Youth Specialist Finn Gelsimino spends most days at Cooper-Siegel Community Library in Fox Chapel doing just about everything.
He mans the desk, plans and runs programs, works with children, maintains community spaces, pulls titles for patrons — and when he finds the time, shelves books.
Gelsimino said it hasn’t always been this way during the five years he’s worked there. The mounting pressure, though, pushed workers to unionize.
In early 2025, the library reorganized its workflow. Employees began rotating between desks and departments, taking on new responsibilities beyond their original duties.
“I think we didn’t end up realizing what everybody could feasibly do,” Gelsimino said. “Which has been tricky for me because I am very much trained to be a children and teen librarian.”
A lack of administrative transparency, paired with over a year of grappling with short-staffing, wages as low as $13.22 per hour, changing leadership and expanding responsibilities, pushed workers to unionize, by a 13-3 vote, with the United Steelworkers (USW) in late July.
The Cooper-Siegel staff enters the bargaining phase of their first contract amid rising tensions and concerns across the broader library workforce. They join more than 750 library workers across the country — including in Ohio, Illinois and New York — who have organized over the last 12 months as library wages lag way below other sectors and the soaring cost of living.
‘You just can’t ask people to work for $13 an hour’
“The trend is more organization,” said Stephen Laskaris, president of United Library Workers, the bargaining unit of USW that represents workers at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.
CLP became Allegheny County’s first library to unionize in 2019, followed by Penn Hills Library last May. Workers, library leaders and labor experts say the same pressures that drove CLP’s unionization — low wages, short-staffing and a desire for a seat at the table — are pushing new union drives today.
“People believe in the mission of libraries. It’s one of the only places that provides free service at the point of service to the public, where anybody can come in,” Laskaris said. “Libraries sort of exploit that desire that people have to support the mission to get low-wage labor.”
Each of Allegheny County’s 46 independent libraries has its own structure. Laskaris said that library workers occupy a stratified workforce, ranging from low-paid, non-degree-holding positions, to midlevel assistant roles and professional librarian positions that require specialized degrees.
Workers can be grouped into three broader occupational categories — professional librarians, library technicians and library assistants.
“As recently as six years ago, [library assistants] at CLP were paid below $15 an hour, and at some of our countywide libraries, you could see roles for as little as $10 an hour,” he said.
A new contract, ratified last March, ensures that wages for that same position start at $19 an hour, with no role at the library dipping below $15 an hour.
At Cooper-Siegel, some part-time library service assistants are making just $13.22 an hour. According to the organization’s IRS 990 forms, the average annual compensation of an employee in 2025 was $23,791, a figure that encompasses both part-time and full-time wages across 32 workers.
“This is an industry where there are over-educated, underpaid, multiply marginalized people doing what they can to support their fellow community members,” said Dakota Kuhn, a public services associate at Penn Hills.
Workers’ commitment to public service has long sustained the profession despite low wages. But as workers increasingly rely on library jobs to support themselves, low pay has become a growing obstacle to retention.
“After the reorganization, it’s kind of been a generational shift where there are people working here that are working for the money,” said Cameron Smith, a library services assistant at Cooper-Siegel. “You just can’t ask people to work for $13 an hour.”
Four staff members at Cooper-Siegel expressed confidence in unionization strengthening the library’s “long-term institutional stability and workforce longevity.”
“There’s more transparency for management, which I think everybody wants. There’s a lot of balls being juggled as far as what our staff want emphasized,” Smith said. “Library staff had to change a lot in the past 20 years, you know, we’ve gone from card catalogs to computers.”
In a publicly issued statement, Cooper-Siegel management wrote that there are “no immediate changes to operations.”
“We respect the outcome of the election and look forward to bargaining in good faith. As always, we remain committed to serving our community.”
Expanding role, no place for growth
Cooper-Siegel staff are not alone in feeling the squeeze. Library workers across Allegheny County face wages that lag behind state and national benchmarks, even as workplace responsibilities continue to mount.
At Penn Hills Library, a line trails out the door for the community fridge, which serves more than 640 people each month. Patrons gather around the service desk, while staff juggle the responsibilities of keeping the place afloat.
Workers at Penn Hills began organizing with USW following the resignation of their former director. Kuhn said low wages, unaffordable healthcare and limited pathways to full-time employment fueled the union drive.
“I hold two jobs and know many other library workers who do as well. Access to affordable healthcare was also a motivating factor. As a part-time employee, I am paying out of pocket for healthcare and simply cannot afford it,” Kuhn said.
Penn Hills Library and its workers haven’t yet reached agreement on a contract. Whether the growing labor movement will improve workers’ conditions and wages — or give them greater influence amid censorship disputes — remains to be seen.
For workers like KJ Miller, an advocacy and community engagement library assistant at Penn Hills, the movement signals a shift in how workers understand their right to representation in the workplace.
“I think for a long time unions and libraries didn’t seem to make sense together in people’s heads, unless it was at a larger place like Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh with so many different locations, but I see that changing,” Miller said. “I think library workers are beginning to remember that they, too, have the right to representation, and that’s a trend I’m always willing to get behind.”
Educated, ‘vital’ — and underpaid
Though library technicians and assistants are generally not required to have a college degree, data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Statistics suggests that more than half of library technicians and assistants have earned an associate’s degree or higher.
Emily Drabinski, former president of the American Library Association, and associate professor and chair of library and information studies at Queens College in New York, noted that libraries play a “vital role” as one of the only institutions meant to “serve everyone equally.”
“Every kind of social problem, you know, like poverty or organized assaults on immigrant communities — all of that shows up at the front door of your library,” Drabinski said.
Library workers of all stripes typically earn less in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area compared to their counterparts across the county, state and country.
In 2025, librarians and media specialists in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area made about $10,000 less than the national average, and $4,000 less than the state average for their role.
Likewise, library technicians in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area made roughly $2,000 less than the national and state averages. Library assistants in Allegheny County and the Pittsburgh metropolitan bring home $4,000 less than the national average.
Amy Anderson, CEO of the Allegheny County Library Association (ACLA), said declining state funding is part of the problem.
State subsidiaries for public libraries have stagnated over the past two decades. Now, funding has flatlined at $75.47 million — the same amount of aid as in 2001.
“A lot of times that means that we may not be able to pay as much as a Target or a Walmart or a Starbucks, and so the pay is usually not what it should be or what it could be,” Anderson said. “If we can increase our funding or find ways to increase our revenues, that is going to be a big driver for making sure that we are able to pay our staff the way that they should be paid.”
According to 2025 data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, unionized library professionals earned 10% more than their non-union counterparts.
In 2025, 26% of the national library workforce — including librarians, assistants, and technicians — was unionized.
“I don’t think that any employer and any union are going to come to an agreement that jeopardizes the continued existence of the library,” Laskaris said. “Most employers can afford to make hard choices and push more money towards payroll and towards compensation for employees.”
Censorship raises tensions
The union drive extends far beyond Pittsburgh. In Ohio, library workers at the Columbus Metropolitan Library unionized amid concerns over state-level censorship efforts.
In 2025, $25 million was slashed from Ohio’s Public Library Fund. The revised budget also included a provision that would have forced public libraries to move books about sexual orientation out of the view of minors.
Jude Virostko, a queer librarian involved in the unionization process, said the provision raised concern about how the library would protect its community, budget and workers.
“When the time came for us to advocate for our libraries and our communities, I asked management, ‘What is our plan to address this?’ I want to see this place that serves our community funded, but I’m also disturbed at the idea that as a queer person I am inherently inappropriate to be around children,” Virostko said. “I was told that the library did not want to draw attention to that portion of the bill, and that we should not address it publicly in any meaningful way.”
Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed the library restriction provision — a win for librarians — however, Virostko said library leadership’s initial dismissal of staff concerns represented a “turning point” for many workers.
“A lot of people went from being kind of on the fence to realizing, ‘oh, we are the only ones who can advocate for ourselves,’” she said.
Backlash against the LGBT materials in libraries has reverberated locally and nationally.
In June, Monroeville Public Library became embroiled in controversy after members of the municipal council intervened in a Pride Month LGBT book display, pushing for its early removal.
The controversy has raised concerns over whether the library will face retaliatory budget cuts. At a Sept. 28 library board meeting, members discussed the library’s 2027 budget amid concerns about potential reductions to funding and staffing.
“We are hoping that the council recognizes that it would be foolish to cut our budget right now,” said Kelly Meredith, president of the Monroeville Public Library board. “We are hopeful that there won’t be cuts because of all of the public interest in our budget.”
Currently, the municipality spends 3.6% of its budget on the library, down slightly from 2013 despite rising costs.
Any cuts would come at a time when the library is already being asked to do more with fewer resources, workers say.
“There’s no other facility here in Monroeville that sees as much traffic as we do that belongs to the municipality,” said Nicole Henline, director of the library.
In Penn Hills, Kuhn said strong libraries are a counterweight to “people in power who want an uneducated and ill-informed voter base.”
“We’re in an era where the current administration is rolling back workplace protections and erroneously cancelling grants that fund vital programs across the country,” she said. “It is vital that information stewards such as library workers are protected and are paid sufficiently to continue to adequately serve their communities.”
Octavia Liku is an editorial intern at Pittsburgh’s Public Source and can be reached at octavia@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Danny Arensberg.
MOST READ STORIES
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
