Precarity, Solidarity, Professional Control and Structural Problems in Canadian Librarianship

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • McNally, Michael B.

• Canadian librarianship is a field beset by an interrelated set of structural problems. The field is divided into two castes of workers (“library technicians/assistants” and “professional librarians”) at both a professional and educational level. For MLIS holders, problems of precarious labour underpin the work environment, especially for recent graduates. Despite the field’s supposed commitment to intellectual freedom, the benefits of such freedoms are often not fully enjoyed by public library workers and non-academic library staff who lack the protections of academic freedom. In academic libraries the field’s “reprofessionalization” of the workforce is decentering library workers. Finally, while multiple Canadian library associations exist, there is no national voice to unify and advocate for library workers.

  Spurring these problems is the issue of professional control. Employers benefit from the surplus of potential workers (the reserve army of labour). Professional schools, which are accredited by a foreign body, are beholden to standards of accreditation divorced from the concerns of workers. And most significantly, workers have little control over the profession in terms of setting both professional standards and controlling entry into the field. As a potential solution a “college of librarians” and recasting of LIS education toward a unified undergraduate degree may be a valuable approach to address these structural problems.

• Date created

  2024-05-10

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Politics of Libraries; Politics of Libraries VI: Solidarity
  • Precarity

• Type of Item

  Conference/Workshop Presentation

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-k643-aj81

• License

  Attribution 4.0 International