Quitting Time; American Libraries, June 1, 2022

Lara Ewen , American Libraries ; Quitting Time

The pandemic is exacerbating attrition among library workers

"Those feelings of career ambivalence were complicated, Rorie says, by vocational awe, a term coined in 2017 by academic librarian Fobazi Ettarh to describe the notion that librarians, the library profession, and the institution of libraries as a whole is inherently good and therefore above reproach. For Rorie, the idealized standard only made her feel worse. “I feel like I let down the community,” she says. “I feel like I should have tried harder. It’s hard to have to come face-to-face with that.”

Yet even librarians who spoke out say they were largely ignored. “I told my boss, my director, my team, the whole library on multiple occasions that I was really burned out and not doing okay,” says Jules, a queer, neurodivergent academic librarian at a Mountain-state community college who decided in late 2021 to leave libraries. “And it never changed.” Jules is currently looking for nonlibrarian jobs.

Similar experiences have led to low morale across the profession, according to Kaetrena Davis Kendrick, a researcher and library leader whose work on morale has been widely cited.

“Low morale is a traumatic experience for librarians that was happening before the pandemic,” she says. For the purposes of her research, Kendrick defines low morale as the result of “repeated, protracted exposure to workplace abuse and neglect” and says that the issue strikes at the heart of librarians’ identities. “We feel comfortable in libraries,” she says. “But we’re realizing that libraries are not places of comfort or refuge for librarians anymore. So how do we reconcile those feelings of nostalgia, those feelings of having a calling, when we go to work and we’re being abused and neglected?”

Some libraries have tried to assuage employee unhappiness by implementing programs aimed at reducing stress, but Alex says they fall short. “They don’t seem to understand that wellness programs are placing the problem with the individual library worker,” she says. “You can’t meditate your way out of systemic issues or terrible pay or horrible levels of stress.”...

Yet it’s not just about money, says Elaina Norlin, professional development and diversity, equity, and inclusion program coordinator for the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries. “One of the mistakes most organizations—not just libraries—make is, they assume pay will resolve everything,” says Norlin, author of The Six-Step Guide to Library Worker Engagement (ALA Editions, 2021). “When you look at pay, it’s essential, but it’s not a guarantee of [being] engaged, excited, or interested. I’m not saying money isn’t important. But you can’t just say, ‘Here’s the money’ and expect all of this [other] stuff to go away.”

Norlin says that a library system with a diverse workforce will cultivate diversity of thought and different approaches. “We need libraries to invest internally as much as we invest externally,” she says. “And we need to take a really critical look at hierarchy. There is always a small percentage of people who are benefiting from status quo. They’re the gatekeepers, and that needs to be challenged for the [field] to turn around.”"

Kaetrena Davis Kendrick on Low Morale Among Public Librarians; Library Journal, June 3, 2020

Lisa Peet , Library Journal; Kaetrena Davis Kendrick on Low Morale Among Public Librarians

"You mentioned in a recent webinar that boards, human resources departments, and others with oversight are rarely helpful in these situations. 

Those are enabling systems. It's not just that behaviors are going on—these systems are in play. That's significant for people to know, because people move through these experiences blaming themselves, thinking that they're not doing enough. Really, it's the enabling systems. I use the term enabling for a reason: if you're familiar with substance overuse circles, people who are enabling think they're helping, but they're actually doing things to continue negative behavior. Enabling systems are systems that you would think were designed to help, but they inadvertently prolong or continue the experience of workplace abuse or neglect.

Leadership, overwhelmingly, is cited as an enabling system. You go to your leader and think, if I tell my leader, then they'll do something and stop it. But leaders generally have been shown to be most often the perpetrators of the workplace abuse and neglect. It might be a leadership style, authoritarian or toxic leadership, or even just not leading. I call them laissez-faire leaders. Perhaps you have a leader who's never there, who dismisses your complaints—radio silence."