Costs of Cutting Culture
As people who follow my blog here on medium, as well as at “little scrap of ivory’, (https://littlescrapofivory.wordpress.com) having worked for several years in the culture sector, as a member of PCS, it’s been a subject I’ve written about extensively. Saturday June 5th 2021, saw visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum unable to see the ceramics and furniture collections. The galleries were closed as staff have been cut to the bone.
This has been a trend in the culture sector that the pandemic has exacerbated, and it’s all the more galling as it comes from cultural institutions, that for social conservatives consists of the “metropolitan elite”. Institutions that condemned by these same, small c “conservatives’ for being too “woke” for their own good.
Like confessing one’s sins, the Cultural Bailout from “Dishy Rishy”, was supposed to solve all ills, but as Nosheen Iqbal, writing in the Guardian on October 18th 2020 pointed out “Arts organisations and businesses desperate for financial survival have been told that rescue grants are tied to them publicly praising a government campaign”.
She also noted that “The directive, first reported by the trade magazine ArtsProfessional, added that: “In receiving this funding, you are agreeing to acknowledge this funding publicly by crediting the government’s Culture Recovery Fund.” https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/oct/18/want-an-arts-bailout-then-youd-better-praise-sunak-co
The same Guardian article highlighted that “The grants, which are only permitted to cover costs until March 2021, offering many organisations only temporary rather than permanent relief. More than a third of grants on Saturday were awarded to London-based organisations, with just one in Scotland — comedy club Salt ’n’ Sauce Promotions — being awarded £71,000. Almost a third of applicants failed to secure any funding at all”
The bailout money, which I want to stress has been totally paltry when compared to other western economies, with populations comparable to the UK, has not filtered through to those in the galleries, museums, and heritage sites, around the country.
For example, despite the government largess, last year, the Southbank Centre, still saw fit to sack, hundreds of its Visitor Services staff, only to have to rehire people again and put them on furlough.
Fast forward, to 2021 and things have not got that much better, given that nearly every branch in the culture sector that has faced redundancies/privatisation have all reported back on the same thing: difficulty in having enough staff, essential to ensure that the visitors and collections are safe! This applies of course beyond the pandemic itself.
Despite the preaching of how important health and safety is and of being fire safety compliant etc. Many venues are so short staffed, that one brand new manager (who only began working around four weeks ago) was managing a Liverpool waterfront site on their own for the past three days, as well as having five VA’s in a building with a capacity of 1,000+.
But then FOH staff are expected to be security guards, do fire evacuations, be first aid trained and have expert knowledge of the collection and if an object is damaged because of lack of staffing, the staff are always the first to be blamed. In many places the closures due to the pandemic has only served to highlight the public's expectations when reopening becomes more widespread.
The Culture Sector has seen its’ own casualty list, during the pandemic, and with pressure on the various gallery and museum boards to open up fully, that list is going to grow longer. As ever culture sector workers are expected to pay for a crisis they didn’t create, with their jobs if not their lives
Floyd Codlin (PCS ARMS and PCS Culture GEC (Personal Capacity))
