Whoa. Hold on a sec. What?! I guess I should have seen it coming. I mean, obviously the "invisible hand of the market" has done SO well these past few years at ensuring that the public is served and protected, why not put it to work "fixing up" the rest of our civil society? Hmmm... I wonder why I feel such vehement distrust of a company offering to take over public libraries in "ailing communities”? Notice: the article DIDN'T say ailing LIBRARIES, just ailing COMMUNITIES, so who really knows what their criteria were.
Presumably, the local government was hit hard by the recession, so they're looking to cut costs wherever possible. We're told that Library Systems & Services LLC (LSSI) is under a $4 million contract to take control of three still healthy libraries, but we are NOT told how much money the municipality was already spending on these libraries, so it's impossible to determine if this is truly cost-saving. Of course, the assumption is that governmental organizations are not only completely incapable of overseeing their own operations, but that they have no incentive to run them efficiently (because what other motivation could there possibly BE apart from profit?!).
There's also the underlying, un-examined assumption that libraries are SIMPLY places to house books and provide internet access, so removing the qualified, and educated professionals that operate them, and who've been trained to provide information services, and replacing them with un-skilled, non-Union, temp-style workers threatened with layoffs if they fail to perform has NO NEGATIVE IMPACT on the quality of service. There's no discussion here (except in the massive and awesome collection of reader comments, which I highly recommend reading) of the incredible value of librarians teaching information literacy, or helping people navigate new technologies, or find the answers to pressing questions.
Image courtesy of J. Emilio Flores for the NY Times
Jane Hanson, the privatization opponent pictured in the NY Times article, is obviously doing an incredibly important thing by speaking out to protect the library, and I wholeheartedly applaud her efforts, so this next comment is in no way a reflection on her personally. But you've gotta love how the anti-privatization figure they pictured was the stereotypical librarian: a sour-faced, pearl-wearing elderly woman. I can only guess that this assists them in making their case that libraries are run by inefficient, elderly, and perhaps unnecessary people who do as little as possible, and are just waiting to collect their "sweet" pensions. Obviously, such people should be gotten out of the way to better serve the citizenry with a more "efficient" and "profitable" style.
But the question is: how do you measure a library's efficiency and profitability? It seems to me that there are so many important functions and intangible benefits libraries perform and provide that are not really measurable, and these may not necessarily fall under the rubric of "profitability" or "efficiency." Of course, library scientists have for some time been working to figure out a valuing system for libraries, but a bit more on that later.
One such intangible benefit is the democratizing power of public libraries. Here, people who can’t afford an internet connection of their own, can reap the same benefit from the Information Age as anyone else FOR FREE. During an economic downturn in particular, patrons can and do use the public library to apply for jobs online, take classes to build their resume, or bring their kids to access books and learn how to use information (folks barely making ends meet can't afford to just hop over to Barnes & Noble to drop a chunk of change each time Jr. finishes a paperback).
Image courtesy of Ecolocalizer
The limited amount of privatization pushes I've studied (which mostly involved municipal water supplies in S. America and India) did everything to line the pockets of whatever company was taking control (along with the politicians who'd paved the way for them), while making the resource more expensive for the average person, as well as cutting skilled local labor--the same sort of "stream-lining" promised by LSSI. When the private companies found they could no longer make a profit, they left for greener (read: cheaper) pastures elsewhere. This often left the community with a still-broken system that was potentially even more expensive to maintain as a result of "innovations" attempted by the corporation which had had no real long-term commitment, or vested interest in serving the community.
What happens when LSSI decides it has wrung the last ounce of profit out of the library system, can no longer promise rising returns to its shareholders, and so cuts its losses and exits the scene? By then, the municipality will, most likely, have already re-allocated library funds elsewhere, and may find themselves unable to continue library services to its citizens.
The bottom line is that companies serve their bottom line (shareholders), NOT the public. You could argue that since taxpayer money is funding their operation, the public would (at least in part) constitute their shareholders, but such accountability has certainly not been demonstrated anywhere recently by other private contractors paid with taxpayer dollars. I mean, can you name a time when Black Water or Haliburton gave a damn what the American taxpayer thought? They've touted "corporate personhood" as a means of validating their often sociopathic pursuit of profit at the expense of the public interest. So I think it's a perfect time to call their bluff and say that we're therefore unable to entrust them with running vital public institutions like the public library system.
Image courtesy of Water is Life
In my honest opinion (and I know I'm not a lone voice here), there are certain institutions too important to be left to the whims of market forces and profit. It's probably just the "crazy Socialist" in me talking, but some social services are absolutely necessary for the health of the community, and the nature of these vital services are often such that it may not be possible to run them in a "profitable" manner and still serve a democratic populace in a moral way (those "Socialist" fire-fighting, law enforcement, and water/sewer services, for example). I would argue strongly that health care and libraries are to be grouped among those sacred cows, and we've already seen how broken our capital-centric health care system has become.
This is the reason we pay TAXES: to support and subsidize necessary public services that private companies can't be trusted to operate in the best interests of the population.
Why? Because we're a democracy, and therefore we value the delivering of essential services to all citizens in an equitable manner, regardless of socioeconomic status. We're also NOT using an accounting system that conveniently externalizes the human cost of lost employment and decreased access by, or service to the public in order to show a short-term "profit" on our balance sheet.
I think it's important to ask at this juncture, whether privatization pushes might somehow (at least in part) be a kind of logical conclusion some might reach based on the use of Return On Investment (ROI) analysis of libraries intended to demonstrate their value to the community. I know only a small amount about ROI, and think it's vital to put some sort of legible dollar sign on all that the library accomplishes in a community to underline its importance. I'm all for putting the services libraries and librarians provide into terms politicians and taxpayers can understand, but I think we should consider whether by monetizing invaluable services, we might set ourselves up for economic evaluation, and possibly the determination that we're not "cost-effective."
Beyond purely economic criticism, the idea of a private company having control over the information available to the public smacks of censorship and bias (and you can’t tell me that it wouldn’t happen when “all operations — including hiring staff and buying books — [will be] ceded to L.S.S.I..”). Who's to say that the company won’t receive money from an outside source (um, say, a big oil company, or a particular political party) which pushes them to surreptitiously remove all negative press regarding said company or party, along with any information contrary to their beliefs, from the library shelves? Or perhaps invest more heavily in purchasing resources that paint their actions and views in a rosier light?
 |
| Photo courtesy of Anglo Enterprises & Vineyard Film Limited 1966 production of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Retrieved from Wolf in Sheep's Clothing blog |
It's possible that I'm (slightly) overreacting, and if anyone has stories of privatization working in the long-term for the good of a community, this would be a great place to open up discussion. I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts. But to me, privatizing public information access, is a slippery slope to censorship and just one more sledgehammer blow driving the existing wedge between upper and lower classes in this country a little deeper.
WAIT! I have an idea: how about we replace all the CEOs of major banks, investment firms, mortgage lenders, etc., with much lower-paid, less-experienced temps. They have already proven quite dramatically that they are both HIGHLY inefficient and unprofitable to our economy, as well as being inimical to the health of our nation. Hooray for outsourcing! Sound good to anyone else?
That makes me so angry. How can they think that non-union non-professional untrained people can run a library to the same degree as REAL librarians? Privatizing a library is just a step away from subscription libraries and aren't the point of public libraries supposed to be they're "free" and they're open to the public?
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this article. It's really given me something to think (and rant) about.
Thanks for this, Sarah. You have to love how the rationalization by LSSI for the privatization was the model of GM and pensions. It's as though the failure of GM has nothing to do with our national trade policy (no/low tariffs), the fact that GM pours enormous amounts of money into health insurance that manufacturers in other countries do not (because they have nationalized health systems), or the fact that GM was just not well run (while this library system in the story is, in fact, well-run). Instead, it's because union members want to actually receive a living wage commensurate with their skills (while the LSSI rep implies that the employees are lazy, though he doesn't give any specifics as to how they're underperforming). Instead, LSSI is going to extract a profit from this system that is funded by taxpayers--people's taxes in Santa Clarita are going to go line the pockets of billionaire investors in Islington Capital Partners in...yep...Boston, thousands of miles away. Ah, the joys of corporate socialism. May I offer anyone a glass of TARP? -JV
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment, Margaret!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad I'm not the only one upset! I hope we'll talk about it in class (not like I need a reason to rant!).
... And JV, thanks for highlighting the faulty and weak comparison to GM that I had failed to examine. "Corporate socialism" is indeed, to our great misfortune, alive and well. Now if only the anti-Socialist corporate welfare-receiving Capitalists would allow the rest of us to receive some of the benefits they're enjoying, we ALL might start earning a living wage.
ReplyDelete"The bottom line is that companies serve their bottom line (shareholders), NOT the public. You could argue that since taxpayer money is funding their operation, the public would (at least in part) constitute their shareholders, but such accountability has certainly not been demonstrated anywhere recently by other private contractors paid with taxpayer dollars."
ReplyDeleteYES!!!!
Thank you for writing this post. It is awesome beyond all reckoning, and I cannot yet identify a portion of it with which I do not agree.
If the city is disappointed with the library management, it seems like it would be better to hire an outside consultant than to cede all control of the library. I don't understand why they can't get LSSI to do their thing without changing ownership.
ReplyDeleteKaye, a belated thanks for your ego-boosting comment. I'm glad you liked the post:)
ReplyDeleteBob, I completely agree with you when you ask why the city couldn't simply hire a library consultant, if it were truly so concerned about potential losses from the library.