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).

On the Clock: This is why I joined the Best Practices task force by Camila Tessler

When I was first beginning my career, a friend of the family, who was a professor of anthropology, scoffed when I told him what I was doing. “What a weird decision, what a useless profession,” he told me. I pointed out to him that without my profession, not only is most of his work impossible, it’s also meaningless. This was my first time defending my professional choices. It would not be my last. My time as an archivist has only solidified that opinion in me; but I’ve also noticed that while archivists are opinionated, passionate, and endlessly erudite, they’re also usually not willing to argue when someone tells them that their profession doesn’t matter.

Term positions are the professional equivalent of telling us that our profession does not matter.

The issue with term positions is that they look so good on paper to administrators; they provide entry-level archivists a solid entry point into the profession and give strapped-for-cash institutions a way to hire someone to complete a project. It is the next step up from “intern”, and to many, even has the added benefit of being paid (I’ll touch on that)! What’s not to like? Two years of experience, for the newly graduated archivist, seems like an entire world. It seems like a healthy entryway into the profession, and I would argue that if term positions are used ethically by institutions, as outlined by the Best Practices group, then they absolutely are. 

However, institutions rarely agree on what a term position is. Some institutions, bound up in the semantic need to preserve academic pride, categorize term positions as non-professional – or they categorize all their archivists as non-professional. This means that someone with years of term positions may eventually find a permanent position and be forced to begin at the entry-level. Term staff are treated less like library staff members and more like temporary laborers, or laborers on contract. Some term positions can be extended, provided the original project was not completed, which is a strange incentive for finishing a project (finish your project and lose your job). Some institutions treat term laborers exactly like other staff, which anticipates them going through promotion processes. Others anticipate that term positions won’t go through promotion processes, and so don’t prepare them, which leaves them underprepared and unable to complete promotion when they get the ultimate golden ticket: a permanent position, or an extended term in their current institution. And pay as a term worker can be tricky. It is hard to negotiate for a higher salary when employers know that you have nowhere to go or no leverage. Sometimes term positions are not compensated at the same rate as non-term employees, or term positions don’t come with raises, even for the cost of living. Being in a term position often means you haven’t or don’t have time to vest in retirement packages. Constantly moving means a significant portion of savings must be held back for moving costs. Growing wealth (in this case: paying for a comfortable lifestyle for oneself and potentially one’s family) is hard enough for a young professional. It is altogether impossible in a term position.

And finally, there is the extremely startling truth that in most libraries, historical societies, and universities, the only people who experience term positions are archivists. You hardly ever hear about a “term librarian”, because there is an understanding of what librarians do for a library.

All of this gets to the crux of this entry. There is a fundamental gap in understanding the iterative work of archivists in the greater information professional field. While this gap cannot be bridged by only speaking to each other, that’s where it begins. As new professionals, I urge you to not be afraid to speak up and make yourself heard. Attend conferences outside of the archives community. Develop relationships with administrators, curators, professors, academics, researchers, and advocate for the profession in larger academic circles. Join civic groups that control budgets for libraries and historical societies. Make the words I’m an archivist mean as much as I’m a librarian. 

Archivists have been excellent at raising a clamor regarding diversity, ethics in collections, accessibility, and other inward-facing dilemmas. We often want to speak for the archives, but we rarely want to speak for ourselves. But no one else will speak up for us. Advocate for the people who work in archives. Organize. 

Speak up, and make them listen.

Camila Zorrilla Tessler is an archivist working at Yale University. She’s a graduate of the Knowledge River program at the University of Arizona (KR 11) and is particularly interested in making the work of archivists more transparent to researchers outside of the Information Science field and advocating for archival laborers.

On the Clock: Term Position Red Flags by Elise Riley

My first term position was an intense summer love. I spent 3 months processing a 300 linear feet collection at MIT. In a windowless room, I foldered and rehoused documents into literally hundreds of Hollinger boxes. While this sounds like drudgery meant for the pits of Tartarus, it was anything but, and here are some green flags that made for a positive term position experience: 

• Term length: This term position fell between the last two semesters of my graduate program. The two part-time jobs I had allowed me to take a break for the three summer months and return in the fall. 
• Compensation: It was a full-time position, and I was treated as a full-time staff member by the department and paid a competitive hourly rate.
• Onboarding & Professional Development: I was supplied with a work laptop, attended staff meetings, committee meetings, and trainings. For me, it was a real glimpse of what an archivist career felt like. A good thing to test while in grad school spending a lot (too much) money to enter this profession.  
• Support: My supervisor and colleagues were welcoming and encouraging.  

With the aid of an ArchivesSpace Excel sheet and a litany of podcasts, I was able to plow through boxes of writings, research, and clippings. At the end of the summer, we went our separate ways, and I got practical professional experience that ended in time for me to return to classes in the Fall with references for future jobs, and MIT got a behemoth of a collection processed in a short amount of time. 

The second term position I held was a noncommittal co-dependent borderline toxic relationship. I was hired for an IMLS grant-funded project at a Harvard University museum. To set the context, I finished my degree in December 2019. In February 2020 I had multiple interviews for full-time positions but by May all the positions I’d applied for had been axed, and I was laid off from my part-time job. I needed a job and couldn’t afford to be picky. If I could have been more discerning here are some term position red flags I should have watched out for: 

• Basic qualifications & position title: The lowest qualification was “proven knowledge of standards for cataloging archival material, as evidenced by at least 6 months of archives experience (may include coursework and/or internships)”. The job title was “Archives Scanning Assistant”. A peer mentor of mine in graduate school told me that your title matters. It points to the required work experience, designated salary grade, and career advancement opportunities. An assistant role is often a para-professional or pre-degree role. Well, I had just completed my MLIS, so I was overqualified
• Term length: The position was for 20 months, an extremely odd amount of time. Originally the position was for the Best Practice’s recommended minimum of 24 months. The position was grant-funded so they had to adhere to the proposed timeline and therefore the four months lost due to delays caused by the pandemic could not be recouped. This is more of an orange flag because who would have predicted a global pandemic! 
• Compensation: In 2020, employers did not often post salary ranges in job descriptions. SAA would not approve a requirement for salary transparency until May 2021. The same peer mentor (y’all get yourselves a peer mentor!) had previously told me the starting average for a degree-holding archivist was $50,000 and I was offered $42,000. I was able to bargain my salary up but because this was a grant-funded position, and I was new to negotiating I was still undercompensated. 
• Diverse Hiring Initiatives: I didn’t find out until later, but the museum had started centering DEI work. The biggest area of concern was staff diversity, which is great–love to see more BIPOCs like myself getting hired. What wasn’t great was that I and the two other assistants (also BIPOC) hired for the grant were the first hires with this aim in mind. We’d be gone in 20 months! This completely defeats the purpose of making the staff more sustainably diverse. There was a hiring freeze and a year later, the museum was hiring again and sticking to its commitment to hire diversely. So, another orange flag.  
• Retirement options: This is the stuff they don’t teach you in grad school. The vest period at Harvard University, which my employment fell under, is three years. The grant got extended to 32 months (for pandemic reasons) but look at that, still four months shy. So, all that money taken out of my paychecks I could have kept if I’d been properly informed or the administration cared for the concerns of term hires.

My experience overall was positive but at the time I didn’t have Best Practices for Archival Term Positions to understand the full context of my precarious employment. Once I had the job, I almost immediately started job searching again because I knew I would not be hired permanently after the grant ended. The real difference between the two-term positions was I had a clear plan for employment after one but not the other. Term positions keep you in a state of instability, and some might offer you support to negate the effect of employment precarity, but a lot don’t. As you navigate the workforce, break up with shaky commitments and dodge as many red flags as possible. Good luck out there. 

Bio:

Elise Riley

Accessioning Archivist

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library 

On the Clock: Best Practices, February 2022 to now and looking ahead by Monika Lehman

From 2020 to 2022, the Best Practices for Archival Term Positions Working Group met and wrote the document collaboratively over Zoom. During this time, we always had our audience in mind for our Best Practices. We knew that we wanted the Best Practices to reach archivists, administrators, students, and anyone working in libraries so that they could know their colleagues in the field were thinking about the ethical treatment of workers and to provide a resource for all. We wanted to create a set of guidelines to be used as a reference not only for the people creating the term positions but also for the those were in term positions. 

After writing, gathering feedback from colleagues who read drafts of the document, reflection, and editing, The Best Practices for Archival Term Position Group, published the Best Practices Document to Open Science Framework (OSF) in February 2022. We promoted the Best Practices through emailing listservs in the archival field. We also committed ourselves to revisiting and revising the Best Practices in five years. The Best Practices reflect the times in which they were written, and we want to leave it open to incorporate new perspectives in the future. At the Rare Book and Manuscript Section (RBMS) of America Library Associations’ conference in summer 2022, we presented the Best Practices along with members of the Contingent Labor Task Force from New England Archivists. We wanted attendees to know where they could find the Best Practices and encouraged them to share their stories of using the Best Practices in their own work. We also answered questions from attendees on how to implement the Best Practices at their institutions. 

We submitted the Best Practices to SAA to be endorsed as an external standard. The Best Practices were endorsed in summer 2023. This was important to us to have SAA’s endorsement so that the Best Practices can make a significant impact. The announcement of the endorsement was very exciting since we knew it enabled us to reach more people. Also in 2023, a group of the authors presented the Best Practices to our administration at Yale so that they were aware of the document and we could answer questions about it.

In 2024, our promotion of the Best Practices continues. In 2022, we were accepted by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Pocket Burgundy series to write a longer publication on the Best Practices. This enabled us to dig deeper into the history of term positions and their impact. We wrote a literature review, conducted a large survey, and also held in depth interviews with administrators and supervisors who created both term and permanent positions. This work will be published later in 2024. 

In June 2024, three members of the Best Practices Working Group will present an update at RBMS. We will cover what we have learned over the past two years from our work on the CLIR publication. We also want to hear from colleagues across the field who have used the Best Practices in their workplaces and as well as  any feedback that they may have from reading the guidelines. Like so much of archival work, we see the work on this document as iterative and malleable as archivists continue to face the challenge of finding support for our work. We hope to continue hearing about its effects on the archival field and how we can enhance it to help our colleagues work in ethical positions. 

Monika Lehman (she/her) is an Archivist at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Before her current position, she was a project archivist at the Beinecke and Manuscripts and Archives. Monika has been a part of the Best Practices for Archival Term Labor group since 2020. She is currently the co-chair of the Reparative Archival Description Working Group at Yale and an associate editor at the Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies. 

On The Clock: Introduction by Elias Larralde

Hello,

My name is Elias Larralde, the current chair of SAA SNAP and I am here to introduce our newest blog series On the Clock: Term Positions in the Archival Field. My inspiration for this series was the recent publication Best Practices for Archival Term Positions by the Term Labor Best Practices Working Group, and its approval by SAA as a standard for the field. I read this document as I was (and still am) applying to jobs, which were a majority of term archival positions around the United States. While the primary audience was administers and managers who are creating these types of positions, I believe that job seekers can equally benefit by reading these standards to advocate for themselves.

This series aims to explore term positions by those who have had experience with them and members of working group. The 9 authors explore term positions through their own experiences and offer advice, analysis, critiques, and opportunities when it comes to these types of jobs. Our authors come from a variety of places and stages of careers, but the constant is that they had to confront the role that term positions have in our field. My aim in the creation of this series is to start a bigger conversation regarding our labor and these positions to both the SAA SNAP and general SAA community. It was for that reason that we decide to start this series on May Day, or International Workers’ Day.

I want to thank all the authors for agreeing to be a part of this series and their work in creating their posts. I also want to thank our blog team Erin and Savannah in helping edit and shape the series. I hope others are inspired by the authors stories and think more reflectively about these positions and our relationship with them. Understanding our labor can take us to the next step of understanding the field and how we can make it better in the future.

Thank you,

Elias Larralde Chair SAA SNAP