Best pay possible in public libraries only for upper positions, extremely poor leadership
Pros
As a librarian with many years of service, my pay is very good and better than can be found in any role I'm qualified for at any other employer (my coworkers' pay as custodians, security, shelvers, and clerks are all extremely bad, very inequitable- not a pro). As a huge system with over 700 employees, staff are able to pressure leadership to make changes (they rarely do make those changes, but they do a lot of apologizing to staff and "committing themselves to doing better"). Many branch teams are cozy and loving like family - I am lucky to be on one of these, but that has not always been the case.
Cons
Clinical psychopaths, pathological liars, high school mean girls are all able to go very far and very high in the organization and if you get in the crosshairs of one of them, you will be blacklisted for your entire career until you get some powerful allies on your side, and even then you will only be safe as long as those allies are around. It's like being in Star Wars or something, with the amount of politics and infighting. The entire Manager layer (Senior Librarian layer's direct supervisors) is comprised of a mixture of psychopaths, racists, bullies, cowards, and people who do a very poor job and are completely disconnected from reality. All decisions are made without input from frontline staff. Pretty much all decisions that are made that affect frontline staff are decisions that unanimously make no sense and are utterly bizarre and usually cause wide ranging suffering for staff and customers. Management works from home. Since they repeatedly hear that they aren't doing well in EDI areas, they attempt to really make this a focus, but repeatedly do not nail it, the efforts being weird and not helping in those areas, and continually ramping up in weirdness and not-helping. As mentioned before, pay for all job classes below the Librarian level are absolutely astounding garbage. For everyone including librarians, the way DERP, the retirement pension is structured, causes almost half of your pay to be withheld. My gross pay is very high, but I'm nearly at poverty line after withholdings. High deductible health insurance with an HSA, where the deductible simply moves higher when you reach it, incentivizes never getting medical care, since it's all out of pocket. Total schedule inflexibility and inability to live in Denver means if you're full time and commute, you will be working, then going to bed, then getting up in the dark and going to work until dark, then going to bed... Management refuses to implement any work life balance for frontline staff and is punishing about it, not coverage related: power trip related. Facilities and technology are lacking and need help, but leadership makes unusual decisions in money allocation. They don't know what's going on, but don't ask what's going on.
