Still grinding? How the pandemic is accelerating job precarity in public history

11 March 2021 – Rachel Boyle

NCPH Board Member Posts, advocacy, profession, employment, new professionals, labor

Job precarity has become a defining feature of the public history field in recent years as workers grind through extractive cycles of unstable, part-time, and temporary work. A 2017 survey on Public History Education and Employment compiled by NCPH, AASLH, AHA, and OAH reported that “respondents noted that contract work has become more common, permanent positions less numerous, and part-time and term employment ubiquitous.” A 2016 AHA report on contingent faculty demonstrated a high reliance on non-tenure-track faculty in history departments, with many adjuncts working multiple jobs and facing poor working conditions. A working group focusing on economic justice at the 2018 and 2019 NCPH conferences attempted to tackle the collective challenges of making a living while engaging in meaningful public history. In recent years, groups like the Art + Museum Transparency collective have been documenting museum salaries, revealing wage inequalities, and supporting calls for unionization. The increasing frequency and visibility of low-paid, precarious labor has raised urgent concerns about worker exploitation and who can afford to make a living in history museums, universities, and beyond.

Now, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated these trends in the cultural sector. Institutions already hostile to BIPOC workers—as highlighted in the wake of the anti-racism uprisings last summer—are laying off staff due to plummeting revenue and lowest-paid employees are often the first to go. Unemployed workers face the choice of leaving the field altogether or competing in a job market with fewer places hiring and others shutting down altogether. Folks may also start looking to contract and gig work to make ends meet, while employers, in turn, consider leaning more heavily on contract work to cut costs, further pushing the field toward a greater reliance on precarious labor. Meanwhile, adjunct faculty at colleges and universities find their positions increasingly tenuous, and higher education administrations are even beginning to treat tenure-track faculty as disposable, too. These developments reflect changes in the broader United States workforce, where more and more workers are joining the gig economy to financially survive in the middle of a public health crisis.

An expanding culture of gigs and grinding raises serious issues for public historians. First of all, job insecurity contributes to unsustainable work practices. How do we cultivate rest or balance when each hour needs to be billable and workers have no benefits or little dependable income? How do we foster meaningful collaborations while trying to monetize projects for economic survival? These questions take on more urgency in the midst of a global crisis where people are dying from both COVID-19 and white supremacy. As historians, we know the harmful long-term consequences when societies ignore, suppress, and silence collective trauma. Furthermore, the push to keep working and hustle through crisis further perpetuates white supremacy in professional settings. The field risks only being accessible to those who are comfortably shielded from trauma or burnout and can continue conducting business as usual. In December 2020, all of the jobs lost in the U.S. economy were held by Black and Latina women, and it’s not hard to see how racial and gender inequities will continue to impact public history work, as well.

What can public historians do on a personal, institutional, and field-wide level to address these deepening systemic problems? Individuals in any position can start with small steps to resist grind culture, lowering expectations of ourselves and others wherever possible, and embracing flexibility and compassion. Public historians can refuse to ask our colleagues for unpaid labor, and instead interrogate how to tangibly divest ourselves from the powers, privileges, and financial resources afforded by white supremacy. We can rest, connect, and grieve, even when capitalism is screaming at us to work nonstop and suppress our grief and, ultimately, our humanity.

Meanwhile, institutions can commit to paying all employees a living wage, especially service workers, support staff, and front-line employees. Living wages should also be extended to contract workers, who should not be merely utilized as a way to lower costs and avoid paying benefits. Organizations ought to apply their anti-racism statements to both full-time and contract hiring, and be prepared to change internal cultures, dismantle longstanding structures, and redistribute resources accordingly. Institutions should further confront how to embrace an ethic of care for Black life as laid out by Aleia Brown.

Finally, how can the field as a whole support precarious workers and advocate for just wages? In a critical step toward salary transparency, NCPH recently started requiring job postings to include pay information. A pay scale like the one annually posted by Professional Historians Australia may also be a way to help folks negotiate for competitive wages. Both gestures help make the work of public history visible and begin to set expectations for adequate wages—not just because public historians bring unique skill sets to the table, but because all workers deserve compensation for their labor. In other words, ensuring public historians’ ability to make a living should not be viewed as separate from the plight of other tenuously employed workers across the economy.

Ultimately, cooperation is the strongest way to combat capitalism. In an inspiring trend, unions, cooperatives, and collaboratives are emerging in museums and among adjuncts to secure better conditions for workers. Collective action can be an antidote to the isolation intensified by gig labor and a pandemic, though it requires long-term investment and relationship building among folks with already limited capacity. In “What Happens Next: Creating Intentional Public History Practice in 2021,” Nicole Moore and B. Erin Cole note the opportunity for organizations to shift their focus from physical resources to human resources, and encourage all public historians to channel their energy toward building relationships among their communities and across the field.

Indeed, collective action and relationship-building should be prioritized as integral to our survival as workers and as an entire field. Museum Workers Speak’s recent mutual aid efforts offer a powerful model that calls on workers to embrace the urgent task of helping each other survive, making sure that our neighbors and colleagues are fed and sheltered. May all public historians follow their lead and do what we can on an individual, institutional, and field-wide level to support each other with time, space, and financial resources. The need to acknowledge and honor our interdependence preceded the pandemic and—like other labor trends—will only continue to intensify in the months and years to come.

~Rachel Boyle, Ph.D. is co-founder of Omnia History, a public history collaborative dedicated to using the past to promote social change. She writes labor history, leads seminars for public audiences, and partners with cultural organizations on digital projects. Boyle currently teaches at DePaul University and serves on the NCPH Board of Directors.