Pay Your Interns - OpenLab Workshop
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Why should you pay your museum's interns? Here are some thoughts on that and 9 other simple practices you can adopt at your museum to change your labor practices for the better.
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Pay Your Interns - OpenLab Workshop
- 1. Pay Your F-ing Interns. Elissa Frankle @museums365 OpenLab Workshop December 1, 2015
- 2. Thank you! Alli Hartley Teresa Martinez Nikhil Trivedi Alyssa Greenberg Monica Montgomery Lesley Kadish Sina Bahram #museumworkersspeak #fightfor15 Adrianne Russell Gretchen Jennings Aleia Brown Carol Bossert Matt Adler Liz Ogbu Cait Reizman Jason Alderman #museumsrespondtoferguson
- 6. Value.
- 7. Here’s looking at you, AAM.
- 8. Do you value your objects more than you value your people?
- 9. Floor Roof
- 10. It starts here, today, with all of us.
- 11. 10 simple rules for improving your labor practices.
- 12. 1.What are the legacies of oppression upon which your institution is built?
- 13. 2. By the time you hire, it’s already too late.
- 14. 3. Live your mission at home.
- 15. 4. Listen to your people at all levels.
- 16. 5. Listen to your community. No, really, listen.
- 17. 6. Define your roles.
- 18. 7. What does “entry level” really mean?
- 19. 8. Let’s talk about grad school.
- 20. 9. Ask your doctor if a union is right for you.
- 21. 10. Pay your fucking interns. #museumworkersspeak DC December 14, 6:15-8 pm The Octagon Thank you!
Hinweis der Redaktion
- (Slide: Pay Your F-ing Interns, white text on black background. Elissa Frankle, @museums365, OpenLab Workshop, December 1, 2015, grey text on black) Hi! My name is Elissa Frankle, and I want to make very clear that I am not speaking on behalf of my institution.
- I wanted to put my thank you slide at the beginning because they so often get lost at the end. These ideas aren’t mine. They belong to the community. These are just some of the people and movements who have influenced this talk. Thank you all so much.
- Pay your dues. Museums seem to love this phrase. Pay your dues, we say, to people new to the field. Do an unpaid internship. Work six part-time jobs after grad school. Heck, GO to grad school. Each of these lines adds another barrier to entry into our field. Well, I have a better phrase for you:
- Pay your interns. Consider the amount of good we could do for the future of the world and our field if we open access to the field to classes of people who have not typically been granted access to museum work.
- Historically, unpaid internships disproportionately lock out people of color from entry into the museum world. This means we don’t hire people of color to full-time jobs, and our institutions wind up only telling a white narrative. Paying your interns can be the first step to ending legacies of oppression, tokenism, and appropriation in your museum.
- To me, it comes down to a question of value. Museums publicly express their value through a few standards and documents: what they collect, what they display, what’s in their mission statements, who they hire, and where they spend their money.
- Consider for a minute AAM’s core documents for museum accreditation: a mission statement, a strategic plan, a statement of institutional ethics, a disaster preparedness plan, and a collections policy. All of these documents relate to collections--even the code of ethics--but treatment of staff is nowhere to be found.
- Which all begs the question: do you value your objects more than you value your people? We may say we value diversity, that of course we value our workers, but do our core documents and budgets reflect that fact? Ask yourself this question. Then ask yourself if it makes you uncomfortable. Does it? Change it.
- And if you’re sitting out there thinking “well, the law says it might be okay not to pay your interns in a non-profit,” remember that laws are only the floor of your house, but the floor is not the roof. Is your museum content to build a fabulous floor? Or do you want to build an entire home big enough for everyone?
- Finally, to my fellow DC-area staff members, middle managers, and CEOs, I charge you to think about how we could show the way forward for museums all over the country from the nation’s capital. Let’s work together in 2016 and commit city-wide to paying our interns. Let’s change the world.
- Paid internships are just the beginning. I’m here today to give you nine other actions, questions, and ways of thinking to try out at your institution to improve our labor practices and allow communities that may not have had access to museum work to find a home in museums.
- Step one is admitting you have a problem. At the Museum Computer Network conference, Nikhil Trivedi challenged us to think about how our institutions have benefited from slavery, genocide, colonialism and war. Commit to talking to someone at your institution about your founding and the basis of your collections. How have you benefited from oppression?
- 2. Hiring more diverse staff is more than about the words we use in our job descriptions and the spaces where we advertise our jobs. It begins well before that: with the culture of your institution, with how we create welcoming or unwelcoming spaces. Reflect on the culture of your museum, then sit down with someone at your museum to talk about how you can change it for the better.
- 3. Take a minute and re-read your institution’s mission and values statements. Are you living up to those ideals when it comes to your workers at all levels? How can you be the change you want to see in the world when you hire and in how you treat your workers?
- 4. Listen. Create a safe space for people at all levels--from your volunteers and interns on up--to talk to one another about their needs as workers. Listening means being open to changing: if you ask the question, you need to be able to act on the answer. And “this is how we’ve always done things” isn’t an answer.
- 5. If it’s already too late by the time we hire, then only listening to our workers isn’t sufficient. Go out to the people who aren’t coming to your museum, and find out why. Then, again, fulfill the contract of listening: act on what you’re hearing.
- 6. Before you call something a contract job, think long and hard about why. One of the biggest issues in labor nationwide today is job misclassification: people doing the work of an employee are called contractors--without benefits--or interns--without pay. By creating a contract job, are you making life easier for your workers? Or for you?
- 7. How many of you have advertised a job as entry-level but required 3-5 years of experience? By requiring museum experience for entry-level jobs, we reinforce the pipeline of people who have already had access to museum work. Make your “entry level” jobs truly a point of entry.
- 8. Speaking of pipelines, let’s talk about grad school. Think about the proliferation of graduate programs in museum studies, the number of students pumped out of these programs, and the expense these programs require. Do you really need someone with a master’s degree? Universities won’t get rid of these cash cows. But we can change our behavior instead.
- 9. Ask your doctor is a union is right for you. Side effects may include feelings of being heard, higher wages, less turnover, higher employee engagement, and a more productive workplace. Oh, and take two paid sick days and call me in the morning. :)
- 10. Pay your fucking interns. Let’s create safer, more open workplaces in the year ahead. Let’s open this amazing field to more people of all backgrounds. Let’s live our values in how we treat our workers. Thank you!