Imagining a Labor Market in Archives that Works for Everyone

The following is the text from my talk at the Spring 2012 MARAC meeting in Cape May, New Jersey. I look forward to your comments, unless you’re a self-identified MRA. I’m not joking.

Today I’m going to talk about things I’ve noticed about being an archives worker.

I speak from my position as an interested participant-observer. There are people who are experts in these kinds of labor issues, and while I’m conversant in them, I’m not a scholar. Like Tom mentioned, I earned my degree in 2008 and I’ve been working as an archivist since then. At the University of Michigan, I did graduate coursework on gender and labor and did a directed reading course about librarians and labor. I’m also part of the group blog called “you ought to be ashamed”. I think that some of my fellow contributors may be in the room today, which is awesome. I’ve learned a lot from all of you.

Our blog posts tend to critique exploitative job advertisements and talk about the larger labor challenges that young professionals face. In the past, contributors have talked about the casualization of professional labor, the casualization of academic labor, the pitfalls of performing beyond one’s stated job duties without the formal structures to support and reward that work, how to sniff out whether an institution’s organizational culture is broken, negotiation, supply and demand in the labor market, and gender and technology. By the way, if you’re interested in writing for the blog, everyone is welcome.

I think that for me, the real power behind the blog is not that we’re going to critique anyone into changing. It’s that we’re building solidarity. We’re helping each other create a sense of what is appropriate and reasonable in our relations with our employers. And yes, people will sometimes still be forced to take jobs where they aren’t supported and don’t have the resources to do all of the work that’s expected of them (which is a disservice to both the collections under their care and, more importantly, the researchers they serve), but at least, hopefully, they won’t think that this is the way it has to be. And when they’re in a position of power, where they can be more thoughtful about resource allocation than the people who came before them, they can make different decisions.

The list of topics that I mentioned above could keep us here all day (which would be okay with me – I would love to talk about any of these things at the reception), so I’m going to narrow my comments to the topic of gender and money. I’ll explore the data that overwhelmingly demonstrates that a pay equity problem persists, even in our profession, and that we should pause and check the data when we start congratulating ourselves for making progress. I’ll talk about some of the research that I’ve encountered that addresses what workers can do to gain leverage on this situation. I’ll also discuss what institutions can do to cease being complicit in a system that doesn’t reward workers for their labor fairly.

By the way, the research that I’ve seen and that I’m focusing on talks about women and pay equity, but there’s good reason to believe that this is a problem for all kinds of people — people who are the first in their families to graduate from college, for instance, or people of color or non-US country of origin.

In defense of the MLS (Sort of)

So, officially this was supposed to be a Point-Counterpoint type collaboration between me and Terry—he giving the argument for alternative paths towards a professional archives position, including the kind of introductory-level training that he describes, and me arguing for the traditional value of the MLS/MLIS/MARA as a professional qualification. Unfortunately, having read Terry’s excellent post, I am having a hard time disagreeing with his vision of an alternate path to professionalism. Awkward.

Perhaps some discussion of my career trajectory thus far can serve as a jumping-off point for discussion of the value of the MLS. I came to the archives field the way a lot of archivists end up finding their way here—I had been planning to pursue a Ph.D. in History, but was fortunate enough to learn from my undergraduate advisor about the dismal prospects in History academia BEFORE I spent the 6+ years working on a dissertation which would be read by 4 people, and so decided to change course a bit. Another person might have been left adrift, but I was fortunate to be working at about the same time at an archival internship at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, and even more fortunate to discover that I enjoyed the work immensely (seeing it as “basically history without the pesky “writing about what you’re researching” bit). I applied to a few archives programs, got into the University of Maryland History/Library Science dual degree program, and 3 years later had the great fortune of getting an archives/RM job that I actually like straight out of school. So there’s me, from High School to Archivist in 7 years. Not too shabby!

Now, backing up a bit into the library school experience itself, here’s a few thoughts about the value of the MLS from my own perspective as a straight-from-undergrad archivist (which, according to A*CENSUS, is a path less than 40% of archivists take to their first professional position):

• I supplemented my formal archives education with a LOT of practical experience. Maryland’s program, at the time I attended, included a practicum component in the Intro to Archives class (there was also the option to write a paper if you didn’t have time for a 50-hour practicum), but beyond that I supplemented my income and experience with a number of jobs in archives and libraries around the DC area. Even after I got my teaching assistantship with the UMD History Department, I worked full-time during summers in archives/records management settings and tried to work at least a few hours a week in archives during the year so I would continue to develop professional experience. I am reasonably certain that the amount and quality of these opportunities was a major factor in my relatively quick employment after graduation. So there is certainly an argument to be made for positions performing more basic archives work early on.
• I learned as much or more about archives from my work as I did from my classes. (Maybe.) For a while, I held as an article of faith the idea that my practical work was more useful than my library school coursework in terms of giving me the skills I needed to do the work of a professional archivist (I learned more about implementing MARC cataloging and performing records surveys during fieldwork than I ever did in the related classes, e.g.) Even with the benefit of hindsight, I think at least a few of the courses I took in library school were wastes of my time, and probably most people could name some courses about which they felt the same way. This too would seem to argue in favor of the more practical approach towards archival training. However, my view on this has changed somewhat since I have had to supervise students of my own as a professional. Some students we get are brand new to the archives field and require a lot of hand-holding to get their work to where it needs to be; students who are further along in the program are often more sophisticated in their thinking about issues of arrangement, description, lateral thinking about reference questions, etc., and so require less supervision. To be sure, some of these students have had experience elsewhere to draw upon, but I am still less certain than I was even 4 years ago that practicum vincit omnia. (Please excuse my Dog Latin.) Particularly in light of the next thing that I’ve noticed:

• My student work, particularly my early student work, was laughably bad. There are still some finding aids I wrote as an undergraduate available for perusal online; I won’t provide the link because I’m pretty embarrassed about their quality. Yes, these were written 8 years ago, but I had no real idea what I was doing and it shows—there’s little integration with the overall description system, my appraisal of what is and is not important is just awful, and I emphasize all the wrong things in my scope/content note and other narrative description data. I wouldn’t expect any more from a fledgling archivist, and certainly a lot of these problems would fix themselves through experience, but the theoretical basis I obtained in my archives course has helped me to be more efficient and effective in a way that just dealing with the idiosyncrasies of particular institutions would not. And remember, my embarrassment is just at the relatively simple task of processing a collection; I shudder to think of the struggles I would have had had I been dropped into a situation where I had to do program or strategic planning.

So, do these ramblings have a point? Surprisingly, yes!  I see my archival education experience as a sort of apprenticeship—I worked for little pay and for long hours on projects of limited scope—describing collections, say, or helping to create a database of photographs taken by campus photographic services—while at the same time getting at least some of the kind of theoretical knowledge I would need to take my skills to the next level and look holistically at an Archives program (figuring out how to set priorities, select and implement standards, develop outreach plans, etc.). At the end of said apprenticeship, I even get to call myself a Master!

(IMPORTANT NOTE: If your significant other is ABD and you try to insist upon this terminology, he/she will laugh at you. At some length. Trust me on this one.)

My guess is that a lot of the work that archives currently give to volunteers or students in MLIS programs probably could fit into the kind of graduated professional structure that Terry describes. Come to that, a lot of project archivist positions, where people are working on a particular collection or laying the groundwork for a specific program such as a CMS, would probably also fit into this niche. So I do think that Terry’s alternative plan of experience plus certification is a very viable one—provided that the experience is extensive enough, and the certification process is robust enough (though he does address both of those points).

As soon as you start to do the kind of broad-based, management-level work you find in posts like the one I wrote about last time, though, you really should have—and employers should require—an MLIS or equivalent. Sure, the degree can be, and often is, used as a gatekeeper requirement for a position, but ideally it is evidence that you have committed to the profession and to learning more about higher levels of administering that profession, and are capable of the kinds of responsibilities that you would expect to find at Master-level work. When you put someone with just a BA into a position like that, you devalue the professional degree, you run the very real risk of overwhelming your new employee, and you waste a lot of time, money, and energy on bringing said employee up to speed on the skills and theory he/she needs to not just do the job, but to do the job well.

Don’t just take my word for it, though. Here’s Arlene in the comments of my last post:

The reason you demand a masters degree in archival studies for an entry level position including those without a management component is so that you get pre-prepared employees who have already read the major texts in the field. So you don’t have to spend time explaining things like appraisal theory. And, if they’ve come out of a good school, they already have some hands-on experience through practicums or internships. I know of no bachelor’s degree that is offering archival education at a level that would suffice. I’d much rather spend my time training the new employee to do things my way than to have them spend three months reading Posner, Boles, Danielson, etc, just to get the concepts.

So, yeah, she just said in 100 words what took me 1400. Apparently just because I have an MLS doesn’t mean that I have a handle on the whole “Brevity” thing.

How to become an archivist in ten short years: take one.

Oh, Terry, when will you learn? I dropped into a twitter conversation last week and ended up leaving wih a promise to provide a point of view post for this blog on “how I got from graduation to archivist in ten years.” Kids are sneaky and have little respect for their befuddled elders. But more on that another time and place.

The conversation that got this started centered on a Drexel University job post for an archives technician. The announcement’s requirements looked like Drexel was trying to hire an archivist on the cheap. Whether or not that’s the case, the larger question here was articulated by Brad Houston (@herdotusjr for the twiterati): “As noted, I don’t think not having a Masters-level degree should DISQUALIFY you, but having the degree shd mean something”.

True enough. And we’ll get back to that question, kids. But first let’s imagine a different path to becoming an archivist. A path that was once available to youngsters back in the fog of history (like when yours truly was misguided youth).

Say a young, starry-eyed high school graduate gets into a nice university. We won’t name name names here — no need stirring up rivalries — but our unamed youngster wants to be a historian (and didn’t bother to read Larry Cebula’s stark “Open Letter to my students: no you cannot be a professor”).

While slogging through an undergraduate program (one that will cost an average of $60K and leave said undergrad nearly $25k in debt if they are one of the lucky 38% to finish in four years) our little history Candide gets a job or an internship or something in a local archives and gets hooked. Upon graduation, with a freshly pressed BA in hand, our aspiring archivist starts looking for a job.

This is where a little suspension of disbelief is in order, gentle readers. No one in 2011 looks for an archives job with a BA. While some might be available, the competition with MLIS’s (over 50,000 awarded from 2000-2008) and other masters degree holders is pretty steep.

But consider an alternative pathway for our 22 year old beamish graduate. Suppose that rather than taking on an additional two years of college (and another pile of debt), there was a “beginning archivist” career path. Leave the naming of such a job to human resources — just consider it a position that allows an educated person to perform basic archives functions, with training and under supervision, at a lower salary than an archivist with a graduate education.

Suppose further that the Academy of Certified Archivists revamped its requirements for certification by strengthening the exam and allowing anyone who had either five years experience at the “beginning archivist” level or had a masters degree and some short period of experience to sit for it. This would allow motivated beginning archivists to use continuing education and on the job training to become “real” archivists through a different pathway than graduate education. This would let our hypothetical high school student start an archival career at age 28, ten years after leaving high school.

Now I’m not dogging the MLIS. It’s a benefit to programs to have the deeper theoretical understanding and broader professional knowledge that a graduate degree provides. But is it really the only way for  person to become an archivist? There are other issues at play here — graduate education in general, value related to debt, ratio of graduates to available jobs, diversity and economics, reduced institutional budgets and equitable compensation — but this is supposed to be a conversation between me and Brad. So I’d like to come back to his tweet as a launching space for his initial salvo: “As noted, I don’t think not having a Masters-level degree should DISQUALIFY you, but having the degree shd mean something”

OK, Brad. What does having the degree mean? What should it mean? What could it mean?

Stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself

ETA: It has come to my attention that as of 11:00 or so on November 23, this post has been removed from Drexel’s iSchool job site. I have no idea what, if any, effect this post may have had on that decision, but if the two events are related I am very appreciative towards the Drexel folks for at least taking these points into consideration.

Today’s doozy of a job posting is brought to you by Drexel University. Let’s take a look, shall we:

Title: Archives Technician
Employer: Drexel University Libraries
Location(s):
Philadelphia, PA — USA

Hours: Full-time
Salary: Commensurate with experience

Duties:
The Archives Technician supports the work of the University Archives and Special Collections by providing patron assistance; accessioning, arranging, describing and preserving print and electronic collections; and coordinating outreach efforts.

- Provide patron assistance to onsite and remote patrons, including maintaining the reference database, performing research, providing and scheduling reading room service
- Accession, arrange and describe archival collections, including creating finding aids
- Maintain the Archives’ desc-riptive tools, including its website, finding aids, style-sheets, web archive, and digital collections. Add content to iDEA, Drexel’s institutional repository.
- Plan and promote exhibitions, open houses, and other educational outreach events. Coordinate these outreach efforts and Archives’ social media (Web 2.0) activities with the Libraries’ Marketing & Events Associate
- Assist the Records Management Archivist in acquiring and accessioning electronic and print records generated by University offices and scholarly work created by faculty and students
- Train and supervise scanning technicians
- Other duties as assigned

Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree required
- Familiarity with the functions of an archives, library or information organization
- Superior organizational and communication skills and demonstrated service orientation
- Eager engagement in an environment of organizational change with a commitment to growth in skills and responsibilities
- Experience working in a collaborative environment, including working with people with diverse backgrounds.
- Sound judgment and the ability to handle responsibilities with both discretion and independence.
- Demonstrated appropriate initiative with the highest degree of integrity.

Ahh, the infamous “Archives Technician” position title. Back when I was a wee archivling, still in Library School but at the point where I began to think “Oh hay, I should start looking for that ‘job’ thing”, I would see “Archives Technician” positions all the time on USAJobs and other similar, bureaucracy-based job sites. I quickly learned that “archives technician” was code for “We don’t have to pay you as much money as we would if we called you an archivist, even though we’re going to make you do as much work as an archivist.” The above posting doesn’t disappoint on that front! It is a full-time job, for which the archives technician is expected to perform all of the traditional archivist duties: not just collections management and processing, but outreach and digital assets management, including responsibility for management of the archives’ web presence. (Is this full responsibility? Partial responsibility, e.g. for their particular unit? The ad doesn’t say.)  But I digress; expecting a technician to do an archivist’s work is so common it’s almost routine at this point.

No, the sticking point in my craw for this particular ad is the following:

Qualifications:

-Bachelor’s degree required

Sorry, I think I read that wrong. WHAT kind of degree?

-Bachelor’s degree required

Oh, for the love of Buddha.

So, let me qualify my impending rant thusly: I do not think that the MLS ipso facto qualifies or disqualifies any particular person for any particular position. It is to a certain extent a “gatekeeper” qualification– you want to be able to see, at a glance, that your applicant has put in the time and training for a professional position– but its absence does not necessarily mean that the person is unqualified for the job (think of the library paraprofessionals who are more familiar with database searching than the “full” librarians). So I really am not trying to be elitist here.

Having said that.

It is incredible to me that this position only requires a B.A. as its educational qualification. The job description is, as noted, a description that would fit a “regular” archivist for all but a few job duties (mostly administrative in nature), and most institutions would want their candidates to have a M.L.S. Come to that, Drexel may also want their “ideal” candidate to have a M.L.S. But by making the B.A. the minimum qualification, the hiring authorities there have cleverly set themselves up for one of the two following scenarios:

a) The position is filled by someone without an M.L.S. Because the candidate does not have “full” qualifications as an archivist, it is deemed “reasonable” to pay them less than they would be paid in a comparable position elsewhere.

b) The position is filled by someone WITH an M.L.S. Because the minimum qualification for this job is a B.A., it is deemed “reasonable” to pay them less than they would be paid in a comparable position elsewhere, because they are “overqualified”– nobody made them get that graduate degree. They will probably be paid more than person a), but not much more.

Now, I admit that this is just one institution that is shortchanging one archives position. Hell, on the Records Management side, the M.L.S. is USUALLY seen as an added bonus, rather than as a requirement for the job. The thing is…I paid a lot of money for my M.L.S. (Probably too much money, but that’s another story.) The M.L.S.’s return on investment is not wonderful to begin with, but the one expectation that one DOES have from this degree is that it qualifies one to do the kind of archival management jobs that pay a wage you can at least live on. The message being sent by this ad is that “we don’t value the M.L.S. as an indicator of professional training and experience.” And the more institutions that post jobs like this, the less that the degree is going to be worth. What’s more, this is from an institution WITH an archives program–you would expect the institutional archives to work to INCREASE the value of a degree from said program.

Yes, this is an entry-level position, and so you don’t expect to see “Ph.D. and 15 years of experience” and all of that stuff. But it would be nice of them to at least pretend that you need to have at least a minimal professional training qualification before you can jump right in to a professional-level position.

Sustainable archives, sustainable archivists

This blog is full of posts where we bash employers. And there are plenty of employers out there who deserve a good blog-bashing. But there are also archivists, even entry-level ones, who deserve some of the blame for poor work environments. I want to start that conversation by talking about my own work history.

Talking about past employers is always a risky proposition, so I want to start out by saying I spent three productive and rewarding years at my last job. It was my first real job ever. If I had it to do over, I would still take that job again. And yet…I have some real regrets. There were things I wish I’d done differently. There were things I wish my employer had done differently. And I hope this post sparks discussions not about what we did wrong, but about how we (and you!) can do the right things in the future.

One of my proudest accomplishments at my old job was starting a regular outreach program. In the 3 years I was there, we went from putting together an exhibit once in a while to four exhibits a year, multiple open houses, and other outreach events. Unfortunately, new programs like these don’t mean new funding. Our budget for receptions where we expected 50+ attendees was $50 or less—not nearly enough for professional catering.

“I will bake cookies,” I said.

And somehow, what I thought would be a stopgap measure until we had funding for a real caterer turned into my boss asking me to bake things for every event we held. There were days when I would put in my eight hours in the archives, and then spend the next eight hours buying ingredients, baking cookies, and cleaning my kitchen afterwards. (I did get reimbursed for whatever ingredients I had receipts for. And after about six months of this, my boss agreed to comp time. It worked out to about 3 hours off work for 8 hours spent baking.)

I gave up activities I loved so I could devote my evenings to baking. I turned down invitations to hang out after work because I knew that I still had many hours of kitchen work waiting for me. I ignored the concerns of my friends and colleagues. I truly believed that if I worked hard enough, whether in the archives or in the kitchen, my employer would promote me from archives technician to archivist.

The whole baking thing was problematic in so many ways. It violated my parent institution’s rules about unpaid overtime and approved catering vendors. Rather than making me an indispensable employee, all that hard work could have gotten me fired. When I started getting comp time (also against the rules for hourly workers like me), it sent a message that my time was better spent baking cookies than answering reference questions or creating digital exhibits. And how would baking cookies prove that I was a good archivist?

And despite all that–I loved it. Not the actual baking part, which was stressful and exhausting, but the day afterwards, when everyone who came to our events told me how delicious my cookies were. I didn’t get a lot of praise for my archives work, and the baking allowed me to finally feel appreciated. If my boss had done the right thing and said, “You can’t bake for our events anymore,” I would have been angry. My feelings would have been hurt. I might well have reacted badly. It would have been hard for both of us.

In the three years I spent in that archives, my boss was mostly very nice to me. He granted all my requests for vacation days. He regularly gave me work time to attend professional events. He listened to all my wild ideas for ways to improve the archives. And so when I said, “I will bake things for our events,” it was no surprise that he said yes.

My eagerness to please eventually became my own undoing. When my boss asked me to help write a proposal to fund a new archivist position, I jumped at the chance. The justification I wrote must have been pretty good, because we got funding for a full-time, permanent position. And because the proposal said that my responsibilities should be transferred to the new position, I had assumed that I would be promoted into it. That didn’t happen, and I was very fortunate to find a new position at another institution and avoid the indignity of a demotion.

During my last week at work, my boss said to me, “You need to know that you could not have worked any harder.” And what I heard was, No matter how hard you worked, it would never have been good enough for us. And it was true. They valued my skills, but they still didn’t consider me a professional. And even when I announced that I had a job offer and was going to leave, that didn’t change.

In spite of having a new job that pays well and provides a good work environment, I find it difficult not to be bitter about the way I was treated. My hard work did earn me merit raises totaling 81 cents an hour, and I gained experience that has served me well since I left. But when I think about what I could have accomplished, personally and professionally, with all the hours I spent making cookies, it makes me want to cry. I am overwhelmed not by anger, but by shame and regret. Why didn’t I stand up for myself?

It took over a year, but I finally did it. I marched into my boss’s office and said, not at all politely, “I’m not baking for events anymore.” That was that. I didn’t get fired. The world didn’t end. And I didn’t bake cookies anymore.

I’m now in the position of supervising other people, and it’s forced me to think about the ways I was treated as an employee, both good and bad, and how I want employers to treat me. In the abstract, my goals are pretty simple. If my employees are happy in their jobs, I hope to help them stay productive and fulfilled in those jobs for as long as possible. If they want to move on, up, or out, I’d like to create a work environment that helps them do that (without demanding work well above their pay grade). I want them to have lives outside of work. I never want them to be afraid to tell me I screwed up.

I’m not going to pretend I have this whole manager thing figured out, but I think my most basic responsibility is to make sure that my department accomplishes things that are proportionate to the number of hours my employees and I work and to our job classifications. If we’re spending four hours a day watching cat videos, we probably aren’t accomplishing as much as we could, and that’s a management failure. But if I set our goals so high that we can’t accomplish them without unpaid overtime, or if we go home at the end of each day stressed out about all the things we didn’t have time to do, I would also consider that a failure. And I think libraries and archives get this wrong. A lot. I’m all for efficiency, but not at the expense of our health, sanity, and personal lives. It’s okay if you don’t fully process all of your collections. It’s okay to fill a reception table with cookies you bought at Wawa. How are you going to argue for funding to do things you’re already doing? Why should your employer pay you more to do the work you already do?

I’ve argued before that the archives profession is not sustainable if there are no jobs for entry-level archivists. But I would also go further to say that the profession is not sustainable if the jobs that do exist are not sustainable on an individual level. No matter how many hours you work, how many collections you process, how many reference questions you answer, or how many cookies you bake, you will never be able to do all the things that need to be done at your archives. That’s the nature of our work, and you’ll burn out if you try. And you can’t take care of the archives if you can’t take care of yourself.

Edited 11/14: Today one of my staff brought in delicious cupcakes to share! And before I went home for the day, we had a little chat.

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to–I would never ask you to–at my last job my boss asked me to bake things…”

“When I bake, it’s because I want to.”

“…awesome! That is exactly how it should be.”

Awkward? Oh hells yes. Worthwhile? Absolutely.

so, how much can you make as an archivist, really?

I completed my grad degree in library and information studies over five years ago. I do not have a permanent, full-time job as an archivist, and I am about to be unemployed self-employed again in two weeks, when my current (part-time!) contract ends. It wasn’t my intention to do a whole lot of freelance copy-editing, proofreading — and some writing — while looking for a full-time job for half a decade, but life has a way of making things kind of wild and random. Predictability is boring, right?

Hunting for a job is all about smoke and mirrors: isn’t that what all this job searching crap teaches you, anyway? Play the game the employers want you to: we’re all a bunch of multi-tasking team players who also work well independently, right?

I’m re-posting something I wrote long before I was invited to contribute to this collective blog. It’s still relevant:  after half a decade of scanning job ads, composing cover letters and reconfiguring resumes, I’m feeling a whole lot of righteous anger whenever a ridiculous job posting appears on a job board or listserv.

The original post can be found here, but I’m re-posting in its entirety, so no need to aggravate any pre-existing repetitive stress injuries you may have developed by endless clicking, clicking, clicking….

Originally posted on Thursday, April 14, 2011:

It’s spring, so it’s time for a shitload of employers to post their Young Canada Works jobs: jobs that are partially funded by the government for students between the ages of 15 and 30. The employer pays half, the government pays half, and a student gets a job that is related to his or her career goals. The pay varies wildly, depending on how much money the institution has.

I recently heard a random statistic on the radio that a living wage in Vancouver is determined to be around the $18/hr mark. That’s $10 more an hour than the current minimum wage in British Columbia, and $8 more than what the minimum wage will be around this time next year. A living wage is what you need to cover basic expenses. The average hourly wage in BC is $23.16.

Here is one full-time position, posted to a listserv. They are paying $13 an hour.

Job Posting: Archive Digitizaion Assistant/Library Assistant
Vancouver

Position: Archive Digitization Assistant/Library Assistant
Duration: 14 weeks, 35 hours per week, Monday-Friday 9AM-5PM, $13/hr
Eligibility: Full-time post-secondary student returning to full-time studies in the Fall, aged 15-30
Start date: To be arranged no later than May 30th, 2011

http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.FA_dsp_details&newsid=1575

And here is another full-time position, for $23.96 an hour:

That second job posting? It pays more than my current job. I make less than the average hourly wage in BC. I’m also throwing 63% of what I earn towards rent right now — financial experts say you shouldn’t be paying more than 30-35% of your income towards rent/mortgage.

My current job requires a graduate degree in library and/or archives studies. That job listed above — no graduate degree necessary, but they still pay $1.00 + more an hour than what I am getting right now, with my fancy degrees. The City of Vancouver is currently advertising a position for a Parking Enforcement Officer: $23.96 per hour, and a high school diploma is the only educational requirement.

In 2005/06, I had a student job at McGill University that paid $9/hr.

The job wasn’t bad and at times it was really awesome, but the pay was terrible. I was 31 years old (too old to apply for any Young Canada Works jobs) and making $9 an hour, which was 50 cents more an hour than I had made 12 years previous, just out of high school, working in a chocolate store.

But I figured it was all temporary. $9 was a terrible wage, considering my education and skills, but it was in the field I wanted to be in, and hey! It’s just a student job! I’ll be making craploads in no time! [by "craploads" I figured I would be in the $45,000 to $55,000 range by year 5 of my life as an archivist -- entry level positions at Library and Archives Canada were being offered at $50,000 in 2006.] I will get a good job and pay back those loans, go on regular vacations, have a social life … I certainly didn’t anticipate developing an electrifying case of burnout during my first job out of grad school, or my brother-in-law killing himself and thereby shattering my family, or what all of the aforementioned would do to my world-view.

I have a job right now, and I am very, very grateful for it. But sometimes, I wish I could go back in time and make a different decision, one that didn’t include grad school. If I had stayed at the convenience store I was working at when I decided I needed to get more education, I would be earning more than what I am earning now (good union).

Or I would be in jail, because that job made me want to kill people. Or….. it doesn’t matter. I don’t have the money to get the supplies to build the time machine. But when my contract is done at the end of the summer, I’ll probably have the time to pursue a little physics research. We’ll see.

Dear Dr. Schellenberg

Dear Dr. Schellenberg,

I understand you are somewhat of an expert in the archival field. Let’s talk job etiquette.

Obviously this is a terrible job market. I’m really not picky. I’m willing to move almost anywhere that has at least one decent restaurant and to be able to live the lifestyle I’ve grown accustomed to (i.e., eating regular meals). So imagine my surprise when I see the perfect job opening only a few weeks after graduation. Never mind that this town doesn’t even get its own craigslist; there is at least one Thai restaurant and I could probably live in a mansion with a few acres of arable land for what I pay in rent now. A few weeks later I’m having a phone interview, being told that prospective candidates are being brought in within the next few weeks and I’m on my way to my mansion! After sending off some lovely thank-you notes, I waited. For four weeks.

At this point, I’ve slogged through a summer of part time jobs and freelance work. So one day I’m sitting at one of my desks/cubicles/workstations and I realize that I actually did interview for a real job and what ever happened to that Thai restaurant? So I send an e-mail to check in. A few days later I get the response that the position had been filled and there were many qualified applicants. It was pretty clear that if I hadn’t “checked in,” I probably would have never heard from them again.

So Schelly. Give it to me straight. In the archives world, is this even within the realm of appropriate employer behavior? I realize that I shouldn’t expect a response from every job that I apply to – that most of my lovingly crafted cover letters go into some void somewhere and get eaten – but to get no response after a phone interview? For a month? Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,
Aggravated in the Archives

Dear Aggravated Archivist,

There is much informational value in your inquiry. I am unsure what you mean by “craigslist” – is this a new method of appraisal?

Regarding your inquiry, this is quite rude. They put you in a real pickle! I am assuming this organization has a terrible handle on its own records management and may in fact still be using Jenkinson’s manual. You are likely better off not working for an institution such as this. Make sure to thoroughly appraise each job opportunity and avoid putting too much sentimental value on ethnic restaurants.