The software industry has adopted a different model, however, one that other entertainment and digital content industries are trying hard to emulate.  In 1908, the Supreme Court recognized the so-called First-sale doctrine, which was later codified in copyright law in 1976.  In essence, the doctrine allows someone who has purchased a copyrighted work to sell that particular copy of the copyrighted work without the copyright holder’s permission and without the copyright holder gaining any further compensation.  This is why publishers are unable to halt the legal trade of used books, movies, music and some software (especially games, console games in particular.)  The software industry managed to do a partial end-run around the first-sale doctrine by changing the verbiage from one of a “sale” to one of a “license”.  Even there, however, they couldn’t completely subvert the 1976 law, they could only make it more cumbersome.

The software industry has been complaining about piracy for a very long time now, and unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted materials is certainly a problem.  That said, it is a large mistake on the part of software manufacturers to count every pirated copy of their software as a would-be sale.  The majority of software pirates would rather go without than pay for content.  Many more would be willing to pay if the price were somewhat reasonable.  But a full discussion of software piracy – and its prevention – is not the focus of this post.

As mentioned before, the primary goal of any for-profit company is to make money, and the highly-competitive software industry is particularly draconian in extracting as much cash as they can.  Until recently, their efforts have focused on reducing piracy (primarily by punishing honest users, but that’s another rant.)  Capcom, however, just upped the ante.  They are going after the perfectly-legal resale market by making a game that is effectively un-resellable.  To make matters worse, the game in question is one with a fairly linear storyline: once you’ve played it, you’ve played it.  You might want to play it a few more times, but it’s not an “infinitely replayable” game the way the Civilization games or Nethack are.

What Capcom is doing is tied to a particular console, using a proprietary cartridge rather than a disk or hard drive.  The game only allows for a single save game file, and this save game file cannot be deleted.  Once part of the game is unlocked, it is permanently unlocked and cannot be reset.  In other words, while the game can be re-sold, it will be re-sold as an already-completed and unlocked game with no opportunity to reset.  If you want the full game experience, you’ll have to buy it new.

It may be legal, but it’s also a sleazy move, and one that will tend to encourage piracy rather than legal purchase.  There is solid evidence that the publishing industries lose more money to second-hand sales than to piracy, but this is clearly a case of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.  Capcom sees it as a way to ensure a solid revenue stream.  The gaming community sees the cost of the game as 100% sunk and unrecoverable, and therefore a bad investment.  I don’t see any winners in this scenario.  Sadly, Capcom is too stupid to see it that way.

While I believe good is good and evil is evil and there are certain things one ought not do, I also believe that the government’s interest in legislating what a person can and cannot do should not be based on what a faith system says so much as on actual harm caused (and I do not consider something sinful to be “harmful” in a legal sense.)  It is easy to say, for instance, that theft should be illegal because the Bible says “thou shalt not steal.”  It is also true that taking another person’s possessions violates that person’s inalienable right to his or her property.  There is actual, quantifiable harm there.  On the other hand, I struggle to find the actual, quantifiable harm in legislating what is or is not permissible between two consenting adults in a committed relationship in the privacy of the bedroom.  (This is not to start a discussion about bedroom morality, but rather to illustrate that there are limits to what constitutes legal harm.  Whether “alienation of affection” constitutes “harm” is a topic for another day.)

Wouldn’t I love to see a Catholic utopia?  Wouldn’t I love to see a society in which a holistic approach is taken to the human person and human dignity, in which workers are paid fair wages and people all work together for the common good?  As a Catholic, the idea does have a certain appeal.  But there is one huge, fundamental problem with that ideal: we live in a pluralistic society, one in which not even a majority is Catholic.  In fact, while the United States can claim to be majority Christian, there is no denomination that can claim to be a majority.  And I can say with certainty that what a Catholic would consider an ideal society does not mesh with what a Baptist or Calvinist or Seventh Day Adventist would consider optimal.  In short, tolerance is required.  Thus, instead of asking what I’d like to see if my perfect government were in place, I’m more interested in asking what protections I’d want to have if a highly-incompatible faith system were calling the shots.  Would I be willing to tolerate a life without bacon or Saturday afternoon football, or a mandated month-long fast?  Would I be willing to live in a society in which women count only as a fraction of a man?  And what of impositions against my own faith (for instance, a blanket ban on alcohol, which could affect the way we celebrate Communion?)

The answer, then, must be that church and state be separated, and that the faith of others be tolerated.  The government’s role must therefore necessarily be to protect the common good, provide for redress of grievances and generally promote an environment in which we are strongly discouraged from causing harm to others, and punished if we do.  Equally importantly, it is NOT the role of the state to legislate and safeguard morality.  Ethics, yes, but morality – at least when real harm to others is involved – falls outside the realm of what a faith-neutral government ought to be doing.

So, without government intervention, won’t the nation just fall into moral derpitude?  Won’t every last shred of goodness and decency fall by the wayside?  As far as the government is concerned, that’s not the government’s problem… but the very nature of the church-state divide indicates that there are two sides to the coin, and that it is the role of churches, synagogues, mosques, priests, imams, rabbis, shamans and other religions and religious leaders to take a true and actual leadership position where morality and right and wrong are concerned.

Sadly for far too long, the ones who are supposed to have been the strongest defense of morality in this country have been floundering in their most fundamental of duties.  What reaches the public eye are the extremists whose often-outlandish and overtly-hostile stances on single issues make them polarizing news fodder, but not exactly role models for how to live one’s life.  Similar are the religious leaders (gleefully?) caught in various scandals, usually sexual in nature (one thinks of the priestly pedophilia scandal, or of the anti-homosexual preacher caught receiving a sensual massage from another male, then blaming it on alcohol.)  Don’t get me wrong: there are many outstanding clergy out there who live their lives well.  But between attempted cover-ups and disingenuous tearful mea culpas, there is a serious credibility problem.

The nature of being a religious authority is that you are therefore a de facto moral authority, and you are expected to live according to the tenets of the morality you preach.  If you are a clergy member or a religious institution and you do not live up to the expectations you set for yourself, you undermine your moral authority and it is there that the true moral decline begins.  This is not to say that clergy ought to be held to impossibly high standards; I think we all understand that clergy are just human.  But I also confess a certain schadenfreude when a fire-and-brimstone preacher whose sermons do not include words like “love” or “mercy” is caught in a compromising position: call it kismet.  One of the best sermons on morality I ever heard came from a priest at Catholic U.  The gist of it was simple: “I’m not perfect, I’ve made my mistakes, but that doesn’t change the fact that a sin is a sin, and even if everybody is doing it (myself included), that doesn’t make it right.”

In the same way I find it morally and ethically reprehensible that a senior clergy member would try to sweep misdeeds under his watch under the rug and try to make things go away quietly without taking responsibility (as happened in many dioceses here and abroad), I find it equally reprehensible that a religious institution that dares claim moral and ethical leadership would cast aside the core tenets of its faith in the interest of becoming more like state-run institutions (which do not have moral restrictions, but can also not claim to be moral leaders.)  If a religiously-oriented institution adheres to a faith that is unambiguously and unequivocally pro-life, how can it make sense for that institution to add an avowed pro-abortion activist to its board?  How can it continue to claim that moral imperative?  For that matter, how can it claim to be on the “church” side of the church-state divide?

American society and government depends on a separation of church and state: we are a pluralistic and inclusive society, and that means there needs to be room for people of all faiths (including no faith at all).  But for the churches who are not permitted to make public policy decisions, the answer is not to bemoan the fact that the law doesn’t permit faith-based intrusions on government.  The answer is to lead by word and by example.  Every major religion has rules for how to live and how to treat others, and it is incumbent on those religions and their clergy to live that way and to encourage their followers to live that way.  Morality is at the very heart of church life.  It is at the very heart of how we, as individuals, treat others in our community.  For a clergy member or a religious institution to abdicate this duty to morality is the pinnacle of moral cowardice.

In order to understand the context here, it is necessary to turn back the clock to 2005.  Between 2003 and 2005, former President Bush had nominated a total of ten candidates to fill federal judicial vacancies.  Democrats filibustered all ten nominees, rather openly admitting they were doing so because they could.  It was a classic case of petty politics.  In response, the Republican majority threatened to change Senate rules to remove the right to filibuster judicial nominees: this was called the “nuclear option.”  In response, a group of 14 moderate Senators from both parties reached an accord in which they agreed to pull the “nuclear option” off the table in exchange for giving up filibusters except “under extraordinary circumstances.”

Until now, this arrangement has benefited President Obama (sort of, in that many nominees are still stuck in committee.)  All his nominees who have made it through committee and made it to a vote have been confirmed.  About 14 others are still awaiting a vote.  Liu is the first candidate since 2005 to have been filibustered.  Democrats are up in arms, claiming the Republican side of the 14 broke their agreement.  The Republicans are countering with the argument that the agreement allowed for “extraordinary circumstances”, and Liu’s nomination falls under that umbrella.

What makes Liu so special?

Goodwin Liu is an Associate Dean and Professor of Law at UC Berkeley.  He is very well regarded as having a keen legal mind and being an excellent legal educator.  According to the ABA, he is “well-qualified” as a candidate for the federal bench.  Liu is also very outspoken.  As far as the Republicans are concerned, he has two very serious strikes against him.  The first is that his personal politics and jurisprudence are very liberal, far more so than Justices Kagan and Sotomayor (who did not get filibustered.)  Liu has made certain statements on the record regarding his interpretation of the Constitution which fall outside the realm of generally-accepted Constitutional law.  I saw one report stating he believes that the Constitution mandates a protection of gay marriage, universal health care and job-related skills training.  Mainstream judicial thought argues whether these are state or federal matters, but they are generally not considered Constitutional rights or protections.  The long and short of it is, Liu would be poised to be the most liberal member of the nation’s most liberal circuit court, and by a wide margin.

The second, and more serious, strike also reflects his outspokenness.  He was a strong opponent to the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, accusing Roberts of being a judicial activist.  His remarks regarding Samuel Alito were downright offensive:

Alito “envisions an America where police may shoot and kill an unarmed boy to stop him from running away with a stolen purse” and “where a black man may be sentenced to death by an all-white jury for killing a white man, absent [an] analysis showing discrimination”

Whether or not one agrees with a judicial candidate’s jurisprudence, this sort of grandstanding does not reflect well on the speaker, especially if the speaker has judicial aspirations of his own.  I must also note (with some irony) that while he accused Roberts of judicial activism, his own scholarly writings advocate (liberal) judicial activism.

So… promise broken or kept?

As I mentioned previously the Group of 14 had agreed not to filibuster except “under extraordinary circumstances.”  Until now, the Republicans had held up their end of the bargain, allowing Obama’s nominees to enjoy an up-or-down vote, and clearing the way for two liberal-leaning Supreme Court justices (in all fairness, though, Kagan’s appointment was mostly a formality, since the hard work had already been done when she was voted in as Solicitor General.)  Liu’s nomination was the first to meet a procedural obstacle, and the Republican members of the 14 were quick to point out that Liu was, in fact, an extraordinary case.  His sworn statements before Congress and his published writings paint a picture of an activist judge with an overtly liberal agenda.  Republicans were concerned that he would not vote based on established case law and generally-accepted jurisprudence, but would apply his own standard that is not in line with accepted Constitutional law.  They were also deeply concerned about his remarks toward Roberts and (especially) Alito.  Ultimately, they found he was too liberal, too extreme and too activist to allow a confirmation vote.  The same arguments that applied to Robert Bork apply to Goodwin Liu, they say.

Democrats feel betrayed.  There is a difference between one’s legal philosophy as outlined in a classroom and what one actually does in a court of law.  Many judges are able to put aside their political opinions and instead rule based on the law as written, so why should Liu be any different?  The ABA’s endorsement was unanimous, and his professional record is impeccable.  As far as the Democrats are concerned, the Republicans walked away from the deal when it became inconvenient.

I find myself having to agree with the Republican Senators on this one.  The agreement was not that the right to filibuster would be waived, but rather that it would be used sparingly, with restraint, and only when there were serious questions about whether the nominee deserved to be on the federal bench.  Complaints about petty politics are well-received: Liu is a liberal rock star, the sort of person progressives really want to see elevated to the federal judiciary (and the sort conservatives really do NOT want to see on the federal bench.)  My own limited knowledge of his jurisprudence leads me to associate him with being a William O. Douglas-type of legal scholar (I do think Liu’s family life is a little more stable.)  But I also think he’s given off some very serious warning bells.  His published writings and statements demonstrate a political bias that raises serious questions as to whether he can be an impartial jurist.  His statements regarding the Constitution raise red flags as to whether he interprets the Constitution correctly.  And his statements regarding Roberts and Alito make some of Justice Scalia’s opinions seem downright congenial.

The role of the Senate in examining a candidate for the federal bench is not to ask, “does this candidate agree with my political ideology?”  It is to ask, “would this candidate make a good judge?  Will this candidate properly interpret the Constitution and the laws we have passed?  Can this candidate rise above the politics and be an excellent jurist?”  Just as it is improper for a political party to block a candidate because they can, it is also improper for a political party to abdicate their responsibility to ask these questions because they are in the minority.  When a prospective judge talks about getting “our ideas and the progressive vision of the Constitution and of law and policy into practice,” there is a very real danger of judicial activism, and such candidates should face much tougher scrutiny.

At the end of the day, it was not Republicans breaking promises that torpedoed Liu’s chances at an appointment to the federal bench.  These same Republicans had allowed 24 other nominees to reach a confirmation vote, and let two qualified progressives onto the Supreme Court.  The record shows that Republican treatment of Liu was the exception, not the rule.  Ultimately, it was Liu himself who was his own undoing.  His vehement, vocal and incendiary comments regarding Roberts and Alito and his copious unabashed left-leaning writings and interpretations gave Senate Republicans all the information they felt they needed to state conclusively that Liu would not be a good federal appeals judge.  Every judge has a bias, but every good judge can put that bias aside.  They clearly felt that was something Liu couldn’t do.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

What exactly does the Fourth Amendment mean?  Historically, that has meant that certain places and items were considered “private”, and that the state has no authority to enter, search or seize anything from that area without a judicial warrant that explains, with specificity, what is to be searched and seized (and possibly whom to arrest.)  In other words, you have a Constitutional right to deny law enforcement access to your home unless they can produce a search or arrest warrant.  Now, in certain cases, the warrant requirement can be waived, but only under a very specific set of circumstances, all of which involve urgency and immediacy and a response that simply cannot wait for a warrant (one thinks of gunshots or frantic screams for help.)

The Indiana State Supreme Court was recently presented with a test of the extents of the Fourth Amendment.  A companion to the Fourth Amendment is actually rooted in English Common Law, dating back to the Magna Carta, and has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.  In essence, it states that a citizen may use reasonable means to prevent law enforcement from gaining unlawful access to his property.  A citizen can’t go around shooting law enforcement officers, but it was held that citizens had the right to deny entry and, to a limited degree, physically bar officers from entry until a warrant was produced.

The case of Barnes v. State of Indiana revolved around a set of denied jury instructions citing the common-law right to prevent police from entering a home.  Barnes and his wife were having a domestic dispute, and 911 was called.  Before the police arrived, the situation de-escalated, and when the police arrived, both Barnes and his wife made clear that there was no urgency or immediacy in effect any more, and Barnes explicitly stated that he was refusing police entry.  His wife never told the police they could enter (in other words, either a warrant or probable cause was necessary at this point.)  The police forced their way in, Barnes tried pinning an officer against the wall, was subdued and arrested for physically obstructing an officer in his duties (or whatever it’s called) and was put on trial.  Barnes wanted to include jury instructions that a reasonable defense of one’s home against unlawful police entry was legally permitted.  The judge disagreed, and the jury convicted.  Barnes then appealed to the state Supreme Court on the grounds that the judge got the law fundamentally wrong.

The Indiana Supreme Court’s majority opinion replied with this little gem: “We believe however that a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.”  In other words, according to the Indiana Supreme Court, the right to be secure in your person or home against unreasonable searches and seizures CAN be violated, instead, restitution must be sought after the fact.  The INSC framed this in the context of de-escalating violence and protecting lives.  Obviously, this is a major concern: you don’t want to encourage people to rough up law enforcement, especially in probable cause situations.  The problem is this: the ruling essentially gives law enforcement carte blanche to act with impunity when it comes to entering private property.  One sheriff gleefully commented that he was going to be able to go door-to-door during manhunts, and citizens would have no means of refusing entry.  On its face, this is consistent with the INSC’s ruling.  it is also, on its face, in flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Indiana is not the only place that’s decided the Fourth Amendment no longer fits in with how society ought to work.  The State of California is poised to pass an “anti-piracy” bill that will allow warrantless searches of CD and DVD duplication sites, and authorize the seizure of equipment suspected to be used in piracy.  Granted, there is a far more limited scope to the effect of this legislation, but it still circumvents the Constitutional mandate that there be a strong enough suspicion for law enforcement to get a judge to agree to allow specific places and specific equipment to be searched.

I’m not a Constitutional law expert, but it seems clear to me that the intent of both the Magna Carta and the Fourth Amendment was to afford a measure of privacy and security to private citizens.  In particular, it is the best and strongest defense against “fishing expeditions” to look for things that might be illegal so the state can later act on those illegalities.  The INSC decision and proposed California legislation fundamentally alter that balance: instead of the burden of proof being on the state to demonstrate the necessity of violating a “reasonable expectation of privacy”, it is now incumbent on the violated individual to demonstrate that the state had no business being there.

I understand and appreciate INSC’s interest in de-escalating violence and trying to keep people from getting hurt.  Unfortunately, the very broad ruling means that even a common-sense approach is no longer valid.  In the Barnes case, all Barnes was asking for was for a jury to decide if police intervention was lawful or not.  That is an appropriate issue for the jury to decide.  If the police could demonstrate probable cause (i.e. a 911 call trumps the reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to home entry), Barnes had no case and would be convicted.  If Barnes could demonstrate that the police acted without probable cause (i.e. the 911 call had de-escalated and the police were aware of the de-escalation), then his Fourth Amendment rights remained intact.  I do not favor manhandling law enforcement officers, and I don’t like violence.  But the INSC has now made it so the only real limiting factor on the power of law enforcement to enter homes is the ability of the private citizen to retain a lawyer to sue law enforcement for Fourth Amendment violations after the fact.  And I shudder to think what would happen if an unlawful entry were to lead to a warrant based on something the officer saw while unlawfully in someone’s home.

Before I continue, those of you who follow the political side of my blog know that I’ve got certain leanings and opinions and such, and I’m fairly live-and-let-live regarding what I post.  I also know that a lot of people (and corporations) are not.  Therefore, to make sure there is no confusion about anything, every black and white photo on this blog under the “Photography” category was taken by me (Joe Reimers), in most cases in the context of furthering my education.  But those pictures are definitely my intellectual property, and are, in fact, copyrighted to me, except to the extent required by my instructor and educational institution for the sole purposes of furthering my education.

As these images (namely, the black-and-white images under the “Photography” category) are mine, I grant the right to download, view and share these photos for personal, non-commercial use only.

With that silliness out of the way, here’s some more happy photo fun-time goodness.

If you look closely in the background, you can barely not see the Golden Gate Bridge.  Yeah, it was cloudy, but I had to work hard to get the clouds to come out in the print (the print has more cloud texture than the raw negative.  I had to do some serious burning.)

The world's crookedest street

View out a San Francisco Cable Car

I took this one with 400 speed film pushed to ASA 3200 out the back of a moving cable car.

I love this picture.  It’s also pushed, but the effect is very different.  Hard to believe it’s in San Francisco!

This was my last – and most successful – print of the Grotto.  I can still do better, but it’s much, much closer to where I want it.

This last picture is from an assignment I had in which I had to emulate a significant work of art.  I chose Picasso’s Old Guitarist, and photographed my brother emulating the pose with 3 different guitars (classical, electric and Rock Band controller.)  What makes this print interesting is that I put 3 different negatives on the same print without any light bleeding.  They’re almost straight and sorta equally-positioned, too!  It’s hard to do when you can’t see where the prints actually are.  But that’s what makes dark room work fun!

I’ll post some of my choices later on.

When the Senate Democrats walked out nearly three weeks ago, I was somewhat concerned by that move.  In essence, it was the strongest possible move they could have made, and one of questionable legality (which is why they took pains to flee to Illinois: had they gone to a Republican-run state, they would likely have been extradited back to Wisconsin.)  Clearly, they felt they had no choice, and they felt that this was the moment at which they should fall on their swords.  When you’re an elected official, fleeing your constituency because you object to legislation you can’t block is a very symbolic move, but it’s also a very risky one.  In the case of the Wisconsin Democrats, it had the desired effect of delaying the vote – for a time.  But it also had the effect of letting the Republicans know that any and all legislative tactics were fair game.  Denying a quorum is the legislative equivalent of the “nuclear option.”  Once the nuclear card is played, the other party knows that the gloves are off and that any and all procedural options are on the table.

In a few years, the Democrats in Wisconsin will have the opportunity to reverse this law.  Unfortunately for them, they’ve let the Republicans know that the nuclear option is now fair game.  For the sake of Wisconsin, I hope it doesn’t come to that, but the genie is out of the bottle, and the gambit ultimately failed.  They should have known you ultimately can’t out-rules-lawyer a rules lawyer.

In his Newsweek op-ed piece, George Will claims it’s part of a bigger, progressive behavior-modification plan.  I’m not sure I’d go that far.  I do think there’s a certain romance to the rails, and there’s a long national history tying railroads with progress.  For moving freight, railroads are fine, but they’ve become woefully outmoded as mass people-movers.  Local and regional trains are one thing: spending $22 round-trip to get from South Bend to downtown Chicago and back in around 2 hours isn’t bad at all, especially considering you’d spend a lot more time and money dealing with airports.  But once you get beyond commuter distances, it stops being worthwhile.  When I was going to school in Washington, DC, I had the option of flying home or taking the train.  I took the train once and flew the rest of the time.  Flying was faster, cheaper and more comfortable by a wide margin.

High-speed rail won’t appeal to people in a hurry because airplanes travel much, much faster, often for the same or somewhat lower cost.  And it won’t appeal to people on a budget because buses are much, much cheaper and don’t take that much longer (usually.)  So why do we want to dump $53B into it, on top of other money the government tried to hand out to states as development grants (which were rejected by WI, OH and FL?)  I just don’t get it.

Once upon a time, I worked for a publicly-funded (speak: taxpayer-supported) institution (speak: public library.)  I knew going in that library work was not a particularly reliable means for retiring at 35, but it was steady work that would pay the bills.  (NB: it’s also turned out to be extraordinarily rewarding work.  Libraries are a good mixture of awesomeness and win.)  And for a good while, it was a good job.  I made reasonably-decent money for an entry-level systems guy, and I really liked my boss a lot.  That said, the higher-up management was a bit more difficult.  The director tended to run hot and cold, and the management immediately beneath him tended to run more cold than hot (especially the HR director.)

Before I continue, it’s important to explain a little bit about libraries and librarianship.  A “librarian” is not “someone who works at a library.”  ”Librarian” is a professional designation for someone who has received a master’s degree in library or information science, and who uses that degree professionally in the context of a library.  Like many other professions, librarianship tends to be specialized: there’s a required core curriculum, but most library students will specialize in certain areas, such as reference, cataloging, e-resources, systems, etc.  The different areas are specialized enough that while a reference librarian has some understanding of what cataloging is all about, there’s still a steep learning curve when it comes to actually doing it (a very experienced cataloging librarian once told me it took him about 5 years of cataloging work before he felt comfortable with it.)

Anyway, this particular library director had this idea that people tended to stagnate in their jobs after 5 years of doing the same thing.  As a result, he had a requirement that his area coordinators would rotate positions every 5 years (never mind that he’s been director since the 1980s.)  This, of course, meant that coordinators had to understand every aspect of library service, but it also meant that you had people who were specialized in technical services overseeing public services and vice-versa.  Not ideal, but mostly manageable.

Then he got the brilliant idea to extend that to everyone. Librarians were first, but it was clear he wanted to rotate the entire staff (with a few exceptions, and I’m pretty sure I was one of them.)  He wanted to put catalogers in public services and public services librarians in cataloging and shuffle different crews into Audio-Visual and Children’s.  Without going into too much detail, most tech services librarians are there because they’re not interested in dealing with the public, and many public services librarians are there because it takes a certain temperament to deal with technical services.  And, as I mentioned before, there’s a certain (long) learning curve when adapting to the different areas.  Not everyone has the right disposition to deal with kids.  Not everyone has the right feel for a contemporary A-V department.  You get the picture.

The director implemented these changes with very little warning and hit immediate resistance, particularly after making it very clear that these changes were non-negotiable.  The reaction was swift and strong.  Several very experienced librarians opted to take early retirement instead of being forced into a long commute to a branch not near them or taking a job in a department they had no interest in working.  The librarian responsible for local history and genealogy, a fixture in the local genealogical societies (and frankly, one of the best specialist librarians I know if you want to research your family) took retirement and effectively gutted what had been a very strong department.  There was public backlash as well, as people were losing “their” librarians for reasons nobody understood.

Other factors were also in play at this time: staff were being subjected to rigorous searches of personal belongings upon entering and exiting the library because a lot of material was walking off.  In fact, staff were subject to more rigorous searches than patrons were, even though there was conclusive evidence that some patrons were stealing material.  It was easier to treat staff as thieves.  Staff were getting low pay raises (1-2% per year, none if you were at the top of your range) while the director was getting an annual 5% raise.  And there were some very serious issues with the HR director, who seemed to think it was her job to crack down on employees as hard as she possibly could (seriously, the woman did not have an ounce of compassion in her body.  I once put in for funeral leave for my great grandfather, and she essentially said, “too bad, if you want to go, you’ll have to use vacation time.”  The director, to his credit, overruled her and gave me bereavement time.)  This combination of factors led some librarians to lead an effort to organize.

The librarian leading the effort contacted AFSCME and began the process of recruiting would-be members to the cause.  I got on board because I saw out-of-control management that was changing rules on the fly and was not responsive to reasonable requests by the staff.  It wasn’t about money, it was about basic working conditions and forcing management to give staff some consideration.  We knew it was going to be an uphill battle.  Librarians don’t like making waves, and we knew many staff would be in fear for their jobs.  The HR director could be quite petty, and as I mentioned, the director tended to run hot and cold, depending on his mood.  And a union would turn his mood quite sour very quickly.

Meetings with the AFSCME rep were part information, part sales pitch.  We had to be careful not to say the “u-word” at work, and if we did, it was in hushed tones with trusted allies.  Before we could go public with this thing, we had to ensure we had enough of a critical mass of support that the inevitable anti-union propaganda couldn’t kill the effort.  Ultimately, though, the unionization effort felt like we were diving into the maws of one behemoth to save ourselves from another.  It wasn’t comfortable.  On the other hand, the union would have at least been able to force a little bit more humanity into the HR side of the equation: if we were going to be treated as the enemy by the administration, by gum, we’d give them a reason for it!

So what happened?  Well, in the middle of organization effort, before we went “public”, I learned of a position at another library that meshed well with my skill set, and I ultimately got the job.  As a result, I more or less disassociated myself with the unionization effort, since I wasn’t an interested party any more.  From what I heard later, the administration had an inkling something was up and took a strong anti-union posture, which included some concessions.  From what I could gather, several people left around the time I did, and the administration backed down on some of the more grievous policies.  I don’t know if the unionization effort ever went to a vote, but it ultimately failed.  At the same time, by all accounts, the director was really scared.  The effort to unionize was organized and coordinated and had more than token following.  In the end, he won, but he didn’t get everything he wanted, and the staff got some of what they wanted.