Hannah Matthews is a former senior library associate and senior library assistant at the Portland Public Library. She is currently the marketing coordinator at Back Cove Books in Woodford’s Corner, Portland. She lives in South Portland with her family.

Before Portland’s City Council voted, on June 1, to approve the city’s annual budget for the next fiscal year, the unionized employees of the Portland Public Library (PPL) and many community supporters went before them with a plea: more funding to the library, in the hopes that library leadership would then agree to pay their workers the livable wage for which they have been pleading.

But it is apparent, after last week’s vote, that those same workers — who collectively keep one of Portland’s most beloved and necessary institutions running every day, at great financial and personal sacrifice to themselves and their families — are being left behind once again.

Despite holding the library’s purse strings by providing 84% of its funding, the city of Portland has declined to allocate enough money to the library to provide reasonable or livable wage increases to its employees.

According to public comment made to the City’s Finance Committee, years of wage stagnation for PPL employees means that unionized wages workers are making less than they were nine years ago when adjusting for inflation. The city has now passed just a 5% increase to the library’s funding, despite the library employees’ union’s request for a larger increase to counteract these years of wage backsliding.

The PPL is a quasi-municipal organization, meaning that it’s not a department of the city of Portland — but the land on which its buildings sit, the buildings themselves, and the majority of its funding are all inextricably tied to the city. As such, the Portland city government plays a tremendous role in the ability of the library’s employees to survive Portland’s cost-of-living crisis.

Yet other than a single City Council appointee on its current 15-member Board of Trustees, the city of Portland remains divorced from the conversations and decisions that affect the well-being of the people who make its own public library run. This month, when the city budget season coincided with contract negotiations for library employees’ new union contract, it was painfully obvious that the buck is continuously passed back and forth between PPL’s Board of Trustees and the Portland City Council.

Members of PPL’s board say they alone cannot provide enough of a wage increase without funding from the City Council, and the City Council is detached enough from the library’s operations and staff that it does not take responsibility for — or have the authority to influence — contract and wage negotiations between the library and its unionized employees, some of whom can no longer afford rent and groceries on their current library wages. 

Contrast this with the city’s generous and repeated stewardship of wages for unionized employees of the Portland Police Department (PPD). Maintaining it as a full-fledged city department, the City Council approved an 18.3% (about $3.7 million) budget increase for the PPD.

According to Portland’s finance director, Brendan O’Connell, a significant portion of that increase is related to wages in the most recent police union contract. The current contract that was approved last year by the city provides cost of living wage increases of 5% each year of the contract for police officers (independent of and on top of other wage increases for length of employment), with sergeants and lieutenants receiving even more — an 8% increase in the first year of the contract.

In the grand scheme of things, the library’s budget is only about 25% of the PPD’s — making the PPL Staff Association’s request for living wages appear even more minimal in comparison to other city budget lines.

Because the city negotiates directly with the PPD’s union and controls the budget, it easily and freely makes fair and reasonable decisions with the police department’s employees in contract negotiations, and increases police department salaries with both frequency and enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, the Library’s Board of Trustees and the city continue to pass the blame and the responsibility back and forth with no end in sight, pointing their fingers at one another, as our public library workers continue to go without adequate wages to live in the community they tirelessly serve. Many PPL staff members are forced to work multiple jobs in order to make ends meet, many rely on food banks and other forms of assistance to survive and many are being priced out of their work — and their homes in Portland — altogether.