240 library employees, around a quarter of the workforce, have lost their jobs at the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires, in a move criticised by free speech organisations

Mass lay-offs at the national library in Argentina, where 240 employees lost their jobs last week, have been slammed by intellectuals and free speech organisations.

The cuts at the Biblioteca Nacional, once run by Jorge Luis Borges, were announced last Tuesday to “tears and cries of outrage”, according to a report in La Nacion, which said that staff had been phoned by authorities throughout the day to be given the news, which caused “fainting and nervous breakdowns”. They stem from new president Mauricio Macri’s government, which has already fired thousands of public sector workers as part of cost-cutting measures.

The job cuts amount to around a quarter of the library’s staff, according to the Buenos Aires Herald. The cuts were blamed by ministry of culture on the “disproportionate growth” in the number of employees at the library under its last director Horacio González, said La Nacion. According to a statement, in 2005 there were 306 workers at the library, compared to 1,048 now.

But María Pia López, ex-director of the Museum of Books and Language at the National Library, said the increase in staff related to the expansion in the library’s operations, including the creation of a digital library and a book museum. “The lay-offs affect the operations and in some cases, make them impossible,” she said.

López said that on Monday, police surrounded the library to prevent protests by laid-off workers. The library’s acting director Elsa Barber has been denounced by her colleagues, said López, and Alberto Manguel, the internationally renowned writer who is due to take up a position as director of the library in July, “is remaining silent about these sombre events”.

According to López, a group of library workers are planning negotiations to try to reinstate the dismissed employees. The Buenos Aires Herald reported that unions were beginning talks on behalf of the workers this week.

The Argentinian government issued a statement saying that the library’s staff had grown “disproportionately” under the tenure of the previous library director, Horacio González, “until it reached the current 1,048”. The government said a “big number of irregularities recorded in ‘recruitment/hiring documents’” had also driven the decision, saying an investigation had detected 50 cases of staff “who got remunerated without attending the Library or carrying out any kind of [working] timetable there.”

Samantha Schnee, chair of English PEN’s writers in translation committee, called for the cuts to be reassessed. “Argentina’s most renowned man of letters, Jorge Luis Borges, once said, ‘I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library’. In a more mundane sense, libraries are the repositories of humankind’s knowledge. Therefore it is both alarming and disturbing that many of the custodians of this knowledge at Argentina’s National Library in Buenos Aires have been summarily dismissed,” she said. “The Argentine authorities should reconsider their decision.”

The Centro PEN Argentina said that it “urges that a case-by-case examination be made of the firings of personnel that includes veteran researchers, technical experts in digitisation and microfilm, doctors of philosophy, arts, history.

The PEN centre said that the local community of scholars, readers and library users had been “alarmed and mobilised” by the news of the lay-offs. Writers and intellectuals including Beatriz Sarlo, Luisa Valenzuela, Ricardo Piglia, Andrea Giunta and Néstor García Canclini signed a paid advertisement demanding that the library be preserved “as a space of pluralism and freedom of expression”, and that the executive proceed “with due precaution”, reported the Buenos Aires Herald.