Where the Money Went

Words by Jack O'Malley

Institutional practices during the pandemic have undermined job stability in more subtle ways as well. In a survey by the Archival Workers Emergency Fund, respondents expressed concern about the elimination and consolidation of positions, reduction of contract lengths, inability to find new positions, and distribution of the impact along gendered and racial lines. 

Crowdsourced reporting in Google Docs and mutual aid requests further documents the systemic pattern of furloughs, forced retirements, transfers and pay reductions that have reshaped work in cultural heritage. When institutions needed money during the pandemic, they consistently chose to take it from their most vulnerable employees. 

While much of the information about layoffs is anecdotal, the public has access to comprehensive records for PPP loans. The SBA makes the entire dataset, some eleven million records, available to download as a CSV, and both ProPublica and CNN maintain a searchable web interface for the data.

Screenshots of the CNN database for PPP loans and the second draw PPP loan for the New York Transit Museum from ProPublica.

I became interested in the PPP dataset in October 2020 when I began a project to connect layoffs to digital programming for a museum studies course. By leveling the financial playing field and seeking to guarantee employment, I thought PPP loans could move discussions about employment security away from a strictly financial analysis and towards what the Digital Library Federation refers to as  the "structural norms of power, privilege, and oppression" in their Collective Responsibility Labor Advocacy Toolkit. I set out to capture how a museum's treatment of its most vulnerable employees might look if leadership teams used PPP loans as a tool to push back against the downward pressure exerted on precarious workers. For the hundreds of institutions that received PPP loans and still chose to furlough precarious staff, I wanted to ask where the money went. 

I first extracted data on loans for museums (NAICS code 712110) and libraries and archives (NAICS code 519120) with the goal of identifying examples of institutions that successfully used the PPP loan period, usually covering about eight weeks of payroll, to develop programs and policies that would ensure the long-term employment of staff.

My primary case study examined the New York Transit Museum, which received a loan for $316,922 in April 2020 and a second draw loan for $336,957 in February 2021. As of November 2020, about four months after their PPP loan ended, the Transit Museum had not laid off or furloughed any employees. Instead, they expanded their digital programs. During the case study period, the Education department produced near-daily live programming featuring educators, archivists, curators, and visitor services staff. I concluded that the museum successfully used the PPP loan to derive significant value from the expansion of its digital programs while employee payrolls were protected.

In April 2021, likely at the end of the Transit Museum's second draw loan, the New York Post reported that the Transit Museum would lay off a third of its staff—twenty-four employees from retail, education, curation, and administration—due to "fiscal challenges." A former employee told the Post that the Transit Museum’s management internally billed the cuts as a "restructuring." Yet, unlike so many institutions, the Post notes that the museum "retained a full staff through the first 12 months of the pandemic." 

Viewed through the lens of PPP loans, layoffs and furloughs at other institutions followed the same pattern as at the Transit Museum. At the end of April 2020, the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum received one of the highest dollar amounts per job ($51,892) of museums receiving PPP loans. By the following November, the Museum cited low attendance as a justification for layoffs, furloughs, and pay reductions. The Field Museum in Chicago received $4,757,455 to cover payroll costs; shortly after the loan period ended president Richard Lariviere announced significant layoffs, explicitly noting that the end of the loan period contributed to the decision. Only two days earlier, staff had called on the Field Museum to find "creative solutions" to remaining fully staffed, as reported in the Chicago Tribune. 

PPP loans rarely prompted a strategic shift that would benefit workers in the long run. Comparing the PPP dataset to publicly available sources, I found dozens of examples in the mold of the Field Museum. That layoffs and furloughs occurred so consistently and so quickly
after loans ran out serves as evidence that institutions chose to transfer economic and social risk to low wage earners when they failed
to use the loan period to build at least some resilience to remain fully staffed. The Transit Museum's experiment with digital programming successfully resisted the pressure to offload the economic burden to its low wage earners for at least six months, which gave employees much needed stability, dignity, and pay. The eventual layoffs illustrate that the temporary incentive to guarantee employment does not go far enough. More money will not do anything for workers without a consistent, explicit mandate for secure employment. 

Decisions about layoffs and restructurings will not suddenly reverse the economic consequences of the pandemic. Companies and institutions have always found ways to use moments of crisis to permanently alter work. Examining individual PPP loans shifts the conversation around employment from funding to practice. The sheer number of loans and the consistency of their failure to prevent layoffs, not only in cultural heritage but across industries, should shift the focus from individual institutions to the systemic changes happening in the field. Archivists and librarians across cultural heritage institutions will need to step forward to document, critique, and collectively resist practices of worker disempowerment.  

Resources

Archival Workers Emergency Fund

Museum Staff Impact of COVID19

Museum Workers Speak

Museum Educators Roundtable Mutual Aid Resources

New York Transit Museum Mutual Aid

Small Business Administration Paycheck Protection Program dataset 

More stories