Director Faces “No Confidence” Vote in King County
-- Library Journal, 5/25/2006
When library workers at the King County Library System, Issaquah, WA, voted at the end of 2002 to unionize, a union organizer said that the staff—who already received healthy solid compensation—“want to have a voice in the everyday operations of the library that affect their conditions of employment.” Now those union workers have expressed “no confidence” in the management of longtime director Bill Ptacek, mainly because of a new policy in which libraries are grouped into clusters, and the cluster manager can send workers to any of the branches within it. According to the Seattle Times, 92 percent of the 388 librarians and library assistants who voted expressed no confidence; there are 523 people in the union. Susan Veltfort, president of Washington State Council of County and City Employees Local 1857, charged that Ptacek ignored workers until they filed 30 grievances about the cluster plan. Ptacek told the newspaper that he was concerned, adding, “We've got to do a better job of communicating." He is scheduled to meet with union leaders today. “I think I'm in a listening mode more than anything." Also, last month the president of the Mercer Island Friends of the Library told the library board of trustees that patrons of 19 branches (of 43) had lost confidence in the director.
