Service to the labor community: a pubic library perspective

Library Trends, Summer, 2002 by Ann C. Sparanese

ABSTRACT

SINCE THE EARLIEST DAYS OF THE NATION, American workers have been viewed as primary beneficiaries of the establishment of the free public library. They have been the focus of public library development, whether for the fortification of their education or for social control, as a counter force to the upheavals of workers in Europe. At various times in its history, the public library has concentrated on workers, specifically the organized labor movement, as both clientele to be served and as partners in cooperative educational work. Although their numbers have diminished in the last decade, unions in the year 2000 still represented 16.3 million U.S. workers--13.5 percent of all working people in the U.S ("Union Membership," 2002, p. 1)--arguably a greater number of individual members than any other American social justice or secular organization. If union retirees and union households are taken into consideration, a very high percentage of Americans are indeed included in the community of organized labor which potentially interacts with the public library. Historically, significant forms of outreach, programming, and cooperative services designed specifically for workers have been undertaken by public libraries across the country, many in cooperation with the labor movement. In addition, public libraries have endeavored to address the needs of the American workforce both as individuals and as labor union members. In order to make these endeavors more productive today, the needs of the labor community, both individually and collectively, must be considered. As the labor movement itself has changed and developed, in terms of membership demographics, size, and expressed goals, the public library's service to this important sector must also grow and evolve.

THE LITERATURE OF LABOR AND LIBRARIES

Of the various types of libraries throughout the country, the public library undoubtedly has had the longest, deepest, most intimate, and yet most ambivalent relationship with the labor movement. Considering the size of the labor community and its own long history, there is a relatively small body of library literature addressing the relationship between these two institutions. Literature concerning public library service to the labor movement reached a high point during a time when the labor movement was at its strongest and ebbed with the movement's decline in membership and influence. The subject of library service to labor does receive a major visitation every decade or so; each time the amount and size of this literature appears directly proportional to the size and strength of the labor movement itself. As the labor movement has itself gradually decreased, literature dealing with library service to labor has also declined.

In the middle to late 1800s, articles in the literature focused on the task of reaching workers with the message of the democratizing effect and educational uplift provided by libraries. This included the preamble to the Massachusetts Library Law of 1847 (Ditzion, 1947, pp. 18-19). In the early 1900s, library literature was developed in support of the Workers' Education Movement, a group that strove to provide workers with a class-oriented view of the world and society as well as education in their fields (Dwyer, 1977, pp. 27-151). In the 1940s and 1950s, years which coincided with the greatest growth of union membership and strength in our society (in 1954, 35 percent of all private sector workers were union members), a number of dissertations (Goshin, 1941; Poll, 1953; Sullivan, 1953) were produced on the relationship between libraries and labor, culminating in 1963 with a full-length book, edited by Dorothy Kuhn Oko, a developer and leader in library service to labor at the New York Public Library, in collaboration with B.F. Downey. Published by the American Library Association (ALA), Library Service to Labor was a landmark contribution, pulling together many of the articles published in the newsletter Library Service to Labor, produced for many years by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO)/ALA Joint Committee on Library Service to Labor Groups. This book, considered the "bible" of library services to labor unions, presented historical background, theory, practical ideas, and case studies on how public libraries could reach out to and serve organized labor. Though this work is now dated, it has no contemporary equivalent, particularly with the elimination in 1970 of the Library Service to Labor newsletter, the source of much of its material. Even with a forty-year gap and changes in information technology, many of the ideas presented in this book are as relevant today as they were in 1963. In 1976, the last survey of labor collections and services in public libraries was done by the joint committee. Of the 723 questionnaires sent out, 18 of 385 responding libraries reported that they had special labor collections, and 14 had a staff member assigned to work with labor, down from 22 in the previous survey of 1967 (Imhoff & Brandwein, 1977, p. 151). Today, even the New York Public Library no longer has a staff member specifically devoted to work with labor.