Invisible Labor

Your staff de-escalated a crisis this week. They walked someone through a benefits application. They cleaned up a biohazard. They held it together through an interaction that would rattle a social worker. And none of it showed up in your budget request.

There is a fundamental disconnect between what library workers actually do and what gets captured in our metrics, our job descriptions, and our budgets. That disconnect makes libraries harder to fund, harder to staff, and harder to defend.

This session provides library leaders with research-backed strategies for closing that gap. Fobazi Ettarh's research on "vocational awe" explains how framing librarianship as a sacred calling keeps job duties expanding and wages flat. Mary Guy and Meredith Newman's work on emotional labor in public sector jobs reveals why the most demanding skills your staff perform every day don't show up in their pay grades. And Rachel Ivy Clarke's service valuation research at the Syracuse University iSchool offers a practical alternative to the circulation-based metrics that train funders to value your inventory over your workforce.

Together, these frameworks give library leaders the tools to make invisible labor visible — in board reports, in budget requests, and in the language we use to describe and advocate for staff positions.

This is not a wellness presentation. It's about budgets, job descriptions, and the structural reasons your most skilled labor doesn't have a line item.
 

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Library directors, managers, and HR who write board reports, defend budgets, or influence how staff positions are described and classified. If you've ever struggled to explain to a funder why your library needs more than book money — or watched a talented staff member leave because the job outgrew the job description — this session was built for you.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Define invisible labor and vocational awe as structural problems in library operations — and explain how they drive budget vulnerability, staff turnover, and expanding job scope without corresponding compensation.
• Understand why the numbers most libraries put in front of their boards — like circulation stats and materials budgets — accidentally make it easier to cut staff.
• Recognize the pattern by which voluntary staff efforts quietly become mandatory job expectations.
• Apply new tracking categories to your existing systems so your budget requests reflect the skilled labor your staff perform every day.
• Identify the gap between existing job description language and the skilled emotional labor staff actually perform.

The recording and presentation slides will be available to all who register.

CALL Training Partner: Library 2.0

Track: Invisible Labor