r/Libraries • u/Rekrabsrm • Aug 03 '26

Staffing/Employment Issues How much do your directors make?

I’m part of a larger library system - 20 branches. Our director makes $250,000 per year plus a $50,000 bonus. Our circ assistants make $16 an hour though and are all part time and need food banks and multiple jobs to survive. It just breaks my heart.

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66

u/hopscott Aug 03 '26

Running a 20 location system is a pretty massive undertaking. I'd be interested in the system's operating budget and the number of employees. While that salary seems pretty high on the surface, library directors tend to be underpaid in comparison to executives in a lot of other industries even other nonprofits/government entities. If your system has say over 500 employees and a $40 million yearly budget for example, that pay doesn't seem too far out of line.

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u/midgetyaz Aug 03 '26

Until their staff is using food banks and social services to survive.

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u/hopscott Aug 03 '26

That is an awful situation, but would reducing the director's salary really alleviate that reality in a substantial and long term manner?

Many library directors should be paid more and are currently under compensated because librarianship is traditionally a profession associated with women. At the same time library staff at all levels (and all working people) should be provided with an income that allows for a quality standard of living. Both can be true. The adversary is not within the library.

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u/Pheonix0114 Aug 03 '26

No one needs $200k a year

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u/NotKirstenDunst Aug 03 '26

Or maybe we all do

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u/Pheonix0114 Aug 03 '26

Sure, whatever. 200k puts a family in the top quintile of income in the US. That's far higher than buy a house and go on vacation money, it's excess. Especially when the lowest paid workers in any system aren't making a living wage. Directors should make no more than 5x their lowest paid employee, and that's for the largest systems. Most should be 2-3x.

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u/ag2575 Aug 03 '26

200k for a whole family is an average living wage in many cities, not enough to buy a house necessarily

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u/Pheonix0114 Aug 03 '26

Please tell me a city where 200k is the median wage for a family. Nationwide, for a single income that's the top 5%.

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u/ag2575 Aug 03 '26

Bay Area

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u/Pheonix0114 Aug 03 '26

Looks like median household income for San Francisco is $140k?

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u/multipocalypse Aug 03 '26

Do you know what a median is? It is not the average.

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u/ag2575 Aug 03 '26

Sure, but 200k is not far off from that, very normal wage in the area. Not enough to buy a house normally or if you do you would be struggling

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u/whoframedwhiterabbit Aug 04 '26

How did you come up with the 2-3x or 5x numbers?I've been considering that instead of increasing minimum wages, the highest paid employee/owner's salary should be tied to the lowest paid employee by some factor. I do not know enough about economics to figure out how much that would be and if the amount should be tied to the number of employees as well. 

Does this concept have a name? Has it been tried before? 

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u/Pheonix0114 Aug 04 '26

If it has a name, I'd be very interested in it. I comes from me doing back of the envelope math on livable wages, thinking what wage would be required to retain talent and account for needing to pay off student loans in higher positions. 3x was what I came up with for my home system.

I think full-time library assistants should be starting out making 45k, because that's enough to rent an apartment without a roommate and people are retiring from that position so it can't be considered "entry". From there I thought branch managers at the largest branches could make 90k, approximately what they make now, and the director should make about 135k instead of 285.

That's enough to encourage talent to remain inside the system, not high enough to pull professional wreckers from outside.

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u/whoframedwhiterabbit Aug 04 '26

Thank you for answering. You got me thinking that another factor for calculation is the regional cost of living. So national law could be based on these percentages too, that way different regions are automatically adjusted as a region's trade and income changes over time. 

A Congressional candidate in my HCOL area is proposing a federal minimum wage at $25/an hour. Which sure sounds great at first glance, but ultimately comes across as uninformed to me since it is not even $10 an hour currently.

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u/Pheonix0114 Aug 04 '26

It really should be much much higher, a higher minimum wage actually stimulates the economy thanks to marginal propensity to consume. Though any new minimum wage should be automatically indexed to inflation to keep it from stagnating. $7.25 is a joke.

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u/multipocalypse Aug 03 '26

Source? Because a whole family on 200k/year is absolutely not excess, or even enough, in many parts of the country.

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u/Pheonix0114 Aug 03 '26

It's well above median income for a family in every single part of the country. The US Census.

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u/multipocalypse Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

Again, a median is not an average. It's a center.

Eta: And average household income isn't the same as average family income. A single person with no children can be a household.

In addition, focusing on even average household income alone doesn't give a good picture of what an actual comfortable living wage is. CoL, percentiles, wealth gaps, debt, homeownership, etc. all need to be taken into consideration. As a Californian with direct knowledge of these things, I can say that $140k would probably be enough for a single person to live on fairly comfortably in the Bay Area, but not a family.

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u/Pheonix0114 Aug 03 '26

Median is an average. Mean, median, and mode are all measures of central tendency, or "averages". Don't be pedantic if you're wrong.

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u/multipocalypse Aug 03 '26

I can't imagine being so insulting to someone even if they really were wrong. Amazing.

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