Can We Talk Together About Museum Work? Soon?

Beercp - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9537466

I took a week off to celebrate Thanksgiving with family, and I'm back to make my annual ask for a museum world work summit. I've asked before. In March 2021, I used this blog to write a letter to Laura Lott and John Dichtl, presidents of AAM and AASLH respectively, but to date, nothing. It's no secret that the world of museum work is a mess, and it's popular to blame it on COVID, but is that the whole answer?

This week I listened to economist Lane Windham on It's Been a Minute. Windham teaches at Georgetown and is is Associate Director of Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor . She argues that we're living through a worker rights revival. Economists also call it the "great resignation," where people left low-wage jobs with no benefits, and then because of COVID, chose not to return, in some cases waiting employers out. But, while COVID may have been the reason to quit low-wage, no-benefit jobs--after all if your crap pay won't cover after-school care and there's no school, why stay?-- Windham suggests their anger dates back to 2018/19 with a wave of strikes when, for example, 500,000 teachers and other workers took to the picket lines. She also points out that many of today's strikers are women, reflecting mass entry of women into the workforce in the 1980s and 90s--women of color at Amazon and nurses at Kaiser Permanente for example--as well as women's interest and leadership in unions.

I acknowledge that I am part of a group of museum folk who use social media to otherwise moan about the world of museum work. I guess crying into the Internet void is soul-soothing in a way, but it doesn't move the needle, which is something I'm increasingly focused on. (When you work with high school students you want to model ways to create change that go beyond emotions.) And there are a lot of us talking and Tweeting about museum work from many different sectors around the globe. What would happen if--for example-- you put Maria Vlachou, Aletheia Whittman, Franklin Vagnone, Monica Montgomery, Porchia Moore, Lonnie Bunch, and Elizabeth Merritt together with Darren Walker (Ford Foundation), Lane Windham (Georgetown) and Amy Costello (NPQ)? What ideas about the future of museum work might come out of a summit like that? What changes might they propose about board training? About leadership training? About the gender wage gap? About DEI training?

The museum work world isn't simply a corporate giant employing massive numbers of worker bees à la Amazon. It's complex. And yes, museums are more like other non-profits than big business, but I would argue, museums are still unique. They mix often hyper-educated folk with wealthy trustees, charged with hiring a single individual to run the organization. Then the trustees step back, re-focusing at regularly scheduled intervals to oversee mission and money, and leaving the director/president to hire/fire and lead teams that may range from a paid staff who could all fit in an SUV, to organizations with workforces as large as small towns. And that's before we incorporate volunteer groups many of whom play an important--although increasingly charged--role in today's museums. If you consider this picture also includes a group of leaders --at the director level and below--who may have had little training, mentoring or experience in actually leading humans, much less in creating policies for a transparent, equitable, empathetic workplace, you have a recipe for disaster i.e. a simmering pot of worker unrest.

Recently some of social media's museum thought leaders have suggested museum directors need to solve these problems. While there are many steps an individual can take to make themselves a better leader, starting with a huge dose of self-awareness to check their own hubris and bias, I think it's probably not an individual director's role to ride into a board meeting with a flaming sword. How many directors need to have their careers crushed on issue of principle? How many self-sacrificing fights between director and staff have to happen? It's almost always the director who loses. How many open positions do there have to be before organizations realize museum directors aren't the board's handmaidens, and that the board/director relationship must be cooperative and collegial?

One last thought: Sometimes you can't solve a problem until you pull it out and examine it. I'm currently using Aletheia Wittman's work on Institutional Genealogy for a project I'm working on. Her work is a clear, critical framework for assessing organizational history, for trying to understand, how your museum or heritage organization got to where it is today. What would happen if you gave that framework to our mythical group above and asked them to look at museum work as a whole, to open all the closets, bring out the skeletons, lift up the rocks, and get out all the dirty laundry so we can understand where we've come, where we might have lost our way, and how to find a more equitable path? Just a thought.

Be well, be kind and do good work.

Joan Baldwin