LABOUR

Library workers lead the fight

by J. Hodge

Members of CUPE Local 4948 have begun a public campaign to defend Toronto libraries from the budget-cut sideshow of Mayor Ford’s Core Services Review.

Faced with the threat of a 15 to 20 per cent budget cut, library workers have taken the fight to City Hall with the campaign Project Rescue.

The library workers’ union launched the campaign website www.ourpubliclibrary.to to gather support for keeping libraries open. The website asks Torontonians to sign a petition and in the first two weeks of the site’s life, over 25,000 people had signed.

Celebrated author Margaret Atwood put her stamp on it too, tweeting the website to over a quarter million followers, prompting a brief server crash while the union upgraded its capacity.

The website is the beginning of an ongoing, worker-led campaign against library privatization and outsourcing. Thirteen municipal library systems in the United States are run for profit, by a private company, combining a reduction in service hours and union-busting to drive down wages.

Other actions library workers have initiated include a series of information pickets outside libraries through the summer and into the fall, a booth at the Word on the Street literature festival in September, and a series of flash-mob “read-ins” beginning August 28 at Nathan Phillips Square.

Such an outpouring of public anger against the impending budget cuts bodes well for public libraries in Toronto and the www.ourpubliclibrary.to campaign can serve as an example to other public sector unions.

It is possible to fight a right-wing government, and perhaps even to win.