Museum as Muck demands fairer museum careers for working class

Museum as Muck, a network of cultural workers from low socio-economic backgrounds in the cultural sector, has revealed a new manifesto.

The new manifesto comes eight years after its original, and was co-created with members. It calls for structural change across the cultural sector to tackle what it describes as the exclusion of working-class people.

The new manifesto sets out eight demands:

• Know who works for you: collect, publish and act on socio-economic workforce data.
• Pay people properly: pay the Real Living Wage and end unpaid internships and exploitative employment.
• End privilege-based hiring: remove unnecessary qualifications, unpaid experience requirements and opaque recruitment.
• Open up power: increase representation of people from lower socio-economic backgrounds in leadership and decision-making.
• Make progression possible: address class bias in workplace culture, promotion and professional development.
• Change what museums collect and say: embed working-class histories, lives, labour and culture in collections, research and interpretation.
• Share power with communities: involve working-class communities in shaping priorities and decisions from the beginning.
• Make class equality a public duty: embed socio-economic equality in cultural policy, funding and accountability.

The network, founded in 2018, said its manifesto recognises that class intersects with race, disability, gender, sexuality, migration, caring responsibilities and geography. It argues that tackling class inequality makes museums more equitable for everyone.

Michelle McGrath, founder of Museum as Muck, said the manifesto will “offer institutions practical guidance on becoming more class-inclusive, and Museum as Muck provides tools, resources and support to help them make that change. Museums need to change, not the people they keep out.”

The manifesto is available to read in full here.