Quote Originally Posted by chips and underwear View Post

On-call employees are not protected by a union. I've actually thought about collaborating with my fellow on-call employees and starting one of our own but I would have no clue how to even go about implementing that and what the ramifications would be. We are a significant portion (about 20%) of the employees. We deserve to be more heard than we are.
I agree you should be better heard, and starting a Union would do that, but if you are not good at implementing your ideas independently, you will not be successful at organizing a Union, and management will secretly blackball you for your efforts. Unions generally succeed when there is so much work that management loses too much money through work stoppages and can't easily get new workers at the old price. From what you described, that is not the library system today. (That's why there are public employee unions.)

Quote Originally Posted by chips and underwear View Post
People always say things to me like "your time will come", "never give up". "Eventually you will get that job you want."
Well they've been saying that for years and I've been waiting for years and nothing has happened. It seems like it's getting harder and harder the more experience I have ironically. Kind of like, why are you still doing what you're doing after all this time? I think they look down on my experience and think I must not be very good at what I do if piecing together a bunch of miscellaneous part-time jobs is the best I can get.
That could be true. Certainly, the longer you accept second-class treatment, the more likely it is that people will hand it out to you. I think this is actually the hardest part of getting a better job. Managing your image to be someone they need to hire in order to save their collective and individual asses, that is. I don't have a solution for you, but I know a woman who has worked in a library for many years, and is pretty high up. I'll see if she has any suggestions.