Taking your personal ethics to your workplace.

Morgan Wilson started it with his discussion of how to reconcile one’s personal ethics with the system and practices that one supports professionally, Living with myself as a law firm librarian . He asks the question that I hope all of us ask about what we are paid to do:

It is important for me to go to work knowing that I am doing good of some sort in the world. At the very least, I don’t want to be causing harm. How are these concerns resolved in the law firm environment?

After a very interesting discussion of the pros and cons, he concludes

I cannot know on a day to day level if my work is causing good or harm in the world. All I know is that without lawyers and law librarians, our complicated legal system would grind to a halt, and that would be a bad thing.

Michelle McLean continued it with her discussion of ethics in public libraries,Personal ethics in the library. She looks at her approach when stock in the library conflicts with her own personal preferences and beliefs, and also at the general ethics of her workplace. She draws an interesting conclusion that I’d agree with:

Library staff can be highly ethical creatures and will do much to serve our users and to protect their interests (including potentially lost property, however insignificant to us). That doesn’t mean we are perfect, maybe its more a case of library work drawing those who are community minded, etc. That’s who we are, both personally and at work.

I’ve run services in both a law library and public libraries. A major reason I left law libraries was the ethics. I worked as a librarian/researcher in a commercial law firm in Perth during the peak of the 1980’s WA Inc. years, when much money was made and much honour lost. It was a totally wacko environment. I was studying law while I was working there, and used to tell myself I was there to “know mine enemy” – to reinforce to myself that my aim to be a feminist based, community lawyer was right for me. It actually totally turned me off continuing law, as I couldn’t bear to have the majority of my professional peers as lawyers.

I was doing research that was “billable”, so clients were charged in units of 6 minutes for my time. When I did tasks that weren’t billable against any client’s file, but lawyers wanted to justify my time, they used to bill it to a tobacco firm that they represented in a case against a dying man. I could never get my head around the ethics of that – on the one hand ripping off the cigarette company softened the ethical dilemma of the fact that the firm worked for them, on the other hand, it was still ripping off a client.

One of the reasons I later worked in public libraries was again the ethics. It really did feel like a “higher calling” – providing necessary services and enhancing the beauty and the utility of people’s lives. I liked it that the aim was to build social capital, and that I was paid because regular citizens ( through their local council ) were prepared to pool their money to provide library services. I worked in community information for a spell, and just reading the phone book for someone, or telling a little old lady where she could get a foam rubber wedge cut to prop her invalid husband’s leg, was probably the most valuable work I’ll do in my career.

Michelle asked about ethics in other libraries, like academic ones where I work. I guess a major part of our ethical dilemmas is around the fact that a proportion of our first years are under 18, so not legally adults. What do we do if in the name of academic freedom and enquiry, we buy an item that is classified as restricted to 18+ . What do we do if our 17 year olds want to attend one of our Second Life workshops, when we know that Second Life is restricted to those over 18? What about serving alcohol at a library based function where 17 year olds may attend?

In an academic library, I don’t feel as though I’m Doing Good, like I did in public libraries, or like I’m Doing Evil like I did in a Legal Library. These days, my personal ethical dilemmas tend to centre around the best use of resources, like staff time. For example, I would be very uncomfortable supporting educational practices that I believe to be unsound and detrimental to students, like a learning technology that makes them disengaged, or is too cumbersome for instructors to use. Or financial resources – like spending a high proportion of a program’s budget on print resources that only the lecturer and one other student will read at all.

These ethical dilemmas, however, are not unique to libraries. Anyone in any workplace can be “back seat boss” and concerned about the way their organisation’s resources are being used. I guess the solution is similar to Morgan’s – when working within an imperfect system one should always try to do one’s best by one’s clients, and hope that the good done by their workplace outweighs what it does in a flawed way. I’d go a little further, however and add in the Serenity Prayer – one should be able to accept the things that cannot be changed, have the courage to change what needs to be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.