Consistency

Here I go again and I hope my blog posts aren't coming across as whinging gripes but I suppose I'm more interested in if there are others out there that feel the same or even better have advice/solutions to offer!

I have mentioned before that we are a single income family. I knew the pay rate of this position prior to accepting it - and I successfully negotiated for a little bit higher starting point and have since negotiated to be paid at the top of my scale. It wasn't that hard once I sat down with my director and discussed everything that I had been doing (which was a fair bit beyond my original job description and what the libraries had achieved since starting in my role - note I don't take credit for everything but I was focusing on the things a manager should be assisting in making her staff achieve).

So now I sit at the top of my scale - hmmm!! I have mentioned in a past post that in a metropolitan area, an equivalent position to mine would be getting paid at least $20,000 more. But I can't really compare metro with country because our Council is only small so doesn't have a large budget. And if you really look at things - most of the people working there are not earning what they could elsewhere - it is the lifestyle (yeah right)!! Did I mention that in the country we pay more for electricity, groceries, internet access, petrol, etc etc?! But yes it is a beautiful place to live.

What frustrates me is that when I have seen positions advertised in my workplace there appears to be some inconsistency in pay scales. I've been forever lost in why engineers and town planners get paid more than librarians - although I'm sure they would come up with some valid reasons. We all went to university and got our degress, we all work the same hours etc etc. So why are librarians not taking seriously?? What do we have to do as a profession to ensure we are felt to be as necessary and worthy as other senior roles in our organisation?? I realise these are questions that have been asked before - in fact I think they are asked at every conference I've attended. I have always thought that we really need to be attending conferences of different professions and telling them what we are doing well. We already know what we do so why keep telling ourselves - get outside of the box and tell other professions.

My other frustration is that we are a part of a regional library - that is not really the frustration but I'll explain. The regional library is made up of 3 Councils. We are not employed by the regional library we are employed by the Council. Therefore, we are all paid different rates of pay. So we are all working as a "team" but someone doing the same job as someone else - with the same job description, hours etc - is paid differently. You can imagine how we all feel about this. But I don't see that changing in the near future. And if mentioned to the directors of the Councils they will say we are all different sizes with different budgets. So we have to pay different rates.

It is not only pay rates that differ. I have a different budget than the coordinator of the other Councils. So when we are trying to show consistency across the regional library - it can be difficult to do depending on where the money comes from. Regional library will cover some things but infrastructure, furniture, computers etc are covered at council level. So some branches are really very nice looking and others require a bit of a face lift.

Then if you want to bring the issue of consistency into an even broader sense - should we be consistent in services across all the public libraries? Should we all be offering the same thing? Should a person travelling between states be able to walk into a public library and see almost the same layout?? I suppose that would make the world a really boring place. But would it make our impact stronger??

Anyway, enough rambling for one morning. There is a topic I want to blog about that I hope to do in the coming days but I'm unsure how to approach it or explain it so I will think about it a little longer but it has to do with politics and libraries.