Anna Skerrett

A group of 20 librarians voted in support of forming a union at an election two weeks ago.

Last month, Tulane University’s librarians formed a union after an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board.

Tulane has around 50 librarians across several departments who are responsible for facilitating research, curating and overseeing collections and providing academic expertise, according to Katherine Hicks, a scholarly engagement librarian who works with the arts and humanities.

“There’s a lot that goes into librarianship, a lot of work that needs to get done that facilitates the work of an entire university, and yet we are often not thought of in that way,” Hicks said.

“We’re often left out and forgotten, because we’re obviously a much smaller number of people than faculty and students,” said Megan Garton, a senior reference and instruction and electronic services librarian in the law school.

At Tulane, librarians have a unique employment class called “academic status,” meaning they are not considered staff or faculty. Tulane faculty teach and conduct research, while staff handle technical, administrative or support tasks for the university. Staff duties range from maintenance to IT.

“Because we are in this weird third category where we have some academic rights and privileges like the faculty do, but we are still 12 month employees who have regular nine-to-five responsibilities, it’s easy on campus to overlook us and to make policies that affect our job without considering how they will affect us,” Hicks said.

The union aims to secure a contract that specifies and codifies librarians’ statuses, roles, responsibilities, salaries and benefits.

“We have a weird combination of benefits and privileges,” Hicks said. “We’re facing growing concerns that policies were being made without us, and that there wasn’t a lot that was codifying our status and our rights and benefits.”

Garton, who has been at Tulane since 2006, said she saw the need for a union while working toward a raise with new job duties. Garton explained that Tulane librarians do not have specified pay bands like other staff, which set ranges for how much staff will make based on how much time they work. 

Conversations about forming a union have been ongoing since late last year, according to Hicks. 

“I’ve never been part of a union before, or even thought that I would be part of a union,” Garton said. “I’m so excited that we are joining together to tell Tulane that we want to be taken seriously, and they need to listen to our concerns. It’s a great feeling that we’re finally going to be heard.”

After over 80% of eligible Tulane librarians signed cards in support of unionization, the NLRB hosted an election on Aug. 20 where 20 of the 28 eligible librarians voted in favor of forming the union. 

Garton said the election night was “super joyful and exciting.”

“We were pretty confident because we had gotten over 80% of people to sign cards, but we were nervous because they had to turn out to vote as well,” Garton said. “The organizing committee has been working every week to try to keep them engaged. When the vote finally happened, we were just so relieved that we won 20 to five. That was pretty close to the best we could hope for.”

The union is made up of librarians from the Tulane Law Library, the Rudolph Matas Library of Health Sciences, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University Special Collections and Newcomb Archives.

The librarian union is organizing through Tulane Workers United, a union of nontenured track faculty that formed in April 2024.

“We’re using a lot of the same Workers United staff that also work for the nontenure track faculty union,” Hicks said. “We half-jokingly half-seriously called them our union cousins. We are under the same umbrella. We work closely together.”

With the election won, the union can officially start negotiating with the university.

“Depending on how you think about it, it is either the scariest and worst time or the most important time to be coming together and working collectively and taking some power into the hands of workers and ensuring that we have a say in our working conditions, especially in academia right now, especially with the larger political landscape,” Hicks said.