MUTUAL AID AT WORK

Our goal is to provide organizers with a resource to form their own mutual aid networks in the Library, Archive, and Museum (LAM) community, as well as bring awareness to existing mutual aid groups and efforts to support LAM workers. This resource will provide possible pathways organizers may take and relevant examples from the workplace, and challenge organizers to interrogate what they define as their community.

We aim to motivate library, archive, and museum workers in the United States to create informed mutual aid networks as a foundation for connecting with and organizing colleagues to take collective action. We hope that these mutual aid networks will communally address issues of precarious employment and limited access to critical resources highlighted by, but not originating from, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our Contributors

This document was originally prepared by:

• Lauren Goodley (2021–23)

• Katharina Hering (2021–23)

• Mary Kidd (2020–21)

• Carli V. Lowe (2020–22)

• Caitlin Rizzo (2021–23)

• Sandy Rodriguez (2020–23)

• Lydia Tang (2021–22)

• Jennifer Wachtel (2020–21)

• Amy Wickner (2020–21)

• Karly Wildenhaus (2020–21)
  
  

An initial group came together during 2020–21 in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic and are identified occasionally throughout this resource as "we" or "we (the authors)." From 2021 to 2023, additional contributors helped adapt and prepare the document for the web. This is a living resource that will be reviewed and updated subsequently as it is adapted throughout various mutual efforts, projects, and discussions over time. Suggested revisions, additional examples and exercises, and recommended resources may be sent to archival-workers-collective[at]googlegroups.com.

We believe in taking time to establish positionality when organizing mutual aid networks at a workplace. We would like to model this behavior by recognizing our own positions as contributors. While the contributors hold multiple intersecting identities, we all identify as women working in the GLAM industry within predominantly white academic institutions. In addition, many of our contributors currently work in managerial positions within their workplaces. However, we come to this conversation as workers, remembering the effects of work in precarious positions within our own past and amongst our close friends and communities. Finally, we would like to recognize that we are outside of a longer tradition of mutual aid among the marginalized and minoritized that pre-exist academic appropriations of the term.

Our Demands

We demand of each other ... 

• Solidarity in and out of the workplace.

• Building power with one another as workers and with communities beyond the immediate workplace.

• Democratic, worker-led organizing to disrupt oppressive, capitalist power structures that divide and denigrate workers. 

How to Use This Resource