New Delhi: This past week, a news report about the National Museum in New Delhi eliminating nearly 100 posts caught the readers’ eye. Coming at a time when the government is failing to generate more jobs as promised, this was sure to raise a few eyebrows, and so it did.

But the devil was in the details of the story.

R. Mani, the director general of the National Museum, the repository of the country’s more than two lakh prized antiquities, told the Times of India, “The posts that have been eliminated (by the Ministry of Culture) had been lying vacant for five years or more. We are trying to revive them. Actually, these vacancies couldn’t be filled earlier because we couldn’t find any suitable candidates. Now, we will outsource some of the work and try to revive posts. That will take six months to a year. As of now, the critical functions and conservators and curators will be handled by existing staff and through outsourcing.”

He added that the museum’s expansion plan would also be handled “through outsourcing”.

Mani essentially signalled the Ministry of Culture’s strategy to subcontract these (and perhaps some more) jobs to private entities. The justification for outsourcing – not being able to “find any suitable candidates” – does not hold up on closer inspection.

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As per the vacancy announcement list available on the museum's website, only a handful were advertised. One of the two vacant posts of additional director generals was filled in 2017. The other one has since not been advertised for. The post of the joint director general was advertised in 2017. In 2018, two or three posts, including those with a fixed term, were filled. In June this year, an advertisement was issued by the museum administration to fill up six vacancies by “retired government employees” to serve as “consultants/PA/PS” (personal assistant/personal secretary). Clearly, in the last five years, most of the jobs eliminated were not advertised.

What Mani specified as the remedy to the problem – outsourcing – is a growing trend worldwide. In the past decade and a half, it was noticed in Canada, the US and the UK. Though the trend began by outsourcing commercial activities in the museums – like running the coffee and curio shops – non-commercial roles in these public institutions are also increasingly becoming privatised. And the drift is only catching up in the rest of the world.

In a paper published in the International Journal of Arts and Management in 2000, Jeff Harisson, then the curator at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Virginia, held up the basic flaw of this trend. He wrote:

“While privatization has been largely confined to the more commercial aspects of government services, governments in Canada, the United States and Britain have reduced their commitments to social and cultural institutions such as museums and have been extending privatization techniques into traditional public functions. In the museum community, this has meant increased outsourcing of curatorial positions and tentative outsourcing of museum management.”

Harisson added, “In a climate of privatization and reduced government support, museums, always treading a fine line between their need for money, have become increasingly ‘commercial’.”

The British Musuem fiasco

But what is to be highlighted at this point is, the utter fiasco the British Museum has found itself in due to privatisation carried out since 2012. The cumulative effect of this move could be traced in British newspaper headlines this past week.

In 2012, the British Museum management's outsourcing began by privatising 136 low-paid jobs, such as cleaners and maintenance staff. Backed by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCSU), they resisted the move and hit the streets. Then PCSU general secretary Mark Serwotka was quoted in The Guardian saying:

“Cleaners and other museum staff work incredibly hard to maintain this prestigious and popular cultural attraction and we know this is appreciated by the millions of visitors the museum attracts every year. Introducing the profit motive is not only unnecessary, it risks undermining these important services to the public…we will not allow these jobs to be outsourced without a fight.”

Most workers were worried about losing their jobs in the transition, and the private player not protecting their salary structure.

Nevertheless, the museum management handed over the support services to Carillion, Britain’s second largest construction company and also an outsourcing giant. Only 60 of the original 136 employees were given jobs.

In 2018 though, Carillion was busted, leaving not just these museum employees, but 43,000 workers unsure of their jobs globally. The museum workers yet again protested, demanding that the museum management take them in. News reports said the authorities refused to meet them, asking them to speak to Carillion’s administrators, PriceWaterhouseCooper.

The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee quoted one employee in her article. “Once Carillion took over, vacancies were unfilled, jobs disappeared, so we each covered bigger and bigger areas…I used to mop and polish stone floors, clean with Brasso (a brand of silver polish), clean the glass cases. But now there is only time to pick up rubbish.”

Yet another worker was quoted complaining, “There’s never enough equipment. I can spend half an hour trying to find a dustpan, or dragging a Hoover (a vacuum cleaner brand) miles from another department.” She quoted a Museum trustee saying it was a mistake to have outsourced the jobs to Carillion, but added that it couldn’t take back the employees as it had “no legal right to break the contract with Carillion as long as PwC keeps it going.”

Fall in quality control

In the case of India’s National Museum, the likely fall in quality control can’t be ruled out already. Only “15-odd people” have been reportedly taking care of two lakh antiquities. Of the 92 jobs that have been abolished by the Ministry of Culture on July 23, nearly half were of “functional and technical staff”.

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Toynbee noted in her 2018 column, “Carillion’s lesson is that long-term risk is never outsourced.” She also gave examples of similar outsourcing drives running into trouble, such as the Imperial War Museum sub-contracting its gallery services in 2014 to Shield, which was bankrupted too in 2016. “Tate’s visitor services were outsourced to a firm using zero hours contracts, paying far less. Last year (2017), the contract was passed on to Securitas, which also de-recognised the union.”

This past July 15, British Museum trustee and well known novelist-activist Ahdaf Soueif made news after she resigned from her post. In a public statement published in the London Review of Books (LRB) blog, the writer of the 1999 Booker nominee, The Map of Love, cited multiple issues for her resignation. Most of the details she listed rung around the museum’s privatisation drive and possible compromise of its position as a public institution. The immediate trigger behind the resignation was the museum’s decision to renew its contract with British Petroleum (BP) to sponsor high profile exhibitions. BP was involved in not only causing one of the worst environment disasters from its undersea oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, but was accused of trying to cover it up.

Soueif’s statement, which has received the support of the museum's workers, expressed through a public statement issued on July 22, stated that in early 2016 itself, though she raised the issue of BP’s “very high profile sponsorship of public exhibitions with the museum’s board, the chair of trustees and the director”, it “was an education for me how little it seems to trouble anyone – even now, with environmental activists bringing ever bigger and more creative protests into the museum. The public relations value that the museum gives to BP is unique, but the sum of money BP gives the museum is not unattainable elsewhere.”

She also pointed out:

“Public cultural institutions have a responsibility: not only a professional one towards their work, but a moral one in the way they position themselves in relation to ethical and political questions. The world is caught up in battles over climate change, vicious and widening inequality, the residual heritage of colonialism, questions of democracy, citizenship and human rights. On all these issues the museum needs to take a clear ethical position.”

Jeff Harisson concluded his paper with these defining words, “By the very lack of a framework in which to debate privatization in museums, the museum community has been slow to recognize and deal with the threats that the privatization movement poses to its mission and mandate.”

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