I think that the USA and the United Kingdom are pretty well on their own
in the way that there had been such a deliberate and sustained effort to
greatly widen differentials between "top" and "regular" salaries and other
benefits for nakedly ideological reasons over the past 10 - 15 years.  It
is therefore perhaps inevitable that governments and trustee boards of
independent museums dominated by people from the "corporate" sector and
its prevailing culture - who have themselves seen their remuneration
rising by telephone number amounts each year - have introduced the same
philosophy into the museum sector.

The result has been  very substantial "real terms" falls in lower
and middle level salary levels and grades and frankly astonishing
increases for a few "fat cats" (to use the now almost universal UK
terminology).  I would be interested to know how the courts let alone
trustees can claim that there is no "profit" in a quarter-of-a million
dollars per year (already there in the Art Museum Directors' latest
salaries survey) or even half-a-million plus elsewhere in the US
charitable sector is compatible with their "non-profit" status, especially
when deplorably low salaries and very poor other employment conditions are
offered to the bulk of the staff, up to and including quite senior
curators in many cases.

Elsewhere in the world recent USA and UK trends in both absolute terms
and - even more - in relation to internal differentials - are viewed with
surprise and astonishment.  Compared with our eight-fold or even higher
gap between the entry level for a graduate curator and the top
directorships in the USA many European countries would have a ratio of
only twice or three-fold.  In some countries (e.g. France, Norway) the
academic salaries convention is still fiolowed, i.e. the directors (and
others in top museum management positions) are paid their standard career
grade salary according to their qualifications and experience, plus a
modest responsibility allowance "for the duration of their mission" as
e.g. director.  Even the Director-General of the whole of the Museee du
Louvre complex in Paris (now the largest individual museum in Paris and
its commercial offshoots) as well as President of the Board of Trustees,
has the same regular salary as any "Conservateur de l'Etat" (State
curator) on the normal salary sacle for such a level - equivalent to
somewhere around US$75,000 per year -  and I doubt if his
President-Director-General responsibility allowance supplement
would bring his total earnings to more than $100,000 per year.  Compare
that job, scale of operations and level of responsibility with some
of those in the USA.

Patrick Boylan

==============================


On Tue, 22 Jul 1997, Robert A. Baron wrote:

> Subject: Re: salaries
> Newsgroups:   bit.listserv.museum-l
>
> The problem of low museum salaries can be understood clearly when one
> realizes that the "elite" museum profession rewards its workers with low
> pay.  Perhaps if museum work were less "elitist" the pay would be higher.
>
> As Governor E. Brown once told California professors: The pay is low
> because there are "psychic benefits" to the work. <g>
>
> r.baron
> [log in to unmask]
>