CAUT has compiled data from its Librarian Salary and Academic Status Survey and released the results to its member associations.

“I realize not everyone is going to fall off their chairs when they hear the news,” says Carla Graebner, a Simon Fraser University librarian and chair of CAUT’s Librarians’ and Archivists’ Committee. “But the salary and benefit data the survey contains is massively important.”

Data from the survey provides critical support for negotiating teams bargaining new collective agreements. The numbers also expose long-term trends at campuses across Canada, highlighting issues that academic associations need to address.

The survey confirms the explosion over the last decade in student enrolment, traces the dramatic growth in contract academic staff, and illustrates the failure of institutions to maintain the necessary complement of regular academic staff.

The findings also show salaries that vary with gender. “We know librarianship is a female-dominated profession,” adds Graebner. “What the survey also demonstrates is a salary differential favouring male academic librarians that cannot be explained by factors such as years of service and age cohort alone. The study’s reach enables us to identify, analyze, and respond to a whole range of issues from workload concerns to pay equity.”

The survey has been conducted every two years since 1980 and, in addition to salary and benefit numbers, also contains a wealth of information about rank classifications, appointment and promotion criteria, and job descriptions of academic and professional librarians working in Canadian universities and colleges where there are CAUT-affiliated member associations.

“The government’s decision to shut down Statistics Canada’s work on the university and college academic staff survey left a big hole,” says CAUT executive director David Robinson “This makes our librarian survey more important than ever in providing the evidence we need to advocate in our members’ interests and for the public good.”

Academic staff associations and library administrators at 68 public and non-profit religious universities were sent the survey, and 61 sets of responses were received or otherwise compiled, an overall response rate of 90 per cent.