On The Clock: A Marxist perspective on the contract archivist in capital’s age of precarity by Emma Barton-Norris

The number of non-permanent and temporary employment has risen dramatically, dominating in the archival workforce but also shaping the entire economic landscape of the United States.¹ Among archivists, according to the 2023 A*CENSUS report, an average of 30% of archival workers are contingent while an average of 34% of archival repositories plan to increase the amount of short-to-medium-term contract (less than one year to three years) positions in the next five years.² These contract archivists often find themselves entering a position with intermittent hours, lower pay, and less agency. Their labor, situated in the latest era of American capitalism, is precarious. However, they (or rather we) are not alone in our struggle.

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the Occupational Information Network, a 2020 survey found that from 1988 to 2016 precarious employment has increased by 9% in the United States. However, the increase was felt most by high-income, college-educated men whose historical stability in the workforce left them with a distinct advantage compared to the long-term decreases in employment quality felt by women and those from racialized or less-educated populations.³ These new additions to the population of precarious workers have put into focus the issue of today’s pervasive precarity for a more privileged portion of the United States.

It is important to remember that today’s short-term pursuit of profit—in the form of lowering wages and employment with longer, unpredictable, and irregular working hours—is inherent to our current system of production. Precarious work is innate to the capitalist mode of production. While precarity is dominant in the current evolutionary stage of the capitalist epoch, it has always been a feature.

According to Marx, 150 years ago, it was the “growing competition among the [capitalists], and the resulting commercial crises, [that] make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating [and] makes their livelihood more and more precarious.”⁴ This precarity has exacerbated how all workers are exploited for their surplus value, including archivists.

Surplus value, according to Karl Marx in his formative text Capital, is the additional value created by workers through their labor that goes beyond what they are paid in wages. The appropriation of this surplus value, essentially a worker’s unpaid labor, is the most fundamental source of profit in a capitalist society.⁵ In its simplest form, the surplus value created by a worker’s labor is the value of the product produced subtracted by the worker’s wage (for example, if a worker produces goods worth $100 per day but is paid a wage of $50 per day, the surplus value created by the worker’s labor is $50). But archivists have historically been seen as workers who do not engage in the profitable production of goods or services. Therefore, an archival worker experiences the same appropriation through more complex methods of unequal exchange, such as undercompensation, unpaid overtime, or unrealistic productivity targets. In essence, surplus value is the worker’s rate of exploitation. 

I believe that the current wave of contingent, part-time, and contractual archival positions that rely on the quantification of the archivist’s labor and provide no long-term stability have highlighted this exploitation. Although archivists’ output has commonly not been measured in terms of profit, the age of precarity has put our true relationship to capital on display. Contract archivists often lack the benefits and rights that come with permanent employment. We cannot “club together in order to keep up the rate of wages” or find “permanent associations in order to make provision” against their precarity (such as unions).⁶ Yet, contract archivists can find solidarity among other precarious workers.

Precarious workers across the United States—the 30% of archival workers, the 75% of college and university faculty and staff that lack a collective bargaining agreement, and the 35% of all American workers—are all connected by their precarious relationship to their labor-power.⁷ Manifesting this connectedness into solidarity can help all precarious workers navigate their way out of this age of precarity and into a new system where our value as workers is not defined by a contract.⁸

1. Stephanie Bredbenner, Alison Fulmer, Meghan Rinn, Rose Oliveira, and Kimberly Barzola, “Nothing About It Was Better Than a Permanent Job”: Report of The New England Archivists Contingent Employment Study Task Force, February 2022, https://newenglandarchivists.org/resources/Documents/Inclusion_Diversity/Contingent-Employment-2022-report.pdf; Makala Skinner, “A*CENSUS II: Archives Administrators Survey Report,” The American Archivist 86, no. 2 (2023): 258–319, https://doi.org/10.17723/2327-9702-86.2.258. ↩︎
2. See Fig 6 and 34 in Skinner, “A*CENSUS II: Archives Administrators Survey Report,” 272, 299. ↩︎
3. VM Oddo, CC Zhuang, SB Andrea, J Eisenberg-Guyot, T Peckham, D Jacoby, A Hajat, “Changes in precarious employment in the United States: A longitudinal analysis,” Scand J Work Environ Health 4, no. 3 (2021): 171-180. doi: 10.5271/sjweh.3939. ↩︎
4. Karl Marx, “Bourgeois and Proleterians,” in Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore and Frederick Engles (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 19. ↩︎
5. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, Book One: The Process of Production of Capital, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887). ↩︎
6. Karl Marx, “Bourgeois and Proleterians,” in Manifesto of the Communist Party, 19. ↩︎
7. Skinner, “A*CENSUS II: Archives Administrators Survey Report,” 272; Joe Berry and Michelle Savarese, “Directory of U.S. faculty contracts and bargaining agents in institutions of higher education,” National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions (New York: Hunter College, CUNY, 2012), vii; VM Oddo, et al, “Changes in precarious employment in the United States: A longitudinal analysis,” 175. doi: 10.5271/sjweh.3939. ↩︎
8. For example, the creation of educational resource guides that can help library workers navigate their relationship to their own labor can be integrated into other DEIA work. See class/labor tab in the Bowdoin College Library DEIA Resources guide, https://bowdoin.libguides.com/c.php?g=1275258&p=10211458 ↩︎

Emma Barton-Norris is the Processing Archivist at Bowdoin College Library. She earned her MLIS at the University of Iowa in 2023 where she worked as a Graduate Assistant at the Iowa Women’s Archives and a contract archivist at the State Historical Society of Iowa. While at university, she served as the department steward to the graduate worker’s union, UE-COGS Local 896. Emma was hired by Bowdoin College’s George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives in 2023 to process un-and-under-described collections for a term of three years (with possibility for renewal).