Labor/Valuing-Labor/2019-06-03

DLF WG on Labor in Digital Libraries, Archives and Museums: Valuing Labor Subgroup

Meeting minutes: June 3, 2019

The Maintainers

Facilitator: Jess Farrell

Note-taker: Amy Wickner

Overview of the Maintainers

Started ~5 years ago - Lee & Andy Russell thinking through ideas / but also sort of as a joke re: Walter Isaacson Innovators book

Happy hour → 2 conferences @ Stevens Inst 2016 & 2017 → word of mouth → global interdisciplinary research community

Started out pretty academic (historians, historians of tech, archivists, artists)

2017 conference included practitioner-focused day (community development groups, NGOs, CEOs of companies, activist groups)

Moving into more of a practitioner focus

Recentering cultural attention away from new things to the work maintainers do to keep society going
Quickly moves to labor policy because maintainers are so underpaid

Maintainers in the workforce

Project just getting off the ground - maintainers as prompt to rethink labor policy

United Way - Asset Limited Income-Constrained Employed - 40% of Americans struggle to pay monthly rent & other costs
Divided workforce in to innovator/maintainer/[care?] roles
BLS occupation statistics → divide into innovative/inventor / maintainer roles → 95% of Ohio (first state looked at) are maintainers; holds across all states

Why it’s a compelling framework for information professionals

Got involved starting with first conference, immediately connected with conversations happening there
Interdisciplinary nature of the conference, always some practitioners, conversations between history/theory people & people doing maintenance in their real lives
- From the chat: librarians and archivists talk about the need for interdisciplinarity all the time, not even from a power-building perspective, but from an advocacy perspective, and to just build relationships...and we never actually practice that in our in-person meeting spaces (conferences etc)
- From the chat: Perhaps one reason is that by being truly interdisciplinary others can’t place you in the square peg world, thus we try to ‘fit’ in, when we are mutli-faceted
Hoping to connect people across sectors that were traditionally isolated, information professionals thinking more broadly about who we might build labor power with - janitors, not curators
Connects with thought happening in archives (and sort of libraries) world re: care ethics

Started at 2nd Maintainers conversation (2017)

How to operationalize ideas - LAM people already doing maintenance work but not talking about it

Librarians, archivists, digital preservation people

White paper

Information Maintenance as a Practice of Care
How we think this maintenance framework applies to the world of information maintainers
Releasing to the broader world pretty soon

Maintainers III coming up in October, Washington, DC

How did this group come together? (DLF Labor WG, all info is on wiki)

To what extent have Maintainers used the Valuing Labor research agenda? How do they connect?

Yes - looked at both research agenda & guidelines for grant-funded positions
Forthcoming white paper has sidebars / exemplars of where the work we’re talking about is already going on, including Labor WG
In the bigger Maintainers project there’s quite a bit of overlap (not just info maintainers)
Recently funded grant to look at maintenance etc. are valued within engineering, where it’s often defined as “not engineering”; encouragement to look at city planning & architecture → these dynamics happen in many different fields
- From the chat: One of the consequences of devaluaing maintainers is that people perceived as maintainers who are actually more like innovators(?) also get devalued. So I mean all the digital archivists who make literally $100k less than someone in the IT/corporate tech world who could map their job competencies almost 1-1
Interested in institutional self-assessment & measurement in general - how do you measure well-being of maintainers in general?
Shared focus on research as one way in which these things happen
Maintainers community framework
- Sloan grant to build up Maintainers org
- Looking across different professions & sectors for common structures & phenomena
- Aggregate lessons learned, metrics

Early impressions on where to talk about metrics, assessment, etc.?

Shock of the Old
We don’t have good measures of maintenance as a portion of economic activity → makes it hard to talk about in anything other than subjective terms
Things: How do we get better at maintenance e.g. digital preservation, maintaining the stuff around us?
People (especially uncomfortable re: metrics): Human resources, conflict resolution, ombudspeople, not just how satisfied workers are but also whether maintenance workers feel recognized & respected; whether they feel they have the resources they need
- e.g. in libraries, new initiatives introduced → people responsible for them without recognition or resources and with stress

Follow-up: How does gender play into that?

Digital archives request for resources
- Women leaving digital archives & citing inequitable allocation of resources
- “Digital” brings in a lot of gendered attitudes re: technology x work
Thinking more broadly, women do far more maintenance in the world
Connect to feminist literatures on invisible / feminized work
OSS communities
Women tasked with maintenance roles more often in organizations

What actions do you envision being taken by the research you're building

Long-term action: valuing labor
- Core hypothesis about Info Maintainers is we need to think about who we align ourselves with to build labor power differently than we have in the past
- As long as we continue to look inward, to divisive credentialing to build power as a workforce we’re not going to be effective
- Maintainers gives us a framework to rethink that: who out there is doing work that’s similar to us, understands these experiences of not being seen?
Short-term
- Start building maintenance-centered conversations at existing information professional gatherings, SAA, other conferences
- Virtual roundtables for the white paper
- Curriculum development (Amelia Acker)
Trying to be realistic about institutional self-assessment & managers → building tools to empower workers to begin conversations at their place of work
We don’t have to reinvent from scratch - use existing tools

What role do labor unions play in building power for maintainers? And how do we confront the fact that very few infomaintainers are unionized?

How to build power without a union?
Trying to involve unions in MIII e.g. transport unions
Don’t really see these things happening without actual labor politics
Conversation about labor x information workers has been happening forever
Emphasis that Maintainers is not an innovation! Building on past work, bringing together people who are already doing this work.

What can people in Labor WG do to support / get involved in Maintainers?

White paper - get it out there, participate in roundtables
- Possibly including one on labor
Not looking for a cookie! Looking for substantive engagement, including “you were wrong” (if necessary)
Always looking for ideas, feel free to pitch ideas, collaborations
Info Maintainers is looking to grow, will offer ways to join when the paper comes out

Job alert: Research Librarian @ AFSCME

Next meeting: Monday, July 1, 3pm Eastern / 12pm Pacific - facilitator needed