NJLA PAC Recommendation for Minimum Salary Guidelines Statement

Public Library employment environments in New Jersey vary widely, from very small one-employee libraries to much larger organizations with many departments. Some library workers have collective bargaining arrangements, but the majority of librarians are left to grapple with the issue of low salaries on an individual basis. Hence the need for salary guidelines. In such a varied professional landscape, quantifying minimum salary guidelines presents numerous challenges.

Average librarian salary growth fails to keep up with inflation as evidenced by an analysis of current Consumer Price Index information available at http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?r2. Current salaries fail to reflect the professional qualifications, preparation and challenges that librarians meet every day serving our New Jersey communities. While New Jersey has one of the highest income levels in the United States because of its knowledge industry, our librarians—the highly educated professionals that support and underpin our state’s knowledge industry—are poorly paid. Librarians, like other professionals, deserve a salary that enables them to support themselves and their families.

Compensation for librarians, after adjusting for inflation, increased at a far slower rate than salaries earned by other professionals, including teachers and private sector workers with similar educational backgrounds. Public librarianship, in particular, suffers as new graduates of accredited library and information science programs avoid public library work in favor of more lucrative positions in the academic, school, and private sectors.

It is useful to compare librarian salaries to reasonably equivalent teacher positions in local school systems for three reasons:

• School systems are a competitive market for professionals in public libraries,
• Both fields are traditionally female professions, and
• Both areas are sometimes a low funding priority in their communities.

Wages for librarians lag in two critical areas:

• Starting salaries remain lower than teachers, and
• Average salaries remain lower than teachers.

Unlike many of our librarians, teachers receive an annual percentage increase (e.g., cost of living) added to a “step” based on years of demonstrated successful service. Three years ago, the state’s biggest district—Newark—awarded raises of more than 5 percent, bringing the average teacher’s pay to about $75,000 in 2005 (Star Ledger, August 29, 2006). Front-line full-time librarians working in New Jersey typically remain in their positions for ten or more years before they make even $50,000 per year.

New Jersey Library Association fully supports the concept of equal pay for equal work.

(Please note that Library Boards using state report data to compare their director salary with others should be aware that the data presented by the New Jersey State Library is skewed because it fails to differentiate between the salaries of full-time and part-time library directors.)

Adopted by the New Jersey Library Association Executive Board Dec. 19, 2006.

Adapted from Maine Library Association Public Library Standards.

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