Is LAM a community? What unites us as workers?

The authors acknowledge that libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) are not inherently a community. This section asks in what ways LAM functions as a community, and what unites people as LAM workers. A given mutual aid effort or group may find "community" hard to define. Regularly checking in to ask, "What is the LAM community?" and tracking the concept over time may be as valuable to a mutual aid effort as starting with a shared understanding. Below, the authors offer some reflections from our own long-running discussion.

Writing as, for, and to LAM workers is one activity that unites us - not just in exploring mutual aid at work but also in company with other ongoing efforts to support, organize, and speak up for LAM workers. (Please see List of Existing Mutual Aid Efforts in LAM for examples.) Putting workers first demands an inclusive understanding of who performs library, archives, and museum work. Those working within LAM institutions are bound together by occupation of similar work sites, no matter pay and precarity. As authors of this document, we also put workers first as a way to recognize LAM work performed outside of institutions, including by people who are themselves primarily outside of institutional life. If LAM workers allow similarities in working conditions to unite us, we may be better able to form relationships without institutional mediation.

Communities are as much about boundaries as they are about connection, so the authors find it meaningful to identify as workers rather than as managers or administrators. This assertion is a counterpunch to the institutional insistence on "workplace as family," respectability, and establishing affective relationships between workers and employers (that employers then control).

Mutual Aid as Community Building

Bringing mutual aid into the workplace raises questions about what LAM workers owe to other people and for whom we are equipped to care. For example, workers are equipped to care for people with whom we share needs or a sense of affinity, and to recognize the needs of those we have claimed as our community. LAM workers are less prepared to care for those we have not taken the time to understand, or with whom we have not made an effort to build relationships. As authors, we suggest that understanding and relationships don't necessarily follow from sharing a workplace or occupation. As many BIPOC and contingent LAM workers (like us) can attest, it's possible to feel little in common with those who work in the next cubicle or have the same title. There are likely people in each of our lives to whom LAM workers owe (and feel we owe) much more than we owe to fellow LAM workers.

Given all of this, we (the authors) propose mutual aid at work as a mechanism for building relationships and community. Through mutual aid, it may be possible to better know the needs of those with whom LAM workers share working spaces. This may lead to better understanding workplace structures, including how what happens at work is tied to what happens in the rest of workers' lives. The authors take heart from a labor organizing approach based on "bargaining for the common good," that sees working conditions as inseparable from the well-being of the communities in which workers are embedded. Mutual aid not only supports the common good where institutions fail and/or refuse to act, but it also sustains struggles that matter to workers and our communities.

Mutual Aid as a Critique of Institutional Structures

In our experience, LAM workers also share the lasting effects of dysfunctional organizations. In learning about mutual aid, the authors have recognized critiques of institutional structures. Mutual aid may offer a vehicle for moving LAM workers' dissatisfaction from complaint to critique to building alternatives. Low pay and contract work certainly unite us, but so do creativity, purpose, and embeddedness in place. Recognizing one another as LAM workers offers a way to recognize one another as humans—beyond what is available to us through formalized ethics and values statements of the LAM professions. So, although the authors don't necessarily see professional values, ethics, and identity as inherently comprising a community, we know that these are mutable and anticipate that engaging in mutual aid can help reshape them.

Exercises

For additional exercises, go to the section Exercises: Identify Community Needs and Exercises: Threat Modeling.

Further Resources

For further resources on identifying community needs, go to the Resources page section on Identifying Community Needs.