Pay and Grey Areas

26th October 2025,  by Kirsten Elliott

At Fair Library Jobs we’ve had a few jobs brought to our attention recently because they pay badly. While we’ll call out pay that is lower than the Real Living Wage and London Living Wage, it gets more complicated with posts that pay above that - this post will explain some of those complexities, and end with some calls to action for everyone.

Our manifesto states that pay should be at least “relevant sector-specific salary guidance.” By this we mean policies like the School Library Association salary scales. However, there is no up-to-date, comprehensive guidance across the whole library sector. The latest salary survey we are aware of was done in 2019. There is no authoritative guidance on what salaries in libraries should be from CILIP, our professional body, equivalent to those of the Museum Association. The lack of guidance makes it difficult to discern whether pay is in proportion with the level of expertise and experience required, or with the responsibilities the job will involve.

We at FLJ are a small team of volunteers: we do not have the knowledge or resources to produce salary guidance. Obviously there are cases where we can apply our personal expertise or common sense (any job with managerial responsibilities should pay more than entry level wages, for example). However, librarianship is a diverse profession and in some cases we would just be guessing.

Another complexity is how to apply standards to part-time or term-time only jobs, particularly an issue in school libraries. A role which technically pays the living wage per hour but is only 30 weeks a year, for example, is likely to not pay enough to be sustainable on its own and will also be challenging to supplement with an additional role that fits into the school holidays. 

Location is an additional challenge: while jobs in London should undoubtedly pay the London Living Wage to reflect the high costs of living there, other places also have higher than UK average living costs. Is the standard Real Living Wage enough in places like Cambridge or Bristol? The definition of “high cost of living” is complex in itself - in researching for this post I found multiple lists of the most expensive places to live in the UK each with a slightly different set of cities. Different elements of living costs, such as childcare or rent, will matter more to some people than others.

The other elephant in the room is that in many sectors there is a lack of jobs at all, not just well-paying jobs. The UK higher education sector is in crisis, with library workers at lots of institutions at risk of redundancy alongside their colleagues. Public libraries, schools, further education institutions and the NHS are all facing cuts, after years of underfunding and austerity. When low-paying library jobs in heritage sector jobs are shared on social media there is often an outcry - and also a chorus of people saying that they’ll still get applications because it’s the best of what’s out there, and that’s probably true.

None of this makes the labour of library workers in those sectors less valuable. Library workers should still be paid commensurate with their knowledge and experience, reflecting the worth of what they do. It just feels like a nagging email from the Fair Library Jobs team is unlikely to prompt a change in salary scales.  

So, what next? Our advice, as ever following the example of our friends at Fair Museum Jobs, is to join a union. Changes over pay and conditions, and opposition to redundancies, take hard work from within and trade unions are the best way of organising that. Trade unions are their members, and are only as strong and as active as their membership: don’t just join, but get involved, and be as active as you can. 

Show solidarity with worker actions across other sectors. That might mean respecting a picket line, donating to a strike fund, or writing an email to your local council about how brilliant the public library is. From Monday 27th October to 9th November 2025, PCS union members at the British Library will be out on strike over low pay. Jobs at the BL are notoriously low paid and a recent survey of union members found that many staff were struggling to make ends meet. Have a look at the PCS website for details of their rallies and ways to show support, including an e-action that takes less than a minute.

Unions can’t fix every problem and won’t win every dispute, but when they do win they can make a real material difference - Unison members in Lambeth Libraries recently secured victories on pay, redundancies and working conditions after voting to strike and receiving vocal support from authors and illustrators. 

If you’re a CILIP member, please consider raising the issue of pay and advocating for CILIP to produce salary guidance, and start consistently requiring that jobs posted on the Information Professional job board include clear details of pay. As the “voice for the UK’s information profession” CILIP can set standards that we could use to hold employers to account.

At Fair Library Jobs, we’ll keep calling out the worst paid jobs and doing what we can to advocate for library workers. We would love to see librarianship become a profession in which it is possible to progress in terms of salary. We’d love to see the work that library workers do be properly compensated. We want all library workers to be fairly treated at work and in recruitment processes, and we will keep fighting for that, one nagging email at a time.