An Under-Valued Asset

When I was a staff briefing last week, one of my colleagues took a great deal of exception to the use of the word "asset" when referring to buildings, but not when referring to staff. This is in the light of a briefing to a department facing cuts of 55% by next April.

Now, of course this is just a matter of semantics. Yes, of course staff are an asset to the employer, or at least they should be. In this instance however, the speaker was referring to the council's Asset Strategy, which specifically refers to council land and property.

However, over the last couple of days, this matter has come to the fore again. Thankfully not yet in my neck of the woods, although this is only a matter of time. Our near neighbours, Birmingham City Council, intend to outsource over 100 jobs to India in a cost cutting strategy. From what I can tell, this is purely because staff costs are too high over here. However, these posts are from the IT teams, which, in local governments generally, pay far below private sector employers in the field. It certainly seems that Birmingham City Council do not see existing staff as a valuable asset.

Then this morning, whilst reading the paper, I came across an article which revealed that Oxford County Council plans to replace professional librarians with volunteers. Now, firstly this beggars the question as to whether the Council is meaning to replace Library Assistants with volunteers, or the postgraduate professionals who are already under valued.

For those of you who may not know, I am a fully qualified librarian, having achieved a postgraduate diploma in Information and Library Studies in 2008. Three years on, I have yet to find a qualified post, and the paraprofessional posts are either disappearing, or wanting more and more for the money. When I speak of the poorly paid librarian, put this into perspective; last month there was a College Librarian post advertised in Worcester asking for less than 13k per annum. This was a full time post and specified that a professional qualification was needed.

If therefore it is the Librarians who are to go, one must ask as to how such poorly paid employees within local government can be replaced by volunteers. Is the state to fund the three years of undergraduate or one year of postgraduate study that would equip them for maintaining a collection? There is a great deal that goes on in those offices behind the Issue Desk, and I'm not sure that Oxfordshire County Council quite realise.

The cynical part of me thinks that maybe they do, and this is their ploy to destroy librarians from within. If they fail themselves, it's not the council who make the cuts. I call it the Eric Pickles mentality.