Civic involvement does not always require a government paycheck
Here's a story that you may not have heard much about, but it deserves more attention. Twice this year, once in May and a second time in August, Block Club Chicago's Rachel Hinton reported on books piling up at Chicago Public Libraries.
In her most recent piece, Hinton wrote that “carts are overflowing and stacks of unshelved books are crowding rooms” at CPL branches.
Hinton, speaking on the Ben Joravsky Show podcast in mid-August, elaborated on that prior statement. She described an Uptown branch’s community room:
“It’s like there was a wall off to the side where you like you kind of have to step over some books, and I imagine elsewhere, there are similar things,” Hinton said.
Those stacks consist of books that library patrons reserved — called a hold — that were available only at another branch.
Here’s how the CPL hold process is designed:
Chicago Public Library drivers transport bins of books, sometimes to the central sorting facility at the Harold Washington Library downtown, sometimes not, but eventually hold books make their way to the people who requested them. When a book is returned to a patron’s home library, drivers are then supposed to pick up that book and others, as well as DVDs, magazines, and anything else that can be checked out. Eventually those items make their way back to the correct branch.
Hinton told Joravsky that system-wide in July there were 113,000 items waiting to be returned. And if you want to place a hold on a book that is sitting in one of those bulging piles, get ready for a long wait. The result is fewer books end up being placed on hold, which might mean less reading overall.
In her May article, Hinton spoke of a driver shortage at CPL— usually there are three drivers transporting books, which is down from the usual nine.
Recently, Joravsky was in Los Angeles, and he spoke in amazement about his library hold experience there.
"Dang, the book arrived like in three days! I was telling the librarian, 'This is unbelievable, I'm so used to Chicago, where you know, it takes the scenic route, they put the book on a steamer that goes to China.'"
Leave it to Chicago to make Los Angeles look good.
Volunteers
There’s a way, or at least a partial way, out of this messy situation at the Chicago Public Library system, which Hinton completely missed in her Block Club articles. But that fix did make it into her discussion with Joravsky. CPL can recruit volunteers to eliminate those piles of books.
“That’s also been I've something I've been hearing, and seeing just on Facebook comments, people have been, like, ‘I’d volunteer do to this,’” Hinton said.
But Hinton then spoke of an obstruction to this commonsense solution — union work rules. Most library employees are members of AFSCME Local 1215, while the CPL truck drivers belong to Teamsters Local 700.
As everyone — short of people who were recently exhumed from a 1976 bicentennial time capsule — already knows, Chicago is broke and it is arguably functionally bankrupt. Solutions, big and small, must come from outside the very narrow intellectual sphere used by elected officials and bureaucrats.
Of course, library volunteers will need to be vetted. Once they pass screening, volunteers can sort the books. This isn't difficult work, which is why unions are so protective of these jobs. So, the books that belong to the Austin branch are placed into the Austin bins, the Jefferson Park branch books go into the Jefferson Park bins. It’s that easy.
And then other volunteers — possessing valid vehicle liability insurance and owning reliable automobiles — can transport those books and DVDs to their home branches.
The unions
Of course, union contracts very likely bar such use of volunteers. More union employees mean a larger political war chest, among other things. But if a year from now, Chicago has a new mayor and those formerly on-hold books are still stacked up across the CPL system, that mayor can issue a call for volunteers. And if the unions complain, Chicago's post-Brandon Johnson mayor can fire back at them in this manner: “Do you mean to tell me you are against books? Are you against kids reading? Do you expect poor Chicagoans to pay $35 at a bookstore for a hardcover book?”
A strong leader in the mold of Theodore Roosevelt would handle this problem exactly that way.
Or, when the time for contract negotiations comes, permitting the use of volunteers in “emergency situations” can be added to the next contract.
Another reason that the use of volunteers is a smart move is that it typically takes anywhere from three-to-five months to hire and onboard a municipal employee. That’s way too long.
Challenging times call for creative solutions. Chicago Public Schools already utilizes volunteers as coaches, tutors, and classroom assistants.
One city, Virginia Beach, possibly because of its large population of military retirees, is widely regarded as a model for effectively using volunteers within municipal government.
Chicago has a large population of retired government employees. So, there is an upside of government workers retiring at age 50 with full pension benefits.
In 2009, the Obama White House, while not necessarily regarding government opportunities, issued a call for national service, and reportedly urged the entertainment industry to weave volunteering into the scripts of television shows.
Volunteering is an idea that all sides of the political scene support.
Our state librarian
The biggest champion of libraries should be Secretary of State and mayoral candidate Alexi Giannoulias. In his current position, Giannoulias should be sounding the alarm about the failures within the Chicago Public Library system. But he’s probably too busy posing for social media beefcake photo shoots.
Giannoulias is all talk and no action, which is something that hasn't escaped Joravsky’s attention regarding Chicago’s libraries.
“And Giannoulias, the Secretary of State, I believe is the official librarian for the state of Illinois, it is something he might [support], although my suspicion is that Giannoulias has not checked out a book himself since he was a young lad at Latin [High School].”
To be fair, in July Giannoulias told NBC Chicago’s Mary Ann Ahern he has “made sure that libraries in underserved communities have more funding.” But he’s been silent on the current CPL problems.
Alexi is pretty good at feel-good generalities but awful at specifics. And because some of his largest campaign donors are from union PACs, don’t expect him to issue a call for volunteers at the Chicago Public Library System and other branches of municipal government.
Several other mayoral candidates will be more receptive to this idea.
As mentioned earlier, challenging times call for creative solutions. Besides, Mayor Johnson did say there is a municipal hiring freeze, right?
Here’s a fix.
