Labor/Valuing-Labor/2019-07-01
DLF WG on Labor in Digital Libraries, Archives and Museums: Valuing Labor Subgroup
Meeting minutes: July 1, 2019
Salaries
Facilitator: Liz Caringola
Note-takers: Liz Caringola, Sandy Rodriguez
Discussion
Arts + All Museums Salary Transparency 2019
DPE AFL-CIO Library Professionals: Facts & Figures (see section “Library Worker Earnings and the Wage Gap”)
Living wage
Researching public salaries
- For California: Sacramento Bee Salary Database
- University of California salary database (search Librarian, not Archivist)
- UMD salary database (search “LIBR” to just see salaries in the Libraries)
- For Utah (state and local government entities)
Researching private salaries
- Guidestar: publishes salary information for non-profit institutions
- Glassdoor
- Perhaps it is even more important for workers at private institutions to self-report in the surveys below?
Salary surveys
- ARL Annual Salary Survey
- 2017 WArS/SAA Salary Survey
- Library Salaries Inequity Resource List (features self-reported salaries under “Voluntary Payscale Information”)
- AMIA Field Survey (currently underway and focused on moving image archives)
- Arts + All Museums Salary Transparency 2019_View Only (includes art museums, historical societies, etc.) - feel free to request edit access from the owner & add your salary, if applicable; there’s also valuable info in the tabs
Additional topics discussed
- Individual negotiation vs. collective negotiation
- For individual
- AAUW Salary Negotiation Programs
- Counter offer as expedited promotion
- Other things to negotiate besides salaries (i.e. moving expenses, more vacation time, professional development funding)
- For individual
- Cost of living
- Is it strategic disadvantage for long-term salary growth to take a lower paying job even if somewhere with a lower cost of living?
- Wages are not keeping pace with the extremely high cost of living in cities like San Francisco and New York
- Compression
- Definition: “Compression is when you have small differences in pay regardless of experience, skills, level, or seniority. You see this when the starting salaries for your new employees in a particular job title are too close to the wages of your existing workers. In really awful circumstances, the starting salaries might even exceed what your current employees are earning.” (–PayScale)
- Equity
- Ranking/classifications
- Do not always correspond to salary differences
- Raises including merit and cost-of-living increases
- Eligibility difference with contract workers (i.e. term limited workers not qualifying for cost-of-living increases)
- Who in institution oversees salary issues
- Budget Committees
- Unions
- HR (sometimes impose constraints that are out of the control of hiring managers)
- Types of arguments for collective approaches:
- Compression
- Compare to peer institutions (i.e. based on salary surveys)
- Compare to comparable positions within the institution
- Recruitment (making salaries competitive to help bring on new staff)
- Reducing pay inequality
- Reducing turnover/attrition
- Within broader diversity/equity/inclusion iniatives
- Strategies for collective approaches:
- Professional organizations advocating on behalf of workers
- Requiring salaries on job postings
- Advocacy Toolkits (discussed at Collective Responsibility forum)
- Make visible and put in writing salary rules/processes within one’s own institution for greater transparency
- Professional organizations advocating on behalf of workers