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
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