Controversy over the Free Library of Philadelphia’s new staffing minimums played out this week in the local media between the union representing the city’s library workers and management. On behalf of the union, a public relations specialist sent out an email to reporters expressing surprise and discontent over the change. We followed the issue and posted about it on this blog. Afterwards, we invited both the Free Library of Philadelphia and AFSCME District Council 47, which is the union representing library workers, to write an op-ed about the matter. The staffing change, which requires four people instead of three to operate a branch, comes in the wake of a 20% budget reduction at the Free Library, and a court order forcing the city to keep open 11 libraries it intended to close to save money. Both the library administration and the union accepted the offer to do an op-ed. A day later, however, union officials declined to write the op-ed after Mayor Michael Nutter announced a second $1 billion revenue shortfall, which will likely mean more municipal layoffs and tense negotiations with the union.

Free Library’s Response to New Staffing Policy

By: Sandy Horrocks, Vice President for Communications and Development at the Free Library of Philadelphia

The Free Library of Philadelphia’s current staffing roster for each of the 49 branch libraries is approximately six staff. Some libraries are staffed at a much higher level due to the size, building layout and volume of customers. Given our current 111 vacant positions, our branches do operate on less than six staff members. But we should not be operating on less than four people per day- this is fewer than we should have for good service and security.

The Library has and will continue to open with three staff members with the certainty that additional staff will arrive during the day to get us as close as possible to the operational staffing roster of six.

We will not open if there are only three staff members to handle the eight hour schedule and no staff available to be redeployed.  If we operate with only three staff members - and one is a guard (who also serves as the custodian) - we are unable to provide the professional library services our customers need and deserve.

Have we opened with three people before? Yes. Was it a good idea? No. For safety and security reasons, our director Siobhan Reardon thinks we must now have four people minimum at a branch; and can open, as in the past, with three if another person can be found to go to that location. If we have three people, one of whom is a guard/custodian, then the other two people must: open the doors, help with computers, maybe run a program or two, can’t go to the bathroom, can’t get lunch or be helpful with library services from helping a customer on a job search to a student with homework.  It is a bad idea and our director wants us to provide professional services. The minimum should be six. But to stay open, we are dropping that to four and will open with three.  Some days 50 or 75 kids come after school. Two staff (who also check out books, etc) just aren’t enough.

During the past month, we had over 500 hours of redeployed staff time. Librarians and other staff are running all over the City from the northeast to the southwest-trying as hard as possible to keep each library open as many hours as possible. There have been late openings and emergency closings due to shortage of staff; however, every day as we learn who is out due to illness or other circumstances, administrators scramble to move staff from location to location. This library system is here to serve our customers and is making every effort to provide excellent resources and trained staff throughout the City.