Campaigners in Cardiff are protesting against the council’s proposal to change library opening times and hiring unpaid volunteers.
Protesters will be staging a read-in protest to oppose council’s proposal to library cuts in the city next Saturday.
The council is planning to staff the library with unpaid volunteers and change the library opening times but this is a huge problem during the cost of living crisis, according to Adam Johannes, a representative for Cardiff People’s Assembly.
“Mums tell me that finding things for young children to do at the weekend can cost a lot, but the library is free, and it’s educational and it feels like a safe space,” says Adam.
“A friend who was homeless told me that the library was one place where he could go and spend time in the warm, read the newspapers and browse books, and use computers and nobody bothered him.”
Cutting library opening hours especially during a cost-of-living crisis has been called a backwards step by the protestors.
“As families struggle to heat their homes due to rising living costs, libraries across the UK are becoming “warm banks” for people who need somewhere to keep warm. Some even provide hot drinks, free clothes, soup, hygiene products and free sanitary products that can be handed out discreetly to combat period poverty,” says Adam.
He says, “Proposals to slash library opening times and recruit more unpaid volunteers is a classic technique. Opening hours are cut, the service is run down, use falls as residents find their local library is not open when they want and does not have what they want, this is then used as an excuse to close libraries.”
Meanwhile, Councillor Lynda Thorne, Cabinet Member for Housing & Communities says, “The Council is facing severe financial pressures in terms of setting its budget and has been consulting on a number of issues to be considered. The proposal consulted on which could affect the Library Service is a reduction in opening hours of our Hubs which also provide the Library Hub.”
“Every effort will be made to mitigate negative impact to our service users. Most of our Hubs/Libraries already operate a 7 o’clock finish one day a week in order to offer flexibility to our customers. There are no plans to change this.”
Since the year 2010, over 1,000 libraries have been shut down and a quarter of professional library staff have lost their jobs. According to the council’s proposal, it will cut library opening times by an extra day per week.“I am very concerned that our city library services are losing the expertise of skilled trained professional librarians and other library staff. When I speak to library workers they often feel that the council just sees them as people behind desks who shuffle books around, rather than social workers with a long-term commitment to community empowerment,” says Adam.
Library workers often play different roles everyday, at times they become a spirit guide to a young child recommending the next story to read or a helper who helps adults with literacy problems to read documents or just a sympathetic person who gives support to homeless people seeking refuge from the cold.
Libraries have the power to empower society. Adam recalls, “Growing up in a low-income family with little opportunities, for me libraries were like an escape pod from my immediate situation, where through reading I could dream of other worlds, other possibilities and other horizons. They made me able to compete with people of superior social status on an equal footing, with no sense of inferiority, knowledge is power!”
There are currently no libraries that are threatened to close but the campaigners fear that often services are cut and run down and then it leads to less people using them, which then is used as an argument in the future to shut them down.
Adam says, “The basis of a true democracy is the library.”
Click here to sign the petition to oppose the library cuts.