Librarians do lots of different things: we catalog books, digitize documents, search databases, teach people how to evaluate websites, build book collections, to name just a few. This week we did something different: we walked an informational picket line. Students may have seen us and wondered what was going on.
The librarians here at Gleeson are members of the USF Faculty Association. The Faculty Association is a union of the full time faculty and librarians founded in the late 1970’s. For the last 4 months, the Association has been negotiating with the University administration for our contract. Although we have made progress on some issues, we are stuck on the questions of salary and retirement. The goal of the informational picketing was to reach out to the rest of the university and make them aware of our concerns and hopefully move the negotiations forward. We are not on strike but instead are just trying to spread the word. Librarians always believe the more information people have, the better.
The Foghorn just published a front page article about our informational picketing in this week’s issue and they are promising more in depth coverage next week.
Very cool! The photo captures the joint effort of faculty and librarians to defend their standard of living.