There’s an Amazon-like corporation trying to take over public libraries
After tons of backlash on social media, Forbes has deleted an op-ed by an economist who argued that public libraries should be replaced by Amazon. The argument was so absurd that whoever runs the San Francisco Public Library’s Twitter dismissed it with a joke: “Maybe @Forbes doesn’t like that you can download their magazine free with your #SF library card.”
Yet the argument isn’t as far-fetched as you might think. Public libraries across the country are dealing with their own sort of Amazon, a growing corporation slowly gulping up competition while being run by Jeff Bezos-like wealthy investors.
With 82 branches across six states, Library Systems & Services (LS&S) is the country’s third-largest library system, smaller than only Chicago and New York City. It pitches itself to towns and counties by making many of the same arguments in the op-ed. That libraries aren’t “innovative” enough without the corporation’s management and “social entrepreneurship.” That it can help libraries become a “third place” between work and home — as if they weren’t already just that for many poor and working people.
Like Amazon, LS&S slashes employee pay and benefits to turn a profit while shrouding its dealings in secrecy. Last year, it was hit with nearly $70,000 in penalties for wage and hour violations. In 2016, an audit of one of its libraries in Oregon revealed that 28 percent of the public money paid to the corporation was filed under the ominous category of “other,” unknown even to public officials.
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Fortunately, communities often resist LS&S coming into town. Just this week, Seminole County, Florida, decided to keep its libraries under public control after residents organized. Earlier this year, leaders in Santa Clarita, California, voted to end the city’s contract after LS&S replaced all 17 of its librarians.
But that’s not stopping the corporation, which is owned by a private equity firm, from preying on communities struggling for revenue in the low tax era of austerity.
Just in the last few months, LS&S has targeted communities from New England to Texas. It recently promised Ledyard, Connecticut, that it would provide innovative services without adding costs, which the president of the Connecticut Library Association says doesn’t add up. “Everything that they’re talking about is standard practice,” she said. It’s obvious that what LS&S is selling are trendy buzzwords and a roundabout way to cut labor costs for elected officials unwilling to raise taxes on those that can afford them.
I actually wish Forbes hadn’t deleted the op-ed. It’s a monument to the era we’re living in, when somehow it’s common sense that a democratically elected government is less trustworthy than a corporation owned by the world’s richest person — a man with as much wealth as the poorest 160 million Americans.
The fact that an economist thought he could make such an argument in a mainstream publication is chilling. But, that public outcry easily dismissed him gives me hope.
Jeremy Mohler is a writer and communications strategist for In the Public Interest, a nonprofit that advocates for the democratic control of public goods and services. He’d love to hear from you: jmohler@inthepublicinterest.org
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