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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
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?
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