Another example from real life that the world has gone mad

[Minty]

Yesterday I encountered someone I knew for years as one of our local librarians (I visit about four or five libraries, so have got to know quite a few of them) for the first time in a long time. It turned out she was retired. At first I thought it must have been through illness, she was far too young.

No - she was pulled in by her bosses (the local council leisure department) and told they were "doing away with her Grade" (salary grade, that is), so she had a choice, either take a grade step down (or rather three steps down, as it was three steps that were being done away with!) or take voluntary early retirement - at the age of 49! All of those cleared out had one thing in common, they had librarianship qualifications.

It had to be voluntary retirement for the simple sake of paying the bills (that's how bad the downstep was going to be for her) as part of the deal was honouring what wage she would have got until she was 60 as part of the final pension pot. But as she put it, the same council saying they have to cut back on services & "it's all the government's fault" are paying a large chunk of people who were in work & wanted to work to sit at home & do nothing. "Here, have a pension, that takes into account 11 years of work you never did!"

Why have they done this? It's because they're moving library services towards the day they are staffed by volunteers, as happens in some parts of the USA where all they have to pay for is 3rd party liability, and Chartered librarians or anyone with librarianship qualifications stands in their way.

A couple of people resisted, taking the downgrade because they'd not as much to lose (the lowest of the bandings) or out of principle, & are trying to fight it, but they've no chance. The council shut the second most used library in the district a few years back to turn it into an advice centre no one uses but gave some councillor's husband & daughter a cushy wee number.

Give about ten years, & the libraries in my area will be manned by the disinterested forced into it by their local Social Security office for work-experience or busy-bodies wanting to censor what books are allowed in stock (as happened when they allowed them onto local school boards & the first thing they demanded was clearing all the "filth" from the school libraries' shelves). Paid staff with decades of experience will be history. I don't like it one little bit.