Wanted: Free Labor

The Impact and Ethics of Unpaid Work

Lance Stuchell2011 SAA ConferenceSession 105Image courtesy of Flickr member Kevin H. / CC-BY-NC-ND

This slideshow was originally presented atSession 105 of the 2011 SAA Conference

on Thursday, August 25th 2011(some slides have been edited for clarity)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

For more information on this presentation, see the blog post at

http://newarchivist.com/2011/11/17/free-labor/

This Presentation…• Is Not:– Arguing against internships or volunteerism

• WILL:– Outline challenges facing our profession• How internships complicate those challenges

– Discuss creating a “Pay it Forward” internship– Draw a distinction• Internships/volunteering for new professionals • Volunteering outside an archives career track

Financial Challenge

• Professional positions require Masters degree• Cost of graduate programs• Small number of scholarship opportunities• Prolonged job search – Average of 6-months1

– More applicants than positions2

1Dana Miller, “Professional Sustainability: The Elephant in the Archives,” 2009 SAA Conference Presentation (109), slide 15.2Miller, slide 15; Victoria Irons Walch, “A*Census,” American Archivist, vol. 69 no. 2, pg. 312.

Financial Challenge

• Does unpaid work compound this challenge?– Limited in-school paid opportunities – Some students simply have to have an income– Inability of some to afford “placeholder”

employment opportunities

Image courtesy of Flickr member jollyUK / CC-BY

Diversity Challenge

“The relevance of archives to society and the completeness of the documentary record hinge on the profession’s success in ensuring that its members, the holdings that they collect and manage, and the users that they serve reflect the diversity of society as a whole.” – SAA Statement on Diversity

http://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-statement-on-diversity

Diversity Challenge

• Does membership diversity include people of different economic backgrounds?

• How does unpaid work complicate efforts to diversify our professional ranks?– Limits field to those that can “afford” education

and unpaid positions – Is our price of admission too high?

What Do We DO?!?

Image courtesy of Flickr member sparktography / CC-BY-NC

Pay It Forward Internships

• Unpaid positions ≠ professional positions without pay

• If you can pay, pay– Drexel University Archives pays one intern a term– University of Michigan’s IMLS Practicum pays

students for summer internship placements• Some work is not appropriate– Is it archival in nature?– Is it better suited for a part-time paid position?

Volunteer Wanted! Duties:• Supervision of other volunteers • Processing and cataloging new collections• Planning for technology upgrade Qualifications:• Graduate degree in Library Science • Experience with arrangement and description• Experience with archiving digital content

Bad Want Ad

Volunteer Wanted! Duties:• Supervision of other volunteers • Processing and cataloging new collections• Planning for technology upgrade Qualifications:• Working toward or considering a graduate degree in

Library Science • Interest in learning archival arrangement and

description standards• Interest in learning how to manage digital content

Improved Want Ad

Conclusion

• There is a cost associated with unpaid work• Internships are important, make them count • The archival community needs to respond – Training new archivists is an obligation – Make unethical practice unacceptable

Thank You!