Lazy librarians

I'm late to this party, but it seems I should write a little something for those rare folks who may still from time to time stop by to take in the view from this barren, windy little Hill in the blogosphere.

The New York Times reports that Santa Clarita, California, has outsourced its public libraries to a foreign-owned private equity firm, LSSI. The story reports that the CEO of this secretive, for-profit business is quite certain he knows how to improve libraries.

“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can to to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”

The LSSI strategy for improving libraries, as described by the NYT and other sources, depends primarily on "cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees". And, of course, eliminating pensions and other benefits. After all, if minimum wage part-time workers who are thinking about maybe some day getting their GED are good enough for Wal-Mart, they ought to be good enough to do whatever it is Mr. Pezzanite thinks librarians do while he golfs, manages his investment portfolio, handles a busy schedule of three-martini lunches at five-star restaurants, harangues his chauffeur for not keeping him far enough away from the Little People who infest the public roadways, bullies his illegal third-world immigrant housekeepers, and keeps a squadron of personal assistants busy arranging photo-ops and adulatory interviews with uncritical "media personalities".

Hey, if he can make unsupported, insulting assertions about the work habits of a profession he doesn't know squat about, so can I. I bet I'm closer to the truth than he is.

The 2004 article from Library Journal linked above also states that LSSI's contracts typically include a clause which forbids the contracting entity from making any critical or negative public statements about LSSI. Corporate image management at its finest! One side of an argument is enough, isn't it? Surely that will make for more efficient collection development.

LJ and other commenters also note that LSSI takes advantage of volunteers to replace paid staff wherever possible. A commenter on the NYT story states that under California law, it is illegal for a for-profit business to skirt the minimum-wage laws by having "volunteers" work for free. This of course begs the question of why on earth any sensible person would volunteer to work for free to boost the profit margin of some distant, rapacious corporation, or bump up Mr. Pezzanite's no-doubt generous annual bonus. Certainly, as George Will noted, the ideal price of labor, from a business perspective, is zero, but I strongly suspect that even if it were legal, the perceived desirability of volunteering at the library would drop once the library was (correctly) perceived as a for-profit enterprise, headquartered elsewhere, with no connection to the local community other than using it as a source of money to be vacuumed away to New York or London. No one volunteers to sort books for free for Barnes & Noble or Borders, just like no one volunteers to work on a GM assembly line, or staff a Macy's retail sales counter, or clean Mr. Pezzanite's dirty underwear for free.

I wonder if Mr. Pezzanite, from his lofty CEO perch, looks forward to living in a society in which the last vestiges of a stable, professional middle class have been eradicated, and the vast majority of the population outside the executive aristocracy lives hand-to-mouth in precarious part time jobs with no healthcare access and a selection of retirement plans consisting of (1) work till you drop or (2) find a sturdy refrigerator box and stock up on catfood. Look out Mexico, we're gonna pass you... going down.

The readers' comments to the NYT article are on the whole more enlightened and thoughtful than the article itself. But of course, the general public doesn't have much to say about decisions like this. Those decisions are for our betters, says the new social contract.

As for me, I'm too tired to write much more at this point. I was supposed to be home two hours ago after my reference shift ended, but since then I've been intercepted by several students burning the midnight oil on term papers and needing to find peer-reviewed criticism of Hispanic literature of the 1970s, arguments for and against civil rights for gay people, and nonpartisan information about tax rates in the United States over the last ten years. And I'll be back at 8 am to prepare to teach an English class how to find useful and reliable information about political science. I guess Mr. CEO Pezzanite thinks I'm still here because I'm lazy, don't do anything, and should be replaced by a 19-year-old working for minimum wage.