Services to the Labor Community

Citation

Schmidle and Deborah Joseph (Issue Editor), D.J. (2004), "Services to the Labor Community", Library Review, Vol. 53 No. 3, pp. 190-191. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530410526646

The library and information service never ceases to amaze me. The Summer 2002 issue of Library Trends (based in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois) is devoted to the theme Services to the Labor Community. I had no idea just how extensive and longstanding a relationship existed between the labor unions in the United States and ALA. My only excuse is that although the relationship is more than 50 years old, it would appear that until now it was largely undocumented. Library Trends currently puts that particular record straight in a definite way.

This issue contains nine papers. These demonstrate that the relationship between the US trade unions and nation's public libraries is an especially close one. That goes back to the mid‐19th century. The first three articles, by Elizabeth Hubbard, Ann Sparanese and Arthur Myers, chart this relationship historically.

The fourth and fifth pieces are of significance at this time. Margaret Chaplan and Edward Hertenstein describe the crucial importance to union officers of access to information that they need to know. In particular, they highlight the significance of library training on how effectively union officers access information, and how then, they turn this into knowledge, which empowers both them and their members. There are lessons here for the British Labor Movement. I remember speeches and arguments given by radical and committed Labour and trade union members in many desperately deprived communities in West Central Scotland, in Glasgow. But also in Paisley, Greenock, Coatbridge, Motherwell, and so many more. What we failed to realise was that a lack of information, and access to it, made these communities and their representatives utterly powerless.

The British Army learned the lessons of World War I. The British Labour Movement is now only beginning to learn from the mistakes of the 1980s. Rhetoric and good intentions are never enough. In the General Election of 1983, the British Labour Party's Manifesto consisted of a very long list of desirable wants. It was later described brutally as the longest suicide note in British politics. The lesson to be learned from this collection of papers is that the relationship between the American Labor and Public Libraries tells us unequivocally: information is power. If the trade union movement in any country, especially Britain, does not have access to information and thus to knowledge, then many of the poorest people in society will remain disadvantaged. Furthermore, in an era of the information rich and the information poor we shall never have an inclusive, just and tolerant society. There is a significant role for the declining Public Library Service to expand its services. Because it ought to. And because a key to the survival of the Public Library Service has to be its ability to be politically and socially relevant.

Two further papers which address this information need (perhaps it should be called Information Hunger) are as follows.

First, Nelson and Bailey's The Evolution of Research and Information Services at the American Federation of Teachers. This highlights how a major US Public Sector union has to adapt to the challenges of ICT coupled with research.

Second, of outstanding interest to me, is Gaye Williams' Libraries and Working Families: Bridging the Information Divide. She describes how her union (SEIU) utilised the Internet to communicate with and disseminate information to their members. The tragic events of 9/11 affected a number of these members in a direct way. More than 1,300 members – janitors, elevator attendants, security guards, window cleaners – worked in the Twin Towers. In the trajic events, 61 were killed and 3,000 janitors and other service workers lost their jobs. The union's task was to give immediate help to workers and their families to survive the devastation.

The remaining articles have a greater academic slant. They are no less relevant for this, and contribute to putting these services and the relationship between labor and libraries in context. Two of these relate to the archives and primary sources of Labor History (Connors; Golodner). The final piece is by the editor of the collection (Deborah Schmidle). It describes the 5 year Labor Outreach Programme, of Cornell University, which was focused on internal training programmes for Labor Unions in NY State. Its findings?

libraries could do much more to provide services to non‐traditional patron groups, such as labor unions.

As a profession, we are listening?