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Jennifer Aniston's $50K Hairstyle vs. Librarian Pensions
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Ramin Talaie, Bloomberg News / Landov
So it’s come to this: New York paparazzi are chasing down elderly librarians—and turning them into scapegoats for our collective recession rage. Barbara Goldsmith on how our society rewards the wrong heroes.
OK, an economic tsunami has engulfed us and every day more money, jobs, homes, security, self-esteem, and international power has washed away. In its wake is rage and a need for retribution. It’s hardly surprising that the New York Post has been featuring daily articles on “eye-popping scams” and gigantic financial corruption. But last week, among them was “Fat in the Libraries,” which protested the fact that two senior management employees of the New York Public Library receive annual pensions of $184,498 and $188,846. The subhead read, “Library retirees’ serious ca-sssh” which made one assume that this was hush-hush, and the library was out of line for having set this level of compensation.
In fact, it didn’t. The pensions are mandated by the State Pension Authority and these employees came in under Tier 1 of the New York State Employees' Retirement System, which only applies to those hired before 1972. That means they had worked 37 years or more. The Post also noted that other pensions for New York Public Library retirees ran to $21.6 million for some 1,128 people. Using the Post’s own figures (which they did not break down), a simple calculation comes to $19,000 annually per employee, but that wasn’t the spin they wanted.
There’s little doubt that our society is one that rewards gladiators, stars, fame, and idols, who we worship for a time and then destroy and move on.
Just as they did at Bernie Maldoff’s house, the paparazzi plunked themselves outside the 100th Street apartment house of Mary Conwell, who had been the director of 84 of the NYPL branches. As for Priscilla Southon, who had been the senior vice president for human resources and had dedicated 40 years of her life to the library, she was caught in a quarter-page photograph looking as startled as a deer in the headlights as she trudged home carrying three shopping bags, one from Grace’s Market and two others containing toilet paper and other such sundries. What was she doing in a paper featuring Madonna and A-Rod, Jennifer Aniston’s $50,000-a-week hairdresser (no complaints there), Bernie Madoff, and the scandalous Page Six?
What indeed? And it’s not just the Post that’s salacious. Last week the New York Times, a newspaper whose motto is “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” turned blue with a feature on a swingers' club in Brooklyn, complete with an accompanying online link that gives a 360-degree view (like those you see when looking at upscale real estate) of the sexual cribs, a buffet table, sadomasochistic equipment, coffee urns, and shabby leather chairs.
There’s little doubt that our society is one that rewards gladiators, stars, fame, and idols, who we worship for a time and then destroy and move on. Warren Buffett has been “the Oracle of Omaha” but he’s slipping, Madonna is almost a has-been, but others will soon take their place. Over the years, we’ve come to have a Rabelaisian appetite for this mental junk food. Maybe it’s not good to digest this stuff because it gives us a skewed sense of values and we become subsumed in an unreal world. The line between reality and illusion vanishes. We starve for that which makes us strong.
All this leads to the greater question of why teachers, librarians, scholars, and such—the very people who hold our present and future education and self-worth in their hands—are so undervalued? What kind of legacy are we leaving to our children when the ability to move up in a competitive world is denied them? If two librarians are given enough money to live comfortably (not lavishly) after decades of dedication, why is that a cause for opprobrium? When asked, Ms. Conwell told me that at last she has the time and money to study Spanish, attend art classes and occasionally go to the theater.
The answer, of course, is as complicated as why we go to war, but the Post story does give us a clue. In the readers’ responses, one wrote, “A-Rod sells tickets at an average cost of $60 per game and doesn’t get ANY retirement pay from TAXPAYERS. How many tickets do librarians sell?” The answer is self-evident. What these people give cannot be quantified in dollars. If you are fixated on the power of money, what credit goes to a Mary Cronwell, a trained childrens’ librarian who in her capacity as head of the branches fought a little-observed and unremarked-upon battle at the Schomberg Branch with the drug dealers on the corner and won by keeping the kids occupied with reading and special programs. I know about this because I’ve been a trustee of the library since 1983. Also, I’m convinced that Ms. Southon could have made at least ten times her pension (she’d probably have received a “golden parachute”) if she’d gone to a place like Goldman Sachs.
Vartan Gregorian, a former president of the NYPL, called it “The University of the People,” and libraries are just that and more, particularly now in responding to this economic crisis. The Mid-Manhattan Branch is buzzing with librarians helping people find jobs, write resumes, and learn how to present themselves properly in an interview. Librarians are giving them the same attention they gave a young man named Barack Obama, who found his first job right there through this free service. The library provides free computer and English-language classes, and free links to the Internet. There’s even help in filing your tax return. In the last three months of 2008, 4.5 million New Yorkers used these library facilities.
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citivas
The difference is they are public employees. They are symbols of unreasonable gaps in the public compensation system. No one at the public library should be getting a pension of almost two-hundred thousand a year, just as no one at the post office should be getting their $1M home bought from them by the agency, just as 90-some percent of LIRR employees should not be getting special disability pay, etc. It is apples-to-oranges to compare these excesses to those of celebrities.
My mother was a public school teacher and counselor in California who worked her own way through college (her father didn't believe in higher education for women) to get a Master's Degree, who had 40 years tenure and retired only a decade ago with an annual salary that had topped out after all that time at $60,000 a year. Once she retired her pension became 70% of her $60K salary. She now has to pay for her own medical benefits and is ineligible for Medicare or Social Security. I use here as an example, but the point is a vast majority of the millions of public employees in this country have similar stories. Many worked decades, many were highly educated, and most make less that an executive assistant at a NY finance company with maybe two years experience out of school.
So when the public hears about these loopholes in the system (which seem much more common in the Union-dominated Tri-State area than CA and other parts of the country), yeah it gets them mad. They know stars and athletes make millions and blow through it, but they don't want to hear that their tax dollars are funding excesses in public service compensation. Tenure and service has nothing to do with it...
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afterfour
I think that librarians should make a good living. These people worked a long time, and did what they were supposed to do. Are you going to change the rules now that they have achieved a level of success that is seamed too much for a public servant? I understand that maybe the rules should be changed for future retirees, ok, but the ones that are already there.... That seems kind of shady.
Long live the ladies (and men) of Literacy!!
Hooray for Librarians.
mollymaguire
Eat the rich. Start with Hollywood.
AmiBlue
Why are teachers and librarians devalued? They are women for the most.
AmiBlue
most part
sophia5
Right on Babs, what a revelation.
Scholars are undervalued. DUH !
So are the police and firefighters,
and doctors, and nurses.
By the way there are plenty of lousy teachers
out there who keep their jobs, not based on
skill, but union membership.
Conversely there are the brilliant teachers
who are up against a moronic
culture of people who might
call 911 when they don't get their
chicken nuggets, and these people
are breeding clone like creatures
who enter classrooms with no
moral compass, no common sense,
and no ability to reason.
Why don't you send a letter to
President Obama, and suggest
we put a salary cap on entertainers,
and athletes, in fact we will need a czar to
regulate salaries of all Americans
depending on what Obama deems
appropriate under his developing
socialist model of government.
sophia5
Is it time to put a salary cap on writers / authors / columnists?
Is the writer okay with some "governing" body determining
what she makes in salary, and capping her salary
based on merit ? Based on her contribution to society ?
Based on the length of her new book ?
God Bless Capitalism.
citivas
BTW, I completely agree positions like teachers and librarians are under valued. But justifying exceptional pensions like this is the equivilent of jury nullification in the OJ case--it doesn't solve the underlying problem and just means that a small subset of the profession do well while the rest still don't. I would rather see everyone with 40 years of tenure getting $100K a year than a few getting $185K and others getting $48K.
estcruzer
Barbara got it right. There are better uses for print space in the Post than challenging a couple of librarians pensions. We got bigger problems folks and most of the people causing those problem (versus those who actually contributed to the betterment of America and Americans) make a bunch more than $200k/year and do a lot more damage than any librarian I know of. I wonder what the top Post execs get for the questionable articles they publish? (Librarian vs editor of Post?)
Don'g get derailed by yellow jouralism attacking folks that actually are good for us.
woodnut
sophia5, calm down. Don't obsess. This just ruined your whole day didn't it?
Zugzwang
I have to agree with the first commenter here. I am so totally 100 percent in favor of people opening their eyes and realizing what a service teachers and librarians offer to their country. Capable, talented education professionals absolutely *do* deserve to be paid far more than they typically make.
But come on--nearly $200,000 in annual pension money? That's absurd. Even head librarians, who do pull down $100k salaries, don't deserve a pension like that. Maybe if the NY Public Library system wasn't offering these exorbitant pensions, they wouldn't be in such dire straits:
http://tinyurl.com/dd6zgw
werrit
estcruzer actually read the article and understood its point. You must have had some good teachers and librarians in your upbringing--good critical reading and writing skills on display there.
The rest of you had your attention diverted so easily, and your "Attack!!" reflex so easily whipped into a frenzy--against a couple of literal little old ladies who didn't scam anybody or rip anybody off, or even spend their lives devoted to some supremely useless career! Geez, no wonder Rush is so successful--the sheep are so willingly led.
idrisk
What is next?...close public libraries and burn the books?
timepiece
First of all, recall that there pensions are based on salaries in New York City, where the cost of living is a lot higher than in most of the country. Secondly, these were not exactly simple neighborhood librarians getting an outrageous salary - one was vice-president of human resources (what does that position pay in your company?), and the other was director of 84 of the NYPL branches - essentially, the head of an organization with 84 locations and several hundred employees. That there was another level of management above her is irrelevant; it's still a position requiring a lot of education, experience, and hard work. Again, what would a similar position in any other field pay?
Librarians and teachers alike are NOT getting compensated even what they are worth, so calling out people employed by the library (but not working as librarians) as an example of waste is uncalled for, and gives a false impression.
Thank you.
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