‘A For-Profit Company Is Trying to Privatize as Many Public Libraries as They Can’; FAIRNESS & ACCURACY IN REPORTING (FAIR), December 17, 2021

JANINE JACKSON, FAIRNESS & ACCURACY IN REPORTING (FAIR); ‘A For-Profit Company Is Trying to Privatize as Many Public Libraries as They Can’

CounterSpin interview with Caleb Nichols on defending public libraries

CN: And so it’s all about slashing pensions, slashing pay from salaries to hourly rates, kind of nickel-and-diming workers. And that does save money. But the other dimension to that is that these are library budgets and county budgets that are miniscule compared to the other things that money is being spent on. So it’s this sort of race to zero idea of, there’s already not really much money. So in the case of Riverside, and I go over this in the article, they kind of have this narrative, it’s their flagship case, it’s like, look at what the private sector can do for the public sector. Look at how much better we are at running this.

But really, if you look at the amount of money that Riverside was spending on their libraries, it just wasn’t enough money. It just wasn’t a good fraction of the budget. And also the savings that they claimed to have engineered come from places that are not necessarily linked to what this company has actually done. It’s all kind of a shell game, scam, illusion. It’s a grift.

And the same people that are running this company are the same usual suspects as have done other grifting, notably the Scantron Corporation, which has arguably changed the way that we do public education in the United States—for the worse, if you ask most people. The CEO of Library Systems & Services came from the Scantron Corporation. So these are people with experience in this type of, we are going to take our private interests into the public and capitalize off of taxpayer dollars without being accountable...

"CN: But the thing that people need to know, first and foremost, is that there is a private, for-profit company that is trying to privatize as many public libraries as they possibly can. And why is that? That right there for me is enough to go whoa, whoa, whoa, something’s really wrong.

And so on that same note, I don’t understand why American Library Association, for example, is not coming out much more forcefully against this happening, and is not being much more pivotal in forwarding this discussion. There are non-profit groups, like Every Library that has been working on individual cases where libraries are trying to be privatized by this company. But why isn’t the professional organization that governs all of librarianship, literally accredits the schools that give us our master’s degrees, why aren’t they protecting this most precious public good? So that’s a big question that I have. But also, like, where’s the rest of the media?

Why aren’t we talking about this? ‘Cause it’s happening. According to LS&S, they have 80 public library systems they are operating, making them the third-biggest public library operator in the country. I guess that’s probably behind New York Public Library, and maybe LA? I’m not really sure what exactly their metric is. But they’re bragging about that on their website. So I’m just like, no no no no no no; that can’t be how this is.

Because Americans love public libraries. And they love the public part of public libraries. It is one of these things that’s like, we all love the post office and we all love libraries. We can kind of agree on that. And as you mentioned before, the post office is another example of where this kind of attack is happening."