The guild/union subcommittee of the NCPH working group on Public History, Ethics, and Economic Justice has tasked itself with identifying how organizing might be directed to improve the lives and working conditions of public history workers.
In order to do that, group members are drawing on a simple problem tree exercise to better understand the problems that we see before us as practitioners in the field, identify their root causes, and learn how we might best work together to improve our conditions.
The combined results from this exercise are below.
Problems Public History practitioners are facing in the field:
- Bottleneck of funding going to the same institutions and private companies rather than smaller institutions/workers/public institutions/rural or small town projects and institutions
- Lack of jobs; over-abundance of skilled practitioners
- Ongoing job insecurity for workers
- Race-the-bottom in the job market due to hyper-competition for jobs and mid-career professionals competing for entry-level positions
- Public history MA grads entering the job market in increasing numbers to find a lack of entry-level positions, and/or positions that pay a living wage
- Professionals taking on second-jobs to make ends meet OR the field attracting people with outside sources of stable income or wealth, disadvantaging others without access to outside resources; people leaving the field due to these barriers
- Stipends, contracts, and unpaid internships replacing full-time jobs with benefits
- Sense of isolation for Public History workers – feelings of failure for not finding work
- Racism on the job affecting the value of labor and making working conditions difficult or untenable
- Outside companies get contracts for what staff used to do
- Museums/historic sites having to run like businesses to continue to exist
Root causes of problems:
- History is not taken seriously as a profession; many people are alienated from history because what they are taught in K-12 and even college history classes
- The kind of history we “do” is deprioritized by people in power, at the federal, state, and local levels (and it feels as though it is not valued by the wider public); cuts in state and federal humanities budgets
- Lack of real mentorship opportunities in the field
- Lack of collective agreements/standards for public history jobs (e.g. labor standards)
- Pervasive privatization of public institutions due to far-right take over of government and organizing to dismantle public institutions
- Private firms are benefitting from the reorganization of hiring practices at the expense of workers who would benefit from jobs that contract money could provide
- Ongoing, unaddressed racism & misogyny in the field that affects pay and other work conditions
- Lack of funding & privatization is forcing public humanities jobs into the expanding low-wage service sector
- Decades-long attack on unions; workers feeling afraid and powerless as a result
- Dominant narratives blame workers rather than the larger economic system for their problems with the job market
- Workers/practitioners are pitted against each other to compete for limited jobs in a retracting job market rather than encouraged to collaborate and support one another
- Cuts in support of public education leaving students with a huge debt burden coming out of school
Next steps:
On our next call together, we will analyze these root causes and identify some core issues that we might be able to collectively focus on in the weeks ahead. We will attempt to answer the question: How can we collectively organize ourselves to begin to address these problems and which problem/s should we address first?