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:
- Add additional functions to the job descriptions of current employees.
- Plus: Free
- Minus: Overworked employees.
- 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.
- 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.
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!
