Fighting the library layoffs

BOSTON--On February 10, approximately 100 library workers, students and supporters held a rally at Harvard University to protest the threat of widespread layoffs throughout Harvard's library system.

Under fire for their complete lack of transparency concerning the proposed "new Library organizational design," Harvard administrators have twice in the past week released campus-wide open letters attempting to explain their vision of change. However, these letters--from the Harvard president and provost, respectively--were most notable for what they left out of their rambling explanation. That is, the question of layoffs.

Aside from recognizing that "members of the talented library staff are anxious to see how the transition will affect them as individuals," top Harvard officials still have yet to deny that layoffs are part of their "new vision" for the libraries.

Most of the library workers at Harvard are represented by the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW). This affords the library workers a degree of protection from immediate layoffs, and HUCTW leaders have stated they intend to engage the management at the Harvard Libraries in "serious discussion" to avoid layoffs if possible.

Unfortunately, union leaders have indicated no desire to take things beyond "serious discussions." HUCTW did not officially endorse the February 10 rally, and have not called upon the membership to take any sort of action whatsoever, other than to just sit and wait.

Nonetheless, many students and workers are escalating the fight via other channels. In one exciting development, approximately two dozen students from Occupy Harvard began a 24-hour occupation of one of Harvard's main libraries on February 12.

The library occupation is meant to pose an alternative "vision" for the transformation of Harvard's library system--one that puts the question of education and work for the 99 percent ahead of purely money-making considerations.

As a group of occupiers put it in a joint opinion piece for the Harvard Crimson:

A library needs the workers who are its lifeblood, its circulatory system, just as a functioning democratic society needs the voices of the 99 percent. Systems built with profit imperatives can only serve to further perpetuate the patterns of destruction and unequal power structures that we denounce. The proposed library transition not only fails to address these systemic problems, it replicates them.