the way you really want to see? How do you imagine the union in the end state in your mind? And what does it do for you? How does it give you its role in society, it's role in your life, it's role in your workplace, that sort of thing?

I know it's a hard one. We always give people time to do it because we're not encouraged to use our utopian thinking. We're always encouraged to be practical, but I think that's not good. I could tell you mine, which is I'm a wobbly, right? So mine is syndicalism, full absolute mutual aid syndicalism. Council communism, we are we're all negotiating and organizing society based on actually functioning workplaces. That to me is the ideal goal, as opposed to the more likely goal of climate Stalin, but whatever I'd say. I mean, I'm like, I'm a, you know, I don't think about the future very much.

I don't know if it's my anxiety or what, you know, but I, you know, I honestly, I don't think much about the world except the sort of work that's in front of me. And for me, I think, you know, the union needs to be robust. It's organ, its infrastructure needs to be robust. It needs to have, like, enough outlets for people to get involved. It needs to rotate responsibility, right? I think like the best, the union that I see at the end of the world is the union that I see right now, which is like deeply imperfect, but hopefully with enough sort of ways to get in and engage in the kind of workplace democracy that I think is really essential.

So right now I'm the chair in my department, which is like not the same as being the boss, but it's a little like being the boss because I'm the person who controls access to resources, resources in terms of like time and money and those things and it's you know I want to be in a workplace where the resources aren't controlled by me where the resources are controlled collectively and where we all have a democratic stay and how we're going to use them so I've got some money I need to figure out where I'm going to spend it and like right now what I would like is an owl that will make our remote meetings work better but like somebody else might have a different idea and I think a union is a workplace structure you can use to figure out ways for all of us to have a say

and the kind of decision over whether or not we're going to buy the owl. And like that's a like a tiny decision, but like a big decision. Like I had this, I was visiting a library in Iowa once and it was just one of those moments that makes everything clear to you, right? I was, it was a beautiful library. It was remodeled. There had been like a climate disaster. A director had torn the roof off the, off the roof of the building, and they'd had to rebuild the whole thing, and the city council had been enthusiastic about the library, because, of course, the library had stepped in in the face of the disaster. They had used their tech people and their machines to set up in the park to sort of connect people to FEMA, and went back when that still existed, FEMA and insurance, right?

To, to, right, and the city council had given them a bunch of money to remodel, and they built a library that was twice the size of the original library. It was beautiful. I had a room with a loom for quilting classes and it had an outdoor on the roof. It had a fireplace that you could sit and look at the Iowa skies and we're standing there. And the guy is telling me who directs the library that when they remodeled it, it's twice the size and it has twice as many service points. And he said, you know, the city council, they gave us the money for the building, but they didn't give us the money for the staff. So there's the political problem that we always have to be organizing around. And they said, but, you know, in the way we've dealt with that, you know, we've just, we've taken the

full-time positions and we've just split them into part. part-time positions and that makes them a lot more flexible and we're able to cover the service. And it was like I was here having this conversation about the magic that libraries can do, the transformative work they can do in communities to bring them back from disaster. And the common sense that he has is that the most important thing that we have to do right now is cover the service points. And what makes economic sense is to make unlivable jobs for the people in the library, to make it impossible for those people to have like full-time benefited position. And so what we have to do in the union movement and in the library movement is take what has

become acceptable common sense because it was common sense for him. And I guarantee you it was common sense to 85% of the part-time workers in that library. Let's be honest, right? Like where it makes sense to do that. So we need to change that common sense. So what's the utopian idea like idea I have for the union? It's the one where like people begin to feel that they have a say in, what the library is going to look like and that we can build a collective vision where the most

important thing isn't efficiently covering shit, right? But instead, like, what is meaningful public sector work in a public sector institution? What investments are we going to make in the public and in the public sector workforce? Like, one of the things I find sort of shocking about Maryland is that in response to the excellent organizing done by the public library workers there, in a lot of cases you see public money being used to hire high-cost private law firms, I guess they're all private, but law firms that are anti-union to sort of try to beat back the union movement among public sector workers in a public sector workplace. So that is common sense for management, and that's what we're up against. So I guess that's a little bit off topic, but I hope you'll

forgive the rant. No, that's good. So I worked at East Lansing Public Library for six years as adult services librarian and that is where in that position is when you know that's when I started working with my co-authors here you know that's when you started writing the book was when I was in that position and I will always remember this moment and I'm trying to tell this story without telling all the details because it's long but I will always remember this moment when our director left which you know was a good thing for both parties so our director had left and we were maybe about a year, this is maybe about a year after we had formed the union. So a year into our first contract, actually, I should say. So we already had

this experience together as, as workers where we developed our capacity to have those hard conversations with each other to make those decisions that Emily is talking about, right? Like, we developed ourselves as workers that were, confident in our ability to discuss with each other what should be done, right? And that is usually monopolized by management. That goes back to that common sense that Emily's talking about, right? Like, only management has the right or the capacity or the intelligence or the skills to make decisions. We don't, right? And, like, that's what they tell us and that's what we start to believe. But I think what was really clear to me is because we went through this, you know, process, which, you

know, like, is forming a union under the laws in the United States is frustrating and could be interpreted by some as like not radical or whatever because there's all these constraints to what we can do. But for me, what it was about was developing our capacity to make decisions together to do hard things together. And so fast forward to this moment when our director had left, I remember very distinctly we were in our union hall shortly after they had left, shortly after the director. And like part-time workers, workers of all ages, workers across positions. I mean, we were a small place, but workers that came from each sort of nook and cranny of the library and demographic, right? We were having a real conversation about do we really even need a director?

And that is like insane to me, right? In a good way, right? Like I, like, when I think back to that, it is so powerful to realize that, like, we got to that point. You know, we weren't ready, you know. So we had that discussion and people were not ready for that. And there's, you know, I don't really have a particular position in hindsight, whether that was a good or a bad decision. But, like, the point is that we were sitting together in a union hall having a discussion about the future of the library and how it was going to be governed.

And if we're going to get to anything like what we have all, the common threads of our utopias, then we need people that are capable of having those discussions, right? And the only way that we're going to build those subjects, if you will, is through some kind of collective struggle. And right now, it just so happens, I think, that the most easily accessible collective struggle available to people is the struggle at work, right? And so for me, I guess this is a very long way for me saying, I don't think so much about what the horizon looks like, but who's with me walking towards it, right? And so we have to develop comrades. We have to develop people that are willing to have that walk. I don't know what it looks like out there,

but like we're not going to get there if we don't have people that are ready to do it, right? Yeah, I think the only thing I'll add to this, Cotopian vision is I am also a deeply anxious person. And so I think what I focus on is that we are building something that will endure, that will be around long after we are all gone, because it doesn't depend on any one of us to function. And I think a lot about sort of a, it's kind of a corny story, but if you will allow me, the first book that the University of Michigan Library bought was an Audubon book, you know, one of these big elephant folios, Birds of America. and it was purchased before the University of Michigan existed. And that was an investment in the future. And I think that's what we do with the union,

is we're building an investment in the future. And the fact that we're a library union, I think, is significant in an academic context, because there is a reason that the library has always been at the physical heart of a campus. You cannot have an educational institution without a library. We cannot fulfill our mission. without a library.

And we can't have a library without workers. And so by building this thing that will endure beyond any one of us, we are helping to ensure that the library itself will also survive. It's a good story. It's also a good one for holding over the other departments and be like, look, we're planning for the future over here. That's great.

I like ending on the plans for the future and ideal versions of what we're talking about because it forces people to get to do the deep pulls on like, what am I actually trying to do and how do I get there? So whether or not you're actually a future focused person or not, it's still like, I like how it sharpens people. I think it's also useful, too, to pull in the horizon and be like, okay, that's where I want to go. One way to get there is to have a conversation tomorrow at work with somebody I don't know, ask them what they're doing this weekend. Like, it really has to start there, I think. And then you

figure out what you want to do together. But like what the future is going to look like, we're going to have to build it together, and we're not going to know in advance. And I think waiting until it feels safe or comfortable until you know enough or you feel secure enough, you know, just you got to, you know, you got to make the world by walking there, right?

What they say. And just nothing's guaranteed. You don't, you don't know what's coming next. I mean, that's kind of also why my, I'm still so anti-work, is also like, you know, I could do the sensible things. thing of like, you know, waiting out and doing all this, but I don't know, like, how much longer

I've gotten. It's like, I want to go live in this place. I want to be with my husband. I want to go get this new job instead of people are like, oh, you can't leave your job yet. You need to stay a little longer because it might impact your earning. I don't care. Could you hit by a bus. It doesn't matter. I got to go, like, do this now because I don't know what's next. And so there's a freeing aspect of it. I feel like, you've got to do what matters for you now. I guess that's why I like it's so much people tell me they quit their job because I'm just like, that's not an easy decision to make. I know you made it for a good reason.

So I'm always happy to hear people reaching deep and pick it the thing that's right for them, even if it's risky and scary. And also I was at, I think someone's like, you know, 20, probably like 40, 50 year at their library award ceremony. And they said, you know, the most important thing is just I say good morning to people. And I don't know why, but that just stuck with me. and just make a note to do it of just making it a habit of

talking to the people on the way in the door because I'm the kind of person that can be lost to my thoughts and just will freeze past thinking my own little thoughts making a point to talk to people or asking them how their weekends going or what's bothering them.

Yeah, they're good mental habits to build. I think someone who's been at the same job for 50 years, knows what they're talking about. I'm going to need you to stand with me at one point. At some point I'm going to need you to stand with me.

I don't know what it's going to be about. I'm going to need you to stand with me and so I'm going to need you to know my name and he need you need you to know mine. And yeah, that's what it is. Great. Any last minute things you want to get in before you're out? I'll just do a shameless plug. Please support the LA library workers. I don't have the URL in front me, but there is a public support statement that I encourage everybody to sign. Show them there, show them that they are valued and that their work makes this all stronger. Yeah, it'll be in the show notes and put it when I post it, everything. Can I add

one thing to the show notes? Yeah, yeah. I think the hotest, labor story out there. And the one that was resolved today is the WMBA Players Association signed a deal with management that is transformative for the women who play in that league. And I have never seen such a good public example of workers who understand that profit, all profit, derives from their labor. And I think if you're interested in unions and you want to get involved, the WMBA and also look at the National Women's Soccer League, women's sports are creating some of the strongest unions out there right now and the fact that they're not getting more attention, the labor press says something about the labor press. So I'll leave it with that.

It means that Kim Kelly is not really into sports. No. Love her. Anyway, great. Well, the books organize your library. The link will be in the description. Go out buy it, buy a copy through your library, borrow a copy from your library. And I think that's everything. Thanks so much for coming on and talking about unions with us. We love it. It's a real pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us.