The Effects of Scarcity Culture: Arts Workers on their Last Day

As tinny as the song is already, it sounds even more strident as the e-bike picks up speed from a turn and draws closer to where I stand on the porch waiting for my Uber to pick me up: “Said, if you / want to call me baby,” the singer sings as the bike approaches; “Just go ahead now,” the singer drones as the bike drives past, the words stretching out on a slowing tempo as the rider flies by. Is there something wrong with his radio? I think idly, adjusting my face mask against the summer breeze. But of course, there’s nothing wrong with his radio: it’s the Doppler Effect at work, pinching the song’s speed and pitch as the vehicle comes closer and loosening the sound in its wake. But isn’t that like all of life’s events and interludes? Pinched and rushed as they arrive, and spreading slow as they leave us behind. 

I am on my way to work for my last day. I am not leaving for a better job; I am not leaving on the happiest of terms. “I’m calling it an unsanctioned sabbatical,” I tell a friend. “But I’m really just quitting without the next thing lined up,” I admit. The Uber arrives, and I pile in with the things that I need to return to the office. My work computer. A wireless mouse. A key fob. A few books. It feels like a paltry load after eight years, but it’s still a bother to haul all this to work myself.

“It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” I say to the driver. I am invested in speaking as little as possible on the drive, and I hope an upbeat observation like this one at the beginning of the trip will be enough to make my subsequent silence seem friendlier. And it is a beautiful day, truly—twenty degrees and sunny, refreshed from a storm that blew through overnight.

* * *

It is July 30, 2021. I drop my things off at work, and then retreat to the waterfront for a creamy double-scoop of Kawartha Dairy’s Raspberry Thunder. For the first time since I was a teenager, I am unemployed.

Kathi Weeks begins The Problem of Work—a lodestar text for this essay—with a quote from John Stuart Mills’ and Harriet Taylor Mills’ 1869 essay, The Subjection of Women. “Though women do not complain of the power of husbands, each complains of her own husband, or of the husbands of her friends,” the married couple wrote. “It is the same in all other cases of servitude, at least in the commencement of the emancipatory movement. The serfs did not at first complain of the power of their lords, but only of their tyranny.” While I structure my essay with personal anecdotes, my intention is not to focus on the tyranny posed by any one person or place, but the systems and structures that make a long-term career as an arts worker difficult. My focus is on power itself, not those who wield it; I want to dilate the heart of the matter, to diagnose the illness, not describe its symptoms.

I love a perfect quit. I’ve been chasing one ever since starting my professional life at sixteen as a telemarketer in a depressing high-rise in downtown Hamilton, but quitting a job you hate as a teenager is worlds away from quitting a career you love at thirty-seven. I approached the problem as I do all major personal crises: with conversation, working out my potential losses in identity, purpose and meaning, balancing these against my potential gains in time, energy and balance. This writing is a continuation of these conversations; I have spoken to almost twenty arts workers from across Canada and the United States for this essay, all on the condition of anonymity. Their roles—from preparators to educators to curators—are as varied as their workplaces, which include museums and galleries, universities, and arts service organizations. What they share are burnout and precarity leading to, in some cases, quitting—quitting jobs, quitting the field. 

What also unites us are the difficulties of “creative” work in neoliberal institutions, with intellectual and creative freedom promised in lieu of traditional entitlements and secure contracts, with chronic overwork, low wages, and unrealistic expectations for emotional self-regulation as a substitute for improved conditions of work. What we feel is grief, true grief: it is hard to be a believer, and even harder to give that up. But before we talk about giving up, let’s first talk about buying in.

From the neoliberal university to the neoliberal workplace: a pipeline

“My colleague said to me, usually people who do this job have this degree. I was like, but I’m here.”

“I go to this school, I get this education—I did feel primed and ready for the workforce, but I didn’t think about the problem—the cost of education. How did I get into this mess?”

“I got my loans forgiven, but now I have so much credit card debt. Does it even matter?”

Before we begin talking about the neoliberal university, a quick and dirty working definition: neoliberalism, as I use it here, is a political ideology that seeks to transfer responsibility from the public sector to the private sector, and from the institution to the individual. It is pragmatic, but it also has an affective front: it allows the powers that be to reframe cultures of scarcity into cultures of exceptionalism, turning our fears into our desires, sowing competition where solidarity might flourish. Neoliberalism is when your boss says you are lucky to get this job, out of so many applicants, and that knowledge reinforces your replaceability; neoliberalism is when your board treasurer tells you that you should quit if you don’t love it, and your burnout becomes your personal failing; neoliberalism asks you to regulate yourself, rather than change the circumstances that threaten to rupture your self and the selves of others around you. But before we enter the workforce, the place where we are first disciplined in this neoliberal order is in the university.

For many years, I sat on a board of advisors for a postgraduate program in museum practice. We were courted as “industry advisors,” and at each meeting we were invited to report on trends in the field to ensure that the program’s offerings matched what us insiders needed in our early-career employees: should students learn this museum database software or that one; should there be a focus on private collections; how do we allay our students’ frustration with unpaid internships. Since the 1990s, universities have focused less on traditional liberal arts education and more on market-driven offerings—coinciding neatly with a boom in “professional practice” programs, much like the one I graduated from in 2010 and advised on for many years. These specialized degrees—designed, in many cases, by specialists in the field rather than university faculty—are increasingly becoming the norm, functioning as educational gatekeeping in an already classist field.

Why is it that students are taking on significant debt to learn how to enter a catalogue entry into a museum database, or to file a condition report? How is it that there are advanced degrees and certificates designed not to paradigmatically shift our understandings of these institutions in order to transform them, but to train students in their everyday practices and procedures? The skills that were once learned in the first years of an entry level job are now being conferred in a classroom, with students paying for the privilege to receive them. Regardless of whether we count our educational investments in time or money, these sunk costs are outlays that have already been incurred by the time we enter the job market, intensifying our attempts to make good in a system that proves once and again to be rigged against us.

Perpetual emergence in a perpetual emergency

“They hire very young people to fit more senior positions—they’ll get a go-getter, but then, you know, that continues along your career path. I stagnated at 50k in my late thirties.”

“All of this excess responsibility without really looking at what the job entails—the moral is, I’ve accepted things because it’ll build my skill set, and it’ll do really well for me in future jobs, but it’s unfair.”

“They keep saying, ‘It’s an entry level job, a ‘stepping stone.’’”

When I think back to the summer of 2009, I remember the California sun on honeyed travertine, helicopters hovering over the horizon near the UCLA campus after Michael Jackson’s death, and all the other interns wearing cocktail dresses to our afternoon orientation sessions. I was interning at one of the world’s richest museums, but it, too, was struggling in the recession: depending on who you asked, somewhere between ten and twenty-five percent of the institution’s staff had been laid off or their contracts unrenewed. The offices of the museum were simultaneously half-empty and extraordinarily young: the only salaries that survived the cuts were the lowest ones, and major roles were held by junior employees tentatively flexing their muscles in a paranoid office culture of austerity and lack. 

At the time, I thought that this was an anomaly, that the mid-career and senior staff would return once the economy improved, or that the more junior staff would age into their roles with corresponding increases in their salaries. But at each institution that I entered, the staff remained young—until I realized, after 30, that I was among the oldest people at each place I worked. Others I spoke to noticed the same issues, discovering the same ceiling beyond which it was difficult to rise. In unionized workplaces, this barrier was often codified in administrative processes: employees were hired with skill sets beyond what the job description required, and routinely used these skills in their day-to-day activities. Their job descriptions, however, remained at the entry level, depressing their earnings and limiting their bargaining power. When these employees notified their employers of the discrepancies between their job descriptions and job activities, responsibilities were removed rather than the descriptions enhanced, thus negating their rights to increased compensation. 

In non-union environments, more senior employees were still hired in what were listed as entry-level job competitions, but enhanced titles were offered in lieu of pay increases, raising a worker’s public profile without improving their material conditions. In both situations, the affective regime of the neoliberal workplace took a paternalistic tone—both management strategies emphasize the ways in which these roles can be “stepping stones” to other positions in other institutions where that employee might hope to be more fairly compensated, and that others in these roles were driven by “passion” more than paycheck. These institutions’ benign paternalism deflects attention away from the dearth of mid-career and senior level positions in the arts, as each time one of my mid-career or senior colleagues leaves their roles, their positions are reset to near-entry level. Some of these job descriptions beggar belief—positions advertised to early career professionals of two or three years of experience include significant personnel oversight and complex portfolios of responsibility stretching across multiple departments, far outstripping what an entry-level employee should be expected to know. Any institution advising their employees that these roles are prelude to more senior roles at other organizations should ask themselves why such positions don’t exist at their own—there’s a missing middle between the executive and all other roles, and we need to talk about it.

I was surprised, too, to speak to workers at institutions known for treating their employees better than others in the field. A common refrain among them was this notion of the “golden handcuffs”—the mere fact of being paid better than others in similar institutions was a kind of entrapment that reduced these employees’ abilities to advocate for better working conditions. Despite the fact that these employees struggled with the same issues that others described—low wages, precarity, freelance, gig work, and short-term contracts—their bargaining power was reduced without a better institution to point to for comparison. This isn’t a case of good actors and bad actors within the sector: even the best institutions are in a race to the bottom, and we need to be vigilant while the ongoing economic emergencies of the late pandemic and spiraling inflation speed their descent.

The problems of the professionalized not-for-profits

“Okay, so I’m doing all of these things, but I’m not being compensated—the cost of living, inflation, everything is going up, but our salaries are staying the same.” 

“We all got together, and we asked for a raise. And we didn’t hear back from them for a year.”

“‘You need to expect that we’re here because we’re passionate about the work that we’re doing, and these aren’t high paying jobs, but we do this because we love the work that we do’—coming from somebody who’s making over 50k more than I was, it always hurt.”

In 1969, the Art Workers Coalition in New York City issued a series of thirteen demands to the city’s museums, first among them that museum boards be comprised of one-third museum workers and one-third artists. So much of what the AWC demanded is still urgently required today—minimum fees paid to artists for exhibition rights, including for works held in permanent collections; more representation for BIPOC and women artists; clear political action against climate change, gentrification and war—but their demands for transforming how boards are composed somehow feels totally novel, a new verse rather than a common refrain.

Museums are historically embedded settler colonial institutions, but they are also charitable organizations organized and administered in a neoliberal paradigm. Our governing boards are generally comprised of well-heeled businesspeople, whose understanding of the needs of an organization’s audience and staff is filtered through their elite experiences of class, voluntarism, and biases around passion work. Museums are disciplinary organizations: they ostensibly determine what is and what is not culture, and the types of behaviours and attitudes that people must assume to gain proximity to it. But they do not only discipline members of the public, but also their staff: time and time again, my interviewees expressed frustration with how complaints were dealt with (or not dealt with); the racism, homo- and transphobia, sexism, classism and ableism that is normalized and unaddressed; and the requests for improved working conditions that were treated with suspicion and hostility. For volunteer board members, it is often difficult for them to remember that their passion projects are other people’s workplaces, and that employees should be offered safe and healthy jobs, with traditional workplace entitlements like benefits, secure contracts, and pension plans. They also operate at a significant remove from workers, with board meetings closed to all but the executive, who is tasked with working with them to set budgets, determine policy, and deal with HR issues.

I have worked with great boards in the past, but maintaining one is akin to keeping an electron in an excited state. Boards can look democratic from the outside—majority rules, after all—but they are paternalistic in nature, supposing that not-for-profit employees require oversight from the moneyed classes to function responsibly. Executive staff are often caught in the middle between workers and the board, trying to moderate and justify the more progressive aspects of an organization’s work against the inherent conservatism of their board. This conservatism extends to the working conditions of these institutions—as long as pay remains distressingly low in the field, few boards are going to approve budgets that provide fair wages and good benefits to all of their employees. This attitude trickles down to senior staff, resulting in a workplace that is hostile to criticism, let alone self-reflexivity and progressive change. In this sense, the Art Worker’s Coalition wasn’t wrong: only the arts worker understands that arts work is work. Passion is what we have when we have a well-balanced life, in which work does not dominate.

Conclusion: new solidarities for new times

“No one knows what to do about it. Beyond quitting. That seems to be the only option available to people right now.”

“I took this path, I did this work, I put all these years in at this institution—to leave that is really scary. My burnout manifests in not even being able to think.”

“They use you for all you’re willing to give, and then you leave.”

“Honestly, I don’t know if I’m quitting or if I’m failing.”

Precarity is a labour issue, but it’s also a life issue—a barrier against living as full a life as possible under the conditions of late capitalism. I have experienced precarity on the clock but also on my thirty-fifth birthday, in the bathtub with my now-husband, discussing whether or not to have children, achingly aware of all of the ways in which my body was revealing its age; at the No Frills on Wellington, doing mental math as I added items to my grocery basket, already deep in overdraft despite my full-time job; turning down family wedding invitations, or holding off on visiting my pregnant sister because I couldn’t afford to buy a gift, or pay for airfare; and deciding against requesting an unpaid medical leave for my unrelenting burnout and anxiety because I was concerned about my loss of income. The struggle for better labour conditions is precisely the struggle for better life conditions, because one cannot live on passion alone—despite how our passion for this work is operationalized against us, again and again.

“Arts workers cannot subsidize an unviable sector through their own sacrifice—it won’t work in the long-term,” Jim Stanford of the Centre for Future Work tells me in a telephone call on my thirty-ninth birthday. He and I are chatting because I have recently become obsessed with the idea of sectoral bargaining, and how the Status of the Artist Act functions as a kind of blueprint for its adoption here in Canada. Just as the Status of the Artist Act allows CARFAC to negotiate industry-wide minimum licensing fees for artists, sectoral bargaining creates a framework wherein workers in a given sector negotiate with management representatives to create a baseline set of employment standards across a sector, protecting both traditionally defined employees as well as contract and gig workers. It is union activism writ large: instead of trying to negotiate with individual workplaces across a scattered field, it allows workers to build greater solidarities and, with increased power, demand far more significant changes. And just as institutions first balked at paying CARFAC fees, institutions will play broke for the increased personnel costs and decreased management power that come with real change; but if it is the cost of doing business, the money will be found, and the power will be ceded.

There is a cost of inaction that extends beyond our field. Just as language around creativity and culture helped to gentrify the cities of the late 1990s and beyond, language around creativity and culture is gentrifying old forms of precarious labour. Does a curator of sneakers get paid as much, or more, than a retail store manager? A curator of volunteers, or a volunteer coordinator? As a sector, we have shown that workers will give much away in order to follow our passions. We now need to demonstrate, as a sector, what it means to take those powers back. Under a neoliberal regime, the culture of scarcity is rebranded as a culture of exceptionality, asking us to believe that we might survive these difficult careers through competition and not solidarity. We need new solidarities for new times.

I am finishing my final few edits to this piece in a rear-facing window seat, a passenger on a Via train out of Toronto. When I pitched this article four months ago, I sincerely thought I had left the field for good. But now I’m being tugged backwards in time to a new job in an old career, and already the pacing of my life is tightening up, shrinking the loose weave of the last eighteen months. Some combination of boxed wine, great people, and the thrill of seeing a brilliant team try to do this work differently brought me back in, but change within any one institution is tenuous when the field itself remains untransformed. There are remarkable people working in the arts, resilient and passionate, individually capable of great things and together capable of greater. The pandemic has shown us how much worse labour conditions can get in these times of perpetual crises; it is now time to think differently about how to stop this race to the bottom. The challenge is now to think collectively and to think broadly: we have lost too much and too many in this current model, and that has to change.  

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Emily McKibbon is a Windsor, Ontario-based curator and writer. She is grateful to everyone who shared their thoughts and experiences for this article.

This article is published in issue 40.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue