Subject:
Re: why museum salaries are low
Date:
Tue, 22 Jul 1997 11:08:16 -0400
From:
Peter Vreeland <[log in to unmask]>
>According to our statistics, more people in Australia visit museums and
>galleries than attend football matches. So how come the footie players get
>more pay than we do?
>
>Heleanor Feltham
> ----------
The average career in American football spans about 3 to 5 years.
( this is just playing mind you not broadcasting or other spin off
things)
>From my experience in museums many people are around for the long haul 20 to 30 years of a museum career.
Let's sayThe average salary for football players is $100,00.00.
Let's say the average museum professional makes $30,000.00.
5 times $100,00.00 =$500,000.00
20 times $ 30,000.00=$ 600,000.00
We do ok in the long run and nobody tries to tackle a Museum
professional.
Pete
Like what you do and do what you like.
Peter:
That is an utterly specious argument. It makes the false assumption that
professional athletes remain unemployed and never earn another cent once
their athletic careers are over which, as we all know, is hogwash. In
fact, many corporations hire former "big name" athletes, at big
salaries, just to act as spokespersons and figureheads who will attract
clients by their association with the firms in question. Most, however,
go on to well-paying careers in other fields. You cannot, therefore,
compare their professional athletic career earnings with the lifetime
earnings of a museum worker. Furthermore, the assumption that all
athlete's professional careers are as short as they may be in the NFL is
invalid, and even there careers as short as only 3 years are atypical.
Heck, in pro baseball, basketball, and even hockey, many players have
10, 15, and even more years of multi-million dollar earnings. If you
work out how much these guys get paid per hour of actual work, including
training and practice time, you will find that it often runs to the tens
of thousands of dollars. If you work it out, you'll find NFL
placekickers who actually get many thousands of dollars *per kick*!
Given their educations and qualifications, museum professionals and
archaeologists are, without a doubt, the lowest paid professionals in
the labour marketplace. I ran an informal survey on the subject of
salaries here and on Arch-L about a year ago. I didn't publish the
results because too few people responded for the results to have any
real statistical validity. Nevertheless, it is true that there are one
heckuva a lot of university graduates, many if not most with one or more
postgraduate degrees, who are earning significantly less than letter
carriers, trash collectors, janitors, and even many cabbies and other
so-called "blue-collar" workers, most of whom have little or no
post-secondary education and, in many cases, don't even have high school
diplomas. When compared against workers, especially unionized workers,
in almost all other areas, museum workers and archaeologists
consistently rank at or near the bottom of the list in terms of average
income, benefits, job security, and so on. By and large, we do NOT do
well in the long run.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the only area where respondents rated our
professions highly, and in many cases at or near the top, was in terms
of job satisfaction. In other words, we habitually accept lower monetary
compensation and poor working conditions in exchange for doing work we
love. However, while most acknowledged that such a trade-off used to be
acceptable, the harsh realities of life in the modern world have simply
made such a position untenable. Many of us can simply no longer afford
to continue to work for the wages we have gotten by on in the past
because we just don't earn enough to pay the bills. And the situation is
getting worse, not better. As public funding for museums and archaeology
dwindles away, the numbers of available paying jobs continue to
diminish, hours are cut, positions are cut, wages and salaries stagnate
or are reduced, museums and other institutions are closed, research is
curtailed, and opportunities are simply disappearing. Governments are
less and less interested in continuing to fund heritage-related
programmes, departments, organizations, and institutions that they have
in the past unless it can be shown that they actually generate
significant revenue, or unless there is an overwhelming public demand
for the continuance of such programmes and funding.
Unfortunately, as we all know, the heritage community has never been
particularly vocal or successful at getting its message heard, much less
accepted in the corridors of power. And as much as we would like to
believe otherwise, in Canada at least, the public at large really
doesn't support the heritage community. Increasingly, archaeologists and
museum curators are met with overwhelming apathy when they call for
halts to government cutbacks of already critically underfunded
programmes and institutions. "Why should the government put public money
- taxpayers' hard-earned dollars - into museums and archaeology when
hospitals, libraries and schools are closing?" is a question often
heard, and it's a very difficult one to answer without our appearing
only to be self-serving and attempting to feather our own nests.
Until we can convince the public that their heritage is something to be
valued and treasured and protected, then we cannot expect to have the
support of the politicians who hold the public purse strings. But
convince the public that we provide a valuable service, and the public
will in turn convince the politicians that money should be spent in our
areas. Then, and only then, will there be sufficient money available to
allow for increases in wages and salaries, and new job creation, in
museums and in archaeology.
Just my 2 cents (well, maybe a nickel's) worth. End soapbox mode.
Chris Andersen
|
