On Fri, 31 Jul 1998, Donna J. Carty wrote:

> Subject: Re: The Value of an M.A. - $7.25/hr?
>
> I wonder how salaries at museums compare to Adam Smith's model that no
> employee should be paid more than six times what the lowest paid employee is
> paid.  I think a lot of areas of employment would be a lot better if this
> applied.
>
========================================

Donna:

You have hit on one of the ways in which despite the protestations that
they had a two hundred year legitimacy because of their claimed foundations
in Adam Smith, "Thatcherism" in the UK and its "Reaganomics" imitation in
the USA were so selective and dishonest in the use of Adam Smith.

The truth is that in many parts of the world (corrupt "kelptocracy"
dictatorships excluded, of course) the Adam Smith principle still applies
except in the case of e.g. sport and entertainment stars etc.  This is
certainly true of museums - check out comparative earnings of both
professionals and ancillary/manual workers in Scandinavian countries for
example - where the bottom to top salaries ratio is probably nearer to
three or four to one rather than Adam Smith's six to one maximum.

In France the ENTRY salary for a graduate trainee curator entering the
national museums, monuments and archives etc. training school, the Ecole
National du Patrimoine, is around US$25,000, and the MAXIMUM for someone
with around 20 years seniority is around US$75,000.  In addition there are
responsibility allowance additions for Directors and senior staff - but
only payable while they undertake the identified additional
responsibilities.  The last time I heard the responsibility allowance for
the post of Director of the whole of the Louvre complex (including serving
as President of the Board of Trustees and director of its major commercial
property development etc.) was around US$35,000 - bringing the total
salary up to around US$11,000 - a ratio of less than five to one compared
with the trainee curator scale, and perhaps Adam Smith's six to one
compared with the minimum wage for non-professional staff.

It is largely (almost wholly?) the USA and UK which have (very recently,
in fact) widened pay differentials to ratios that can be in excess of 100
to one in some of our recently privatised utilities, and the international
telephone number salaries for top executives of private businesses.  In the
UK museums the movement has been in both directions: REDUCING by as much
as 60% the maximum of national museum curatorial salary scales by
scrapping the Civil Service/French etc. style guaranteed "career grades"
while one of the last moves of the departing Conservative government was to
push through an increase of up to 47% in a single year from 1 April
1997 in the maximum salary of the top civil service grades (against which
top museum salaries are still compared, though no longer automatically
linked) - under the guise of a further move to "performance-related pay"
and rewarding "success".

So far as the USA is concerned, just look carefully at the trends in the
annual AAMD surveys of remuneration in major American art museums over
the past four or five years.

The typical trustee of a major museum is nowadays probably a successful
businessman who will have seen cumulative double-figure (or even
treble-figure) annual increases in his own total remuneration and
benefits every year through the '90s, while he has been forcing down in
cash terms (let alone "real" - inflation-proofed -terms) the pay of office
and factory workers in his own business - citing "market forces" in each
case.

It is therefore not surprising that they would expect to apply the
same "market forces" to museum salaries - hence the deplorably low pay
offered at the bottom end of the museum jobs "market", while the
increasingly frequent $200,000top salaries for such museums (unheard of
three or four years ago) are - no doubt - substantially less than the
annual fashion or pocket money allowances that such trustees are no doubt
paying to wives or girl friends - judging by the sort of evidence that
regularly appears in divorce and "palimony" court cases.

Donna is quite right: we need a return to sensible economics and basic
justice in respect of museum salaries.  Perhaps there ought to be more and
serious discussion also about how non-profits of all kinds should be
spending their hard-won charitable funds, and particular whether people on
relatively moderate salaries, who provide the bulk of the donated and
earned income of charities, approve of the charity spending their money on
the payment of salaries to CEOs, Directors and other senior staff that
are beyond the wildest dreams of the bulk of not only the other staff, but
of the donors themselves.

Patrick Boylan