I’ve worked at Middlebury as a staff member for more than five years now as a member of the Interlibrary Loan Team. I am not a librarian — I don’t have the degree necessary for that title — I just work here behind the circulation desk on Interlibrary Loan (ILL) with the few who survived Workforce Planning and the brunt of the pandemic. We’re a motley lot who do our best to get students the information and resources they need, but sometimes it feels like we’re hiding the extent of the damage understaffing is causing in some misguided attempt to succeed at our work.
I, like so many workers who remain, am from a working class (ie: redneck) Vermont family. I was raised to brag about how much work I could pull in a week, to value the hustle above all else. Vacations are for the weak, especially if you aren’t high enough on the food chain to get paid time off. Or, better yet, if you’re in one of the departments in which you can’t choose when you get time off, but instead have to bend to the will of your supervisors.
I’m one of the lucky ones who have some support. My immediate boss is awesome, as is hers. Still, every time I take time off I wonder: who has to suffer for it? Who’s going to have to do my work on top of their own while I’m away? And what about the departments that are down to one person? Who covers their time away when they’re the only person left?
The cracks are definitely starting to show. In 2021, a single staff member transferred out of their position in mailing services and the absence of anyone in that position brought our entire department at the library to a standstill for nearly a week. I’m willing to bet we weren’t the only ones affected.
The college has gone so understaffed for so long that it’s honestly amazing that anything on this campus functions at all. We’ve had people out for surgery, for serious months-long illness, for family emergencies, even, and no one was brought in to help make up for their absences over weeks or months. The work is just dumped onto the next available employee without so much as a gesture of increased compensation, adding even further to their already absurd workload. It’s no wonder people are leaving hand over fist for better prospects, just for their position to be quietly eliminated with no hope of replacing them.
And that’s where it comes down to work performance. We want to excel at what we do. We try to cover for each other, to make things work to the best of our abilities, but it feels like we’re covering for mistakes we are not responsible for. The more we hustle and pitch in for our neighboring departments, the more the higher-ups can look down from their ivory towers and see nothing wrong. When we call for them to increase wages, to give us more help, they look over and say, “See, they’re doing fine. They don’t need any help,” and assume that we’re exaggerating our distress.
With as much inter-class distrust as there is on this campus, if these gaps aren’t blatantly visible to the administrators, they will continue to ignore them. But how do you make that point without sacrificing your work performance and getting yourself fired? Or making student life even more stressful than it currently is? We are exhausted and burnt out and no matter how much we plead for help, it never seems to come.
Here’s where I should make a call for increased staffing and compensation. But that’s not news — we’ve been pleading for it for years now. My question is simply: what would you do in our place?
Kat Cyr ’11 is an Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Associate.
