How Do We Begin?

Frontline workers in public libraries and the need for workplace safety

Workplace safety has become a critical issue in public libraries in the last several years. Most libraries, rural or urban, have experienced overdoses, patrons in crisis, and violence. Sometimes we are witness to violence between patrons; other times that violence is perpetrated towards us, either through verbal harassment, sexual harassment, gender-based violence, racialized comments, or physical violence or the threat of physical violence. The increase is a result of many social issues:  reduction or loss of  government  funding to resources, increased barriers to access to basic social supports, cuts to funding for mental health supports, increase in housing costs and the cost of living, and the drug poisoning crisis. While media can often focus on extreme cases involving death or serious bodily harm, the frequency of lower-level incidents contributes to burn out and psychological impacts on public-facing library workers. As our public spaces become more inaccessible and more people need access to safe spaces to spend the day, access critical infrastructure like computers or the internet, public libraries have become the last resource for many people. 

Unfortunately, we do not have a good picture of what our day-to-day experience looks like. While many of us have experienced some form of violence or harassment, and while the news often reports on the most extreme of events, we don’t have statistical data on what workplace violence and harassment looks like for frontline workers in public libraries. Some news  reports have generalized statistics, these do not tell us what those incidents are. There is no consistent reporting method, and every library system—and sometimes every branch within that system—reports incidents differently. Asking someone to leave because of intoxication is not the same as having security escort an aggressive patron out of the library.

Some of the responses to the increase in incidents have been to offer social supports like settlement and housing workers, social workers, and health nurses. However, the most common response is to introduce or increase surveillance of public space, whether through cameras or security personnel or metal detectors. While the latter is seen as economically effective—the security industry is an unregulated industry and offers poorly paid and precarious jobs—security should be a last measure, and can often escalate incidents rather than resolve them. Regardless, arrests in public libraries are more common in many urban systems. 

Social supports—health nurses, opioid overdose response teams, social workers—help frontline workers in public libraries provide well-trained support to folks in crisis. But not all systems have these kinds of supports, and the systems that do often fund only a few positions based out of limited locations. This leaves frontline workers in other locations and workers whose shift falls  outside of support hours to handle patrons with complex needs which they are not trained to address. The emotional labour required to provide frontline service impacts workers, especially when the changes to their roles have been largely overlooked by their employers, or when their employers are equally unqualified  to address the societal changes that impact public library work. Added to this, many library systems are trying to do more with less—i.e. frontline workers are expected to do more without additional staffing. This gradually wears frontline workers down and compromises even the most well-trained worker’s ability to address a patron in crisis. As Audrey discusses in her article about the emergency state, our patrons are in crisis but, more and more, so are we. 

For libraries who are only beginning to grapple with serving marginalized populations in precarious situations, tools such as the Canadian Urban Libraries Council’s Library Safety Toolkit might be helpful. But, as CUPE has pointed out, this toolkit is very much an amalgamation of pre-existing precautions, and does little to address the social toll on workers from interacting with precarious individuals. As they say in their critique, “working group members didn’t look for new actions libraries could undertake since existing measures haven’t been able to stem the rate and severity of incidents involving violence and harassment”. Additionally, CUPE has criticized the toolkit for neither consulting with nor meaningfully incorporating the experiences of frontline workers, resulting in a toolkit that does not address the issues that public-facing library workers are experiencing. 

CUPE has begun to do the work that is needed in the field of public library service. In 2023, CUPE released the report Turning the Page: Library Workplace Violence and Harassment Survey Report which focuses on workplace violence and harassment in public libraries in Saskatchewan. In 2025 they released Protecting the Workers Who Keep B.C.’s Libraries Safe for Everyone, a report on worker safety in public libraries in British Columbia. They have published collective agreement language for unions to use when bargaining for better workplace safety for their members, as well as a number of tools focussing on mental health and psychological health and safety at work. They have also published guidelines on conducting psychosocial hazard surveys in the workplace—whether in cooperation with the employer or not. 

In the United States, Urban Librarians Unite conducted a study on public library workers in urban centres and their experiences of trauma. The report, the Urban Library Trauma Study, was released in 2022 and includes recommendations on addressing trauma in library work. One of the outcomes was to develop a Library Worker Support Network with multiple support groups to address particular worker identities, including general, rural, management, and queer, and Black library workers. 

The library and information field is not short on recommendations. The Public Library Association’s blog (a division of the American Library Associations), Public Library Online, has published several articles including Protecting Library Workers: The ongoing battle of the health and safety of library staff. This article notes that “almost every report [on library safety] suggested that changes needed to occur within library leadership to create a more supportive environment”. But when we are faced with management that is not interested in developing a supportive environment that contributes to a safe workplace, we, as workers, are often left to address these issues alone. When we can’t win the boss to our side, we can look to each other and strengthen our position by working together. While none of these documents provide an answer to solve all problems, they can be places for you and your co-workers to start from. There’s no better place to start from than where we are now. 

In solidarity, 

alissa