Speaker Exploitation at State and National Association Conferences

David Lee King, Meredith Farkas, Michelle Boule, and Dorothea Salo all posted about an issue near and dear to my heart: state library association conferences.  I'm going to add my two cents.

The basic issue is as follows, if you speak for the association:

• If you live in the state and/or are a member of the organization (read: have paid to be a member): You have to pay full conference registration and receive no honorarium or expense reimbursement.
• If you live out of state and/or are not a member of the organization: Your travel expenses are covered and you more likely than not receive an honorarium and free registration (at least for a day).

Not only does this rule apply to state conferences, but ALA's and its associate organization's conferences as well (e.g. If you're a member, you have to pay registration, but if you're not you get comped registration, and so on...).

And I have written about this before (see ALA Not Covering Registration for Its Speakers and More on ALA Not Paying Registration for Its Speakers).  Side note: Many would question why we'd want travel expenses covered for a state conference.  I live in California.  It's a big state.  If the conference is in the South, which it is every other year, I either commit to a 7-9 hour drive each way or pay for airfare...and then there's hotel and so forth as well.  The costs associated with our state conferences here are not low by any means.

As someone who was involved in her state library organization (assembly member for three years, VP of the IT Section for one year, and President of the IT Section for two years), I can say that I tried to bring this issue to the association's attention.  At the very least I wanted us to cover speakers' registration.  The response I got varied in intensity, but was uniform across the board and boiled down to "Well, if we did that, we'd lost money, and we're barely scraping by as it is because membership is so low.  No way!"   There was no way the votes were going to come through to pass something so "revolutionary" when the association's business office people say it will cost the association money.   

ALA Council has discussed this issue too, and decided against it.  It seems, again and again, to boil down to money. 

No one wants to admit that their current set-up is unsustainable.

State associations are really outliving their usefulness.  I wonder, though, if our national associations are not doing the same thing.  It used to be that the only way to network was through the associations.  But that is no longer really true.  So much happens online through listservs, blogs, webinars, etc.  I personally don't feel the necessity to belong to any association in order to "network."  So, what do I get for being a part of an association?

Let's call a spade a spade.  These associations lobby on our libraries' behalf.  So, I pay quite a bit of money for membership to a state or national association that returns nearly no substantial benefits to me (a small discount on conference registration and a quarterly [state] or monthly [national] print publication).  So what does all that money I give them go to?  To lobby on behalf of my employer. 

Yes, I know, without a library, a librarian has no job.  But really--do I have to give up a rather high sum of my already paltry public librarian salary to pay for something that benefits my employer?  Would it not be more cost effective, and more sane, for libraries to get together and pay for state and national lobbyists?  Is it fair to have employees paying for their employers' lobbying?  Does this happen in any other profession, except perhaps teaching and nursing (two other traditionally female-dominated professions)?  Is this idea really that unrealistic?

What's happening is, let's be honest, an exploitation of the speakers. We ask them to spend hours preparing, giving us the only content the conference has other than salesmen lining rows of tables.  We ask them to take time to come to our location.  We ask them to help us better ourselves.  And we reward them by asking them to pay registration and sometimes all of their other costs for the privilege of helping us.  As a past conference organizer and ongoing speaker, I am none too pleased with how things currently are in our library associations. 

Personally, I refuse to speak now at any conference that I wasn't planning on attending anyway, unless they are going to comp my registration and all expenses...and if it's a long talk, I need an honorarium too.  This is not elitism talking, it's practicality.  I am asked to speak about 50 times per year.  I can only accommodate 10 of those or so.   I have to filter the requests somehow, so it may as well be by  whether or not I have to pay buckets of money for the privilege of speaking somewhere. 

Things are very, very wrong.  But as I have learned the hard way in other areas of politics, that doesn't mean they'll change--even if we all agree on their wrongness.

Update: Dorothea Salo has written a well-thought-out proposal for how conferences can handle contracting with speakers.  Could this be the library speaking world's equivalent of A Modest Proposal?