New professionals entering the LIS fields
are entering an environment faced with economic pressures that negatively
affect the value of our skills and knowledge, forcing us to sell our labor-power (the abstraction of human labor into something that can be exchanged for money) to employers. Marx states that “the directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent.” As someone entering the field of media archives, this cycle is unavoidable, and is only recently the topic of discussion at professional conferences and in academic
literature.
On my first real digitization project, I helped digitize a collection of ¼” Sony open reel videos for the IS Lab at UCLA. The videos were the recordings of a 1984 conference held by university presidents, computer scientists, economists, members of congress and university librarians in Lake Arrowhead, CA. The purpose of the first "Pioneers" conference was to discuss the next twenty years of the information economy in California, with a specific focus on how it would shape the fate of LIS professions.
The conference was held in May, shortly after Reagan won the election for a second presidential term. Reagan’s new federal budget for university and arts funding were received as “a direct assault” on liberal education and subsequently the library profession. John Brademas, then president of NYU, explained the deleterious effects of neoliberal policies regarding the budget cuts,
“Our universities in our libraries are under very sharp attack by the present administration in Washington. And I think it ought to be clear that the fortunes of higher learning and our academic libraries are closely intertwined…The Reagan administration would either dismantle or gravely weaken the national endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the Museum Services Institute, theNational Institute of Education, the Fulbright exchanges, and all the programs to help libraries.”
The conference was centered around the assumption that as the California information economy (for example, silicon valley and various military R&D corporations) continued to develop, the library professions would be placed into a precarious environment in the upcoming decades. Federal budget cuts would only encourage this process. Robert Muller, president of Johns Hopkins University reiterated the urgency of this matter in a later remark: “we're going to see changes from the status quo, so radical in nature that the operative noun should not be just change nor crisis, but revolution.” Revolutionary changes, he warned, faced the library professions. The occurrence that everyone at the conference referred to, and assumed was happening, is still happening today—the devaluation of LIS professions within the information economy.
The implications of neoliberal policies have had a profound effect on the instability of jobs within LIS professions and subsequently the current standards (or lack of) of value for professional and highly specialized skills and knowledge. Wildenhaus describes jobs in LIS fields functioning as a “ladder of precarity…which can be related to the broader scarcity mentality and funding pressures that pervade archives and libraries as institutions existing under neoliberal conditions. Economic pressures, as Brademas had feared, affected the nature of LIS professions. Wildenhaus elaborates on how this is evidenced through their critique on unpaid internships,
“By recognizing the connection between unpaid internships and other forms of contingent and precarious labor, denormalizing the practice becomes all the more urgent. Rather than accept this tendency towards precarity, information workers can recognize how advocating for the abolition of exploitive positions can help to bolster their own positions as they too resist the effects of neoliberalism.”
As a new professional entering the field of media archiving I have learned two key features about the state of the profession that affirm Wildenhaus’ argument: 1) Labor practices within the profession have not been standardized to normalize, for example, unpaid internship positions or unrealistically low wages; 2) Professionals are frustrated with the precarity of their work and ultimately feel that their labor-power is exploited. For example, on the public Association of Moving Image Archivsts (AMIA) listserv in February of 2018, members reacted negatively to a fulltime job listing at the Sherman Grinberg Film Library—the compensation for a trained media archivist was $12/hr. Joel Parham offered insight into the larger issue at hand in his response to the job posting:
“typically the primary purpose of professional organizations is to be actively involved in promoting the advancement of the profession and professionals. One such way would be to provide direction for the valuation of human capital of those who are most vulnerable – new professionals.”
The exploitation of LIS professionals manifests itself in the rampant practice of offering low wages and unpaid internships because employers can take advantage of cheap labor-power. Parham and Wildenhaus point out that this ultimately creates instability for new professionals, whose education and the skills acquired are highly specialized, but whose labor-power may ultimately be devalued. These sentiments echo the speakers at the 1984 conference, whose urgency is still felt across LIS professions.
LIS professions in general have to make a case for resources that are becoming harder to justify under a society that operates within the neoliberal financialization of everything. That is, everything we do in practice must produce a result that can be justified monetarily or made valuable on these terms. Yet, the totality of the work that builds access to knowledge, the work of an LIS professional, cannot by categorized or described solely in a neoliberal fashion. The skill involved in proving the value of our labor power is not taught as a skill, but should be explicitly presented as such if we want to create a professional environment for students and new professionals to thrive and reject the exploitation of our labor-power.
Brademas, John, May 14, 1984,
transcript, Robert M Hayes Collection.
Muller, Steve, May 14, 1984,
transcript, Robert M Hayes Collection.
Wildenhaus, Karly. “Wages for
Intern Work: Denormalizing Unpaid Positions in Archives and Libraries.” Journal
of Critical Library and Information Studies 2, no. 1 (November 25, 2018).
https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v2i1.88.
“[AMIA-L]
Assistant Media Archivist Position at Sherman Grinberg Film Library -
Zacharyrutland@gmail.Com - Gmail.” Accessed January 30, 2019.
“[AMIA-L] Employment Discussion - Paid vs. Unpaid Internships - Zacharyrutland@gmail.Com - Gmail.” Accessed February 3, 2019. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/amia/FMfcgxwBVMqTZwWDbTvlKmnbbSWQwrQd.
Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1867), Volume II, Ch.X, p. 211.
No comments:
Post a Comment