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

Complete 2019 schedule

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

Connect with Maintainers

Overview of Information Maintainers

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

• Bigger, focused on practitioners, 4 tracks
• Looking at proposals for Information track right now

Discussion (Q&A)

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

• [long-ass overview by Amy]

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

Announcements

Job alert: Research Librarian @ AFSCME

Museum workers’ salaries: http://www.artnews.com/2019/05/31/google-spreadsheet-museum-workers-disclose-salaries/

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