Safety issues are an ever-present worry for Chicago Public Library staff, and our union, Local 1215, works continually to push the City and CPL leadership to address these issues. Last month, several news outlets, including WGN, approached AFSCME Council 31 with questions about recent safety incidents at Harold Washington Library Center (HWLC). These incidents—including a knife fight and sexual assault of a minor—caused CPL staff significant concern, but they were not particularly novel events for HWLC or for CPL employees throughout the library system.
Local 1215 members and officers spoke to the press with the goal of bringing our staff and patron experiences to the public. As library workers, we understand the importance of stories, and the positions and perspectives from which they’re told. We know Chicagoans love their libraries (ourselves included) and that safe libraries benefit the entire city. Since safety can mean different things to different people, we wanted to make our primary demands clear: full staffing, humane policies (like time off) for workers who have experienced a traumatic event at work, and internal authority and emergency criteria to close library locations following these events. As our members know, the specifics discussed with the press are only part of what we’re fighting for.
We refuse to let our safety concerns become part of a fear-mongering “law and order” political agenda. We are not asking for more police. Over-policing and incarceration are causes of, not solutions to, the endemic violence we face. We need holistic solutions that speak to the underlying causes of instability and violence. We need a fully funded Public Health Department, public mental health clinics, CARES first responders in all police districts, safe and affordable housing for all, and a fully funded library system to ensure we can offer the resources and programming that our patrons need.
Our primary demand continues to be that the City and CPL management fully staff our libraries (including full-time security) for the operational hours we maintain – something we have asked for repeatedly over years. Despite our demands, the library lost 50 positions in the last budget, and the City is considering more cuts. While other security measures have seen some progress, it’s not enough. The installation of systemwide panic buttons, for example, is slated to take three more years – four years since we made the demands outlined in the King Branch letter in May 2024, following an attack there on multiple individuals. We cannot wait three years when library workers and patrons are being attacked now. To paraphrase our union brother, “the heaviest thing a person should leave with from our libraries is a stack of books, not trauma.”
The City and library management need to listen to us and our demands. We do this work, we love our libraries—and we know what the solutions are.
To any CPL patrons reading this statement, let your alderperson know a fully funded library is important to you – and that you support library workers and their safety demands, starting with full staffing.
Local 1215 represents over 1,000 Chicago Public Library workers across the city including librarians, clerks, pages, archivists, exhibits workers, library technicians, and assistive resources workers. By extension, Local 1215 represents its patron base, the 2.5 million residents of the City of Chicago. Local 1215 is an affiliate of AFSCME.
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