The Arts & Labor Working Group

Hi all -

I've been meaning to revive this blog, albeit briefly, to tell you a bit about some of the exciting (I think) new developments unfolding with the Arts & Labor working group, which I thought might pique your interest. The group emerged out of conversations between members of the Arts and Culture working group, as well as an extended group of artists, critics, curators, receptionists, interns, art-handlers, and other art workers. (More on this in a bit; the group clearly needs some arts and culture related diversity!) This message is intended to serve as an introduction and an invitation. Please feel free to pass this on to those you know who may be interested is this discussion.

Disclaimer: While we are affiliated with Occupy Wall Street many of our ideas and plans are long range and will not be bound by the time-frame of the physical occupation of Zuccotti Park.

MISSION STATEMENT:
Arts & Labor is a working group founded in conjunction with the New York General Assembly for #occupywallstreet. We are dedicated to exposing and rectifying economic inequalities and exploitative working conditions within the arts and culture industries through direct action and educational initiatives. By forging coalitions, fighting for fair labor practices, and re-imagining the structures we work within, Arts & Labor aims to build solidarity among art workers and achieve parity for every member of the 99%.

LINKS:
Here is a link to a text from six months ago written by a member of
the working group:

http://dismagazine.com/discussion/16545/open-letter-to-labor-servicing-the-culture-industry/

Here are the minutes from our last meeting:

http://www.nycga.net/groups/arts-and-culture/docs/arts-and-labor-meeting-notes-11-1-11

Here is a link for the Google group started by members of Arts and
Labor:

http://groups.google.com/group/ows-arts-and-labor?hl=en


Our meetings are on Tuesdays at 7:30 at the 60 Wall Street atrium.

Our aim is to address both immediate labor concerns as well as larger issues pertaining to culture and the economy. Please don't hesitate to come to our meeting tomorrow if you'd be interested in sharing some of your experiences and helping us brainstorm ways to approach the issues raised in our statement. I'd love to see some of your there. In particular, I'd love to see some of you who are arts affiliated but who are NOT visual studio artists. Arts & Labor is a self-selecting group, meaning it has thus far attracted a very high proportion of studio artists, one or two admins, a writer, and a revolving cast of filmmakers. The arts is so much more than the visual arts, and I think it would be fruitful for the discussion to include a greater diversity of voices. If you are a performer, a writer, a tech person, an intern, an admin, a curator, a filmmaker, a television maker, a designer, a musician, a dancer, or yes, even a visual artist, I encourage you to come to our meeting tomorrow night at 60 Wall Street and/or participate in the online dialogue. Get ready for some invigorating discourse.

Solidarity!
- Kirsten

Actively Organizing: A Lesson From Canada

Picketers from around the world in front of the Museum of Civilization and War. [via]

Museos all know the pitfalls of passive collecting: while you may end up with some great stuff, your collections will be uneven and incomplete. You might end up with all of one thing and none of another. If you are not continuously searching out the objects which will best further your museum's mission, you might fall into a collecting rut.

It seems that this blog has fallen into that rut. If I had been actively seeking news related to museum workers, wages, unions, and the employment situation, I might have been able to bring this story to your attention much sooner. Instead, I've been passively collecting and sharing links that I've stumbled upon. I've brought you a lot of one thing (links related to the general employment situation for young workers in nonprofits, for example) and none of another (stories about actual museos uniting).

In short, I'm feeling duly chastened. This is a huge story.

Workers at the Museum of Civilization and War in Ottawa Canada have been on strike for just over two months. You can follow news about the strike either on their union website (the museum is a national one, so workers can join the public servants' union) or on their Twitter, @MuseumWorkers. Despite their status as public servants, these workers have no job security, temporary contracts, and severely limited opportunities for advancement. They make significantly less than museum workers at other institutions, and have no protections against their jobs being contracted out. More specifics can be found here.

I don't know much about how these things work in Canada, but currently in the U.S. museos with union protection are either public servants or they work for an institution that has organized under the banner of a large labor union. Museum Educators at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum are trying to unionize under UAW Local 2110, a branch of the United Auto Workers. Museos at the New York Historical Society, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the MoMA can also join this union. I don't want to dilute this entry with an additional topic, but you might notice that even if you can join a union (which most museos cannot, since we are not all public servants or the part of a large and unified workforce at a prominent institution), you are still liable to run up against unfair employment practices: you might still get unfair wages, you might still be denied benefits or job security. Unionization is not a cure-all, but it helps. We actually hear about injustices at these museums because there is a union to publicize them. Unions do not only provide the right to bargain, but they also provide a voice outside of the institution. Other museos do not have that voice.

And what a voice it is. The strike at the Museum of Civilization and War shows us a wonderful example of what collective action in a museum should look like. There is an incredible amount of solidarity on the picket lines, with workers from other museums, other industries, and other countries showing up to express support. Museum programming has continued, with the striking workers arranging an outdoor childrens' museum and a Halloween fair. They have chosen to demonstrate what a valuable service they provide not by denying the public that service, but by continuing to provide it.

So what can you do to help aid the cause of workplace fairness in museums?

• For starters, tell a friend. (Thank you Dan Cull, for blogging about this.)
  
• If you really want to go all out you can head to Canada and join the picket line like the admirable men and women from Pittsburgh and Germany who are pictured above.
  
• If you, like me, find yourself with less money and flex time than that, you can send an email to museum CEO Victor Rabinovitch. Let him know that you believe in equality of opportunity, fair salaries, and a healthy measure of employment protection.
  
• Perhaps most importantly, you can let the workers at the Museum of Civilization and War know that you stand with them. I for one think that they provide an excellent example of how to organize with grace and class, and I hope their demands are met in full.

I'll be following this story closely from now on.

Are Museums Sustainable?

Forgive us if we don't have a cohesive strategy or even a unified blogging "voice" just yet. Right now this blog is a mix of people with a mix of ideas, trying to milk even more ideas and voices from the ether of the Internet. Please make yourself heard in the comments, because so far I've seen interesting points raised here and elsewhere.

The biggest bogeyman facing museums is, as always, a lack of funding. There might be plenty of functions that a museum needs performed, but there is insufficient money to pay the ideal number of people to do it. This leaves museums with three options:

1. Add additional functions to the job descriptions of current employees.
• Plus: Free
• Minus: Overworked employees.
  
2. Have interns or volunteers perform job functions
• Plus: Free
• Minus: Often a lack of consistency due to high turnover
• Minus: Destructive effect on overall museum economy, from a worker's perspective.
• Minus: Is it sustainable? See below.
  
3. Hire someone for the new position, but with a very low starting salary.
• Plus: Inexpensive.
  
• Plus: Qualified individual who can devote full 40 hours a week to the task.:
  
• Minus: Destructive effect on overall museum economy, from a worker's perspective.
• Minus: Hinders, rather than helps, diversity in the museum field. See below.
  

My opinion on this might differ from Kat's, (or Maya's, or Jenna's, or yours) but I think part of the reason to organize is to discourage people from taking the poorly paid posts, because this hurts everyone in the long run. The acceptable "entry level" salary for a major US metropolitan area used to be between $32-36K. Recently there have been a spate of museums that seem to think $20K is now an acceptable entry level salary. And if they are able to find qualified, competent people to work for that rate then they are 100% right.

There are a finite amount of jobs and no, as far as I can see organizing won't fix that. It's not a magical elixir. In fact I don't really see how a museum union could coerce museums to offer decent wages, insurance, etc. As KLandon mentioned in her comment on the last post, forcing museums to pay a certain minimum wage could potentially make the number of employment opportunities shrink, particularly in small museums. I'm not sure we're looking at a typical bargaining organization here, especially with such a wide variety of museum types and sizes and differing regional needs.

What a union (and perhaps I am using the term loosely) can do is raise awareness of various issues that affect museum workers: an advocacy organization. If we value ourselves and our time insufficiently, we can't expect our employers to pay well for our services.

Which brings me to the title of this post: are museums sustainable? I don't mean can the conditions in your object store be maintained for hundreds of years, or whether or not anyone will care about your collection of rubber ducks twenty years from now. I mean the most important resource museums have, their people. Is the way museums handle staffing sustainable in the long-term? If it isn't, museums themselves can't be sustainable institutions.

Pete of New Curator calls the extreme reliance on volunteers in museums "not healthy" and "not sustainable," noting that "Any other model relying this heavily on unpaid labour is normally illegal or doomed to failure. Can you imagine a magazine not paying its writers? Or a television program not paying it’s production team? What kind of quality are we to expect?"

The same can be said for heaping extra responsibilities on extant employees. While I'm sure some bear up admirably under the pressure, burnout is inevitable, especially when extra responsibility isn't compensated.

As for lower salaries, most discussions I've heard seem to come back to the idea that there's no reason to hire people with advanced degrees if they're going to demand these fancy "living wage" salaries. (A reason for unionization if there ever was one.) We can train local people from community colleges instead! Involving people from the community is a good and noble idea. They should be involved in the day to day life of the museum. But what happens when you're offering a $20K/year salary? Who do you think is taking those jobs? Who do you think is doing several years of unpaid volunteer work just to possibly one day get those jobs? It's not the psych major from the local community college, it's a rich kid living on mommy and daddy's dime. This does not contribute to diversity in the museum field.

Sigh. Oh well. Unless the money situation at museums changes, it looks like museums are not sustainable. Damn and blast...

I don't believe this for one second. What's unsustainable are museum employment practices. The question remains: what should we do about it?

I'm sure I've jumped all over the place and left out about a dozen salient points, so please chime in and make those points yourselves!