Labor Pains: The 2018 NEMA Conference and the Museum World's Ongoing Wages and Workers Challenges

A labor dispute happening during the recent New England Museum Association (NEMA) Conference illustrates the Museum World's ongoing challenges with workers and wages.

Despite the fact that representatives of Unite Here Local 217 requested that all NEMA Conference attendees honor a boycott and daily picket lines against the Stamford Hilton by not entering the hotel, over 90% of the approximately 900 conference registrants entered the hotel to attend sessions and events.

A small number of NEMA Conference attendees chose to honor the boycott and picket lines by not entering the Hilton and by holding their sessions offsite at either the Local 217 Union Hall, The Bruce Museum, or Franklin Street Works, a local not-for-profit art space. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, almost all of those offsite sessions had a social justice focus, and almost all of those offsite presenters honoring the Hilton boycott were women, people of color, or members of the LGBTQ+ communities.)

Certainly, the decisions that everyone made regarding how to participate (or whether to participate at all) in the NEMA Conference were their own, but museum people being museum people, there was some furious parsing of union and labor terminology and some pretzel logic going on to justify some of those decisions -- which you can rehash for yourself by checking out the #NEMA2018 hashtag on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

[And now for context, a short union terminology sidebar, speaking from my perspective as someone who grew up in Detroit in a union household and in an extended family of union members, including my immigrant grandfather who was fighting with his coworkers against Henry Ford's goons to help start the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.

To boycott an establishment (like the Stamford Hilton) means to withdraw from commercial or social relations with an organization as a punishment or protest.  There doesn't need to be a "strike" a "labor action" or even an active "dispute" or "demonstration."  Union 217 asked all NEMA Conference attendees to boycott the Hilton by canceling their room reservations, and/or by not entering the hotel as a show of support and solidarity.

Picketing is a form of protest in which people congregate outside a place of work or location where an event is taking place. Often, this is done in an attempt to dissuade others from going in, but it can also be done to draw public attention to a cause. Again this can be independent of any formal "strike" or specific "labor action." In this case, Union 217 held daily picket lines outside the Stamford Hilton to urge people not to enter or patronize the hotel.
If you wait 10 minutes after a picket line stops to enter a place of business, or if you look for a side or rear entrance because a picket line is only at the front door, you "technically" did not cross the picket line, but you are also "technically" acting like a weasel.  A picket line serves the same purpose as a boycott in the sense that it is an ongoing request for support and solidarity, whether a picket line completely encircles a building and every entrance 24 hours a day or not. ]

What happened during the 2018 NEMA Conference may be an isolated incident, but it is also reflective of ongoing challenges related to wages and workers in the museum and not-for-profit worlds and how museum workers and museum organizations need to "walk the walk" not just "talk the talk."

Salary transparency is an example of one small way to increase awareness and equity for museum workers. While many national museum organizations like the Association of Children's Museums (ACM) and the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) along with numerous regional, state, and local museum organizations have required that salary ranges be part of every job posting, some other museum organizations (including NEMA) have chosen not to honor this simple requirement asked for by members, including some of their own board members.  (You can find out more about the campaign for museum salary transparency at the National Emerging Museum Professionals Network's website.)


If we want fair pay and better working conditions for ALL workers, including museum workers, and if we want to make museums welcoming places for ALL people, not just a small subset of our communities, how will we ACT when given the chance to show support and solidarity for those ideals? 



Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

P.S. If you receive ExhibiTricks via email (or Facebook or LinkedIn) you will need to click HERE to go to the main ExhibiTricks page to make comments or view multimedia features (like videos!)

Museums and Museum Groups -- STOP COVERING YOUR A*S!

Why don't ALL museum job ads have salary ranges included?  Why don't ALL Museum Groups that host museum job ads require salary ranges be included in those ads?  The museum profession talks a good game concerning gender pay equity, fair pay, and diversifying the museum workforce. But talk, as they say, is cheap.  I expect more, and better, from the museum world than high-minded platitudes, so I want Museums and Museum Groups to:

STOP COVERING YOUR ADS!

Back in October last year, I wrote a blog post over my dismay in finding many (but not all!) museum groups still allowing ads for unpaid internships and job postings without salary ranges to be publicized through their websites and publications. I contacted the leaders of AAM, AAASLH, and NEMA to find out why they are still "covering their ads" and either got no definitive response or got a list of excuses ranging from "not wanting to upset museum members" to the concern that if salary range requirements were instituted, that museums would take their job postings "elsewhere."

I'll state again that I expect more, and better, from the museum world than such weak responses, especially when requiring salary ranges on job postings is such a tiny, tiny difficult step toward resolving pay and diversity inequities in museums, compared to the REALLY HARD steps the museum profession says it wants to take toward a fairer and more representative museum workplace.

The good news is that there are museum organizations that do require that salary ranges be included in museum job ads, and for that, they should be recognized and congratulated. The New York City Museum Educators Roundtable (NYCMER) has such a requirement and the website Museum Jobs (a project of Museum Hack) also requires that every posting includes salary ranges.  Laura Huerta Migus, the Executive Director of the Association of Children's Museums (ACM) is also in the vanguard of museum groups by requiring salary ranges for job ad postings.  Laura was kind enough to share her thoughts with me on this subject and has graciously allowed me to quote her words here:

This is also a best practice that we’ve been adhering to for ACM’s own job postings since 2014. We don’t publish any job announcements without the actual salary range.  This has been a very important strategy, not just from an equity perspective, but also as an employer. In particular, it helps us understand if the job description (including skill requirements) matches the salary and if we need to reconsider the job description and/or minimum required skills. This has happened more than once over the past four years that I have been at ACM. For example, for our communications manager listing, we worked from the existing job description and published the salary and the respondent pool was all over the map, from new college grads to seasoned communications professionals who were seeking to take this position as a contract for their personal business. This wide spectrum of responses told us two things: 1) the salary was not high enough to attract the mid-level professional we were looking for, and 2) the job description did not have the right balance of responsibilities to appeal to the kind of candidate that we needed. So, we took down the job description, rewrote it, adjusted the salary, and reposted. The result is that we got a great (and diverse) candidate pool with the level of experience that we were looking for, and ultimately made a great hire. That said, we do have work to do to sustain a strong staff and be a competitive employer, but it is work we are making progress on for sure!

So why make such a big deal about a (seemingly) small thing like salary ranges on museum job ads?  I'll stop here and refer you to the influential "Nonprofit AF" blog and a post by Vu Le about what he calls "Salary Cloaking." Le outlines many reasons why not posting salary ranges is just plain bad business for non-profits, but let me just pick out a few of his salient points:

• It wastes everyone’s time

• It perpetuates the gender wage gap

• It starts a relationship off on a lack of trust and transparency

I really believe the museum world can do better than this, so I am going to contact (again!) the leaders of the large national museum groups that are lagging behind in requiring that salary ranges be included on museum job ad postings.  I'm going to send them a link to this blog post and ask them (again!) to change their policies and procedures and STOP COVERING THEIR ADS! 

I hope you will take a minute to contact the folks below and the leaders of other museum organizations you are associated with to let them know what you think.


PLEASE EMAIL THESE MUSEUM LEADERS

American Alliance of Museums (AAM):  Laura Lott

American Association for State and Local History (AASLH): John Dichtl

New England Museum Association (NEMA): Dan Yaeger


Let's resolve this one small issue AND start tackling some of those bigger employment issues in the museum world!


Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

P.S. If you receive ExhibiTricks via email (or Facebook or LinkedIn) you will need to click HERE to go to the main ExhibiTricks page to make comments or view multimedia features (like videos!)

Follow the money . . . to museum diversity?

Officials in New York City recently announced a plan that ties funding of cultural institutions to demographic information about staff and board membership in an effort to address ongoing issues of “equity and inclusion.” 

I really hope this plan moves the needle on systemic problems in the museum industry like inadequate salaries and the woeful lack of diversity in staffing and audiences. There has been lots of sincere and well-meaning talk about improvements to museums for over 30 years, but little lasting action.

Because the NYC plan ties improvements to funding, I really believe it has a chance to succeed, since nothing gets the attention of administrators and boards like MONEY!

What do you think?  Have you seen similar plans in action?  Let us know in the "Comments" section at the end of this post.


Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

P.S. If you receive ExhibiTricks via email (or Facebook or LinkedIn) you will need to click HERE to go to the main ExhibiTricks page to make comments or view multimedia features (like videos!)