Hello Eugene;

Further to your response to Doug St. Clair:

I don't know if you read my e-mail of last week on the topic of job
security, but I share your concerns re the vialbility of permanent, secure
jobs in the museum industry.  For 6 years, I served as education officer for
a living history site located just outside of Ottawa in Ontario and was laid
off in April.  Our priciple funding body, the municipality of Cumberland
decided to abandon the Museum as a line department and instead, hire a
facilities managment company to run the site.

The company involved, SERCO, is an international corporation which
specializes in outsourcing.  Basically, the firm scouts contracts with
clients (usually government) who want to offload a responsibility.  The
client lays off their existing staff and SERCO goes out and hires new
staff - 'some' existing employees may be invited to 'transition' to SERCO,
but you are then in the position of competing for your job.  (Think about
this in terms of the qualifications of some of the graduates who have been
posting to the list in the last few weeks.)

In effect, this is union busting.  If you are 'fortunate' enough to be
transitioned, then in Ontario, where workers are protected by merger
legislation, SERCO is obligated to pay you your current salary and level of
benefits.  However, they do not honour seniority and your period of
employment with them is limited solely to the length of SERCO's contract
with the client.  SERCO's been making the headlines in Canada recently as
the Ministry of National Defense handed them a contract to take over the
operation of the air traffic control facility at Goose Bay, Labrador.
Without the protective legislation, transitioned employees found themselves
offered salaries 25% on average below their previous pay scale as the 'scope
of  work' had been altered - if anything like Cumberland's experience it's
increased!  Cumberland went from 5 full-time staff to 4 and from 7
interpreters to 3, while increasing opening hours by an additional day.

Fortunately, I was in the position of not having anyone financially reliant
on me, so I told SERCO to $@#%^&* their job as I felt it was unethical to
hand a publically owned collection over to a for-profit corporation to run.
There are virtually NO safeguards for the collection and while the contract
was slightly modified from the original, SERCO
could benefit from revenues gained from the disposal of artifacts.

And of course, they're recruiting volunteers like crazy - even advertising
publically that they expect volunteers to provide marketing and promotion,
collections management and education and interpretation expertise and
services!  A member of our local historical society has already been
recruited to deliver school programming, because surprise, surprise, the
newly hired staff has no knowledge of local history.

Anyway, sorry for the rant.  As you can imagine, I am still very ticked off
by the whole process - primarily because so many of my colleagues don't
appear to understand how very dangerous a precedent this is.  As for me, I'm
off to Korea for a year to teach English - going back to my pedagogical
roots.

Please, keep up the fight and make sure our colleagues realize that they
must take a position on unregulated outsourcing of cultural institutions and
the exploitation of volunteers, especially graduate students.

Sincerely,

Ann Gonneau
PS If I could think of an appropriate Python quote...  How about Peter
Sellers' "Up the Workers!" from his film on unionism?