So my tweets about Woburn have been a little disjointed but I want to stitch together what I know (or what I can share at this point).

tl;dr - Library director w/a history of shadiness is trying to lay off all employees except for a person she created a job for & one other. 1/

Before coming to Woburn, Bonnie Roalsen (BR), a 2007 Mover & Shaker , was director at another Boston-area library, Dedham. I don't know all details but staff filed many grievances about her & there were threats of a civil suit. All accounts are she was universally loathed... 2/

...except by Dedham's board of trustees, who don't exactly seem pro-staff themselves. I'm beginning to look through Dedham trustees minutes & immediately seeing fun stuff like staff being silenced at meetings & the police being called on staff members. 3/ https://www.dedham-ma.gov/government/board-of-library-trustees/minutes-archive/-folder-1684

At any rate, none of that prevented BR from getting the Woburn job. Once she got there, she created a new assistant director-level job for a guy named John Walsh (JW) who worked with her in Dedham. Interesting, as the rest of the staff there loathed her. What's their deal? 4/

Another fun fact about that is there was an existing assistant director who'd been with the library since 2016, Rebecca Meehan, who appears to make $13K less a year than JW. I was the asst. director for tech at another area library. I did not make $13K more than the other AD. 5/

OK, weird nepotism going on - big deal, right? Well, that's not all, folks!!!

At both Dedham and Woburn, both circulation desks were uprooted and thrown in the trash with zero warning to staff. Woburn's was a brand-new ADA-compliant desk installed in their recent reno. 6/

Now where I come from, we call that destruction of municipal property. But it's also a giant fuck-you to staff. Do you need a place for your computer and your stuff and your work process? Nah, self-checkouts can do all of that. And why would we wait for *scoffs* staff buy-in? 7/

Folks at Dedham and Woburn have both said BR and JW want to replace staff with machines, but that's not the only thing they're replacing them with.

For some amount of time during the covid building closure, they've been using **volunteers** to do home delivery of books. 8/

The volunteer group is a well-known org in Woburn that helps provide opportunities for at-risk youth. When they found out they were doing this work *instead* of staff, they said no thanks. Love to destroy long-standing community partnerships by violating union agreements! 9/

The announcement of the layoffs of all staff, except for the library's archivist and--shocker--JW came this month, even though the city approved all library salaries in the budget. This appears to be in collusion with Mayor Galvin, who is all too happy to have the money back. 10/

Since this was announced, there has been a very interestingly-timed flouting of open meeting laws. Trustees minutes have been slow to be released and there were multiple complaints. Also, the password for the June Zoom was just...suddenly missing on the final agenda somehow! 11/

The one good thing about this is residents are EXTREMELY pissed and they're trying to put the pressure on. If you're on FB, consider joining them in solidarity in their "Support Woburn Librarians" group. Here they are protesting last week. 12/

There is SO much more, and I'm really hoping that media attention and/or lawsuits will unseat BR & JW and stop their unholy alliance (seriously, what is going on there?). We do not want people like this to be in library leadership. They'll keep this up until they're stopped. 13/

ACTION: Contact Library Director Bonnie Roalsen at [email protected] & Mayor Scott Galvin at [email protected]. Join the "Support Woburn Librarians" FB group to learn more & show solidarity.

We can stop this. Let's put the pressure on. #ProtectLibraryWorkers 14/14