Archaeologists Are Organizing to Dig Out of Poverty Wages
Field archaeologists work physically demanding jobs exposed to the elements, often for low pay and meager benefits from private employers. We spoke to one self-identified “dirty shovel bum” about why he and his coworkers are organizing.
Archaeologist Melissa Ritchey excavates a site scheduled for development in the Chinatown neighborhood of Boston, on July 26, 2019. (Lane Turner / Boston Globe via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Alex N. Press
On March 27, a team of archaeologists voted in a union election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The small team, which was deciding on whether to unionize with Teamsters Local 222, is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, where its members are employed by SWCA Environmental Consultants, a global environmental consulting firm. Archaeologists in the cultural resource management (CRM) sector in the United States, the majority of the archaeological workforce in North America, mostly work for low pay and meager benefits, all while braving the elements to survey mile after mile of land on foot. They have plenty of reasons to organize.
Ten people voted in the NLRB elections, but four votes are still being contested. Of the remaining six, the count went 5-1 in favor of unionizing. While that means that the workers cannot yet declare victory, SWCA archaeologist Freeman Stevenson is confident. He said that at least one of the “no” votes among the contested ballots is from a supervisor whom the Board previously declared ineligible to be in the bargaining unit, and once that vote is thrown out, it will be an outright win.
It’s a small bargaining unit, but SWCA Incorporated has some twenty offices across the country that employ archaeologists, and some of those other locations are seeing union drives too. Workers at SWCA’s Pittsburgh office filed for an NLRB election this week, with Teamsters Local 341. Archaeologists based in Maryland at Goodwin and Associates, another CRM firm, also filed for an NLRB election this week, with Teamsters Local 992 (archaeologists in Canada, too, have notched wins in recent years). Jacobin’s Alex N. Press spoke to Stevenson about the work of archaeology in the twenty-first century and why archaeologists should organize. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
For those who aren’t familiar with archaeology and CRM, what’s its history? My knowledge of archaeology is probably rooted as much in depictions of that work in movies as it is in reality, and I imagine I’m not alone in that.
CRM goes back to the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act. Section 106 of that law is a paragraph which stipulates that federal agencies must consider the impact to cultural resources, archaeological resources. That birthed CRM, because it’s not as if federal agencies then got enough money to hire the archaeologists they needed to ensure compliance. No, it’s America, so they started contracting out archaeologists from the private sector to do this work.
Before 1960, if you were an archaeologist, you were working with a university or maybe a museum or a government agency. But for the most part, a lot of the big preservation and mitigation projects were done by museums or universities. But the National Historic Preservation Act suddenly mandated a lot more of that work.
Utah, like many other states and even towns, has similar historic preservation language that requires archaeologists. Universities weren’t able to keep up with the demand, so the industry exploded. For a long time, CRM was done by mom-and-pop shops: a couple of graduate students getting their PhDs together would then go out and start their own small CRM company and hire a couple technicians to do the projects. Those people always had high overhead costs and low profits, and there still are firms like that, but a lot of the work has been done by larger engineering firms, sometimes subcontracted out to environmental consulting firms.
How’d you wind up becoming an archaeologist?
I was a volunteer in the YPG [People’s Defense Units] in Syria and ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] was blowing up all the old stuff there. I’ve always loved history, but it never occurred to me that you could be an archaeologist — I assumed the History Channel just manifested one into existence every time they needed to do a documentary. In Syria, I was staying in Tell Talmer, an Assyrian village, and there’s a very direct connection between cultural and archaeological materials and the living, breathing people of the region. That was really impactful to me, and watching those materials get destroyed really angered me. When you don’t only kill people but attempt to erase any evidence that people existed, that’s even more brutal. So when I got back to the United States, I went to school and got my bachelor’s degree in anthropology.
Can you describe your work? What’s a day in the life of an archaeologist look like?
I live in Salt Lake City, so I perform Section 106 compliance in Utah and in the surrounding states — I’ve been as far east as Texas for work. A client, be it a federal agency or a private company whose project involves federal agencies or federal funding, will put out a contract. For the same reason a mining company must have biologists go out to the place they want to mine to see if the project is going to harm an endangered species, they send us out to see if there’s any archaeological or cultural material. If so, how will the project impact it? If the project will impact it, what can we do to mitigate it? It’s important to understand that no matter what we find, it’s possible that it will be destroyed. If the company has enough money to throw at it, they can bulldoze almost anything they want. It’s up to the federal agencies to stand up against that.
After our company bids on the contract, our project manager sends us archaeological technicians and crew leads out to the project area. We have tablets with GIS software that highlights the area on an overview map, and we walk it. We walk back and forth, back and forth, back and forth at predetermined intervals that differ by state and agency, depending on what the land is like.
In Utah, for the most part, we line up fifteen meters apart and we’ll walk from one end of the project to the other, and then we’ll turn around and walk it some more, looking at the ground and seeing what we find. Typically, in the United States, an archaeological artifact is anything fifty years or older. So my job involves a lot more beer cans from the 1960s than it does Mayan temples or anything cool like that.
What motivated you and your colleagues to organize a union?
As mundane as it sounds, it’s really hard work. If your survey is on a playa in an old abandoned lake bed, then sure, it’s pretty flat, it’s easy walking, except then maybe it’s the summer and it’s 110 degrees outside and it gets so hot that the skin on one of your tech’s feet falls off in their boots. One time, we surveyed an entire mountain range for a mine. You ever see transmission lines cutting across mountains and wonder how those got there? Well, we walked the entire route, hundreds of miles, up and over, looking for things. It’s a passion job, but it’s definitely hard work.
We’re overeducated and underpaid blue-collar workers. When I took this job in 2020, they offered me $15 an hour. I want to be an archaeologist. It’s still the best job I’ve ever had, and I don’t want to work a different one. I love getting to travel all the time, to go to places where I wouldn’t normally go and see things I wouldn’t normally see. But it’s not compensated at the amount it should be.
Starting wages have risen to $18 an hour, but when you account for inflation, that isn’t progress. Pay is also rising because no one’s entering the industry anymore. There’s a massive recruitment crisis going on nationwide throughout the industry, especially at a time when you have the recent infrastructure bill: billions of dollars for work that is going to directly involve us, but no one’s coming into the job because you can work almost any other job and make more money and get to go home every night.
I’ve been gone for two months straight at times. Oil workers do that too, but they also make $20 more an hour and get benefits. This industry says we’re seasonal laborers because technically, we can’t do our work in the winter if there’s snow on the ground. But there have been years in which I’ve worked all twelve months of the year. We have people at my office specifically who’ve been here eight years now, and they’re still temporary employees who don’t get benefits. If they get raises, it’s 50 cents over the wage at which they’re now hiring people.
I don’t think there’s an industry that has had people saying for longer that there needs to be a union than archaeology. People in the 1970s tried to form unions and then there was a push in the 1990s and into the early 2000s, and there is a union left over from that. They’ve operated as a hiring hall of sorts for project labor agreements with the Department of Energy. That’s the United Archaeological Field Technicians (UAFT).
The UAFT have been suing companies for twenty years for not meeting prevailing wage requirements on federal projects, and that’s a big part of why people make as much money as they do now. But in terms of workplace organizing, they didn’t really get anywhere and they were blacklisted pretty successfully from the industry, which scared a lot of people.
Most people in this field only last around five years in the field-tech crew-lead role, and then they either leave the field completely or get promoted into one of the few management positions that are available. But that doesn’t work for someone like me, who just want to be a dirty shovel bum — that’s the lingo we use — for as long as my body will let me and have no intention of going into management. People like me are definitely a minority, but there are plenty of us. I just want to work outside. I don’t want to work in an office, and I don’t want to deal with mining clients or anything like that. For us, there’s no real path forward in terms of wages or benefits.
There’s a big issue in the industry of getting people to feel like they can and should stand up for workers’ rights. But at the end of the day, the work doesn’t get done if we don’t do it. The project managers aren’t going to come out and do the survey: there aren’t enough of them, and their billing rates are too high. Without the field techs, without the crew leads, the industry doesn’t exist. People often say to treat every site as if you’re the last archaeologist who will ever see it because chances are, you are. So we have an important job, both industrially and creatively and academically. But people have let themselves be scared off by what happened in the ’90s.
So it sounds like wages and seniority (and the benefits that can go with it) are a major problem at the company.
I get benefits as a crew lead but most of my technicians don’t get them, and I get pretty standard paid time off and vacation time. My company is slightly better on health and safety than most, but that’s a massive issue throughout the industry, especially in the Southeast. There is disregard for the fact that it’s getting hotter and hotter every year. We need more policies around taking breaks during certain high temperatures — at a different company, a young archaeologist died of heatstroke on their first day of work two years ago.
Walk me through how this organizing campaign began.
We reached out to a few different unions around a year ago: CWA [Communications Workers of America] and LiUNA! [Laborers International Union of North America], the latter of which organized CRM archaeologists in Ontario in 2020. I spoke to the Teamsters local, who I know from organizing campaigns around tenant issues and through DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] work. The LiUNA! Local here wasn’t interested in the effort, and while CWA was interested, the Teamsters responded without hesitation, so we went with them. UPS and freight driving are the local’s main focus, but they’ve organized the first unionized WinCo Foods in Salt Lake City and they’ve organized with app developers in Utah as well. I like that they’re branching out and fighting for as many groups as they can.
In May 2023, we decided to start organizing with the Teamsters. We ended up with 92 percent of the workers signing union authorization cards, meaning there’s just one holdout. Teamsters Local 222 sent a letter to our boss on June 26 asking for voluntary recognition. We originally had seventeen people, though now we’re down to eleven, as some people have left over the past nine months, mostly to leave the industry entirely. There was consensus within the group that the hiring crisis means that there aren’t enough people to replace us. We’re a tight-knit group and this effort only fails if we let the company divide us.
The company has definitely fought us. They made a legal argument to exclude the crew leads as supervisors and the technicians as temporary employees, which would mean no one is in the union. It took about a month to get our stipulation hearing and the hearing took three days, which is long. Our company hired union-buster Ogletree Deakins to be their representative. Region 27 of the NLRB finally determined the scope of the bargaining unit two weeks ago, deciding that both the crew leads and the technicians are in the bargaining unit.
You’ve said that SWCA has some twenty offices that employ archaeologists, and there are organizing efforts at other companies too. But you told me that at least one SWCA worker has already been fired for organizing, right?
Yeah, they fired Evan Flannery, a key organizer at our Pittsburgh office. It was clearly for his protected activities. They fired him in early January this year, right before they were going to submit their union authorization cards. That put the campaign on hold for a while, but Teamsters Local 341 has now petitioned with the NLRB and they are seeking a Cemex ruling based on Evan’s unfair labor practice (ULP) charge [which would force the company to recognize the union and begin bargaining]. The UAFT is also interested in what we’re up to now, and they’ve been part of that campaign.
Is there anything else you wanted to say about either the CRM industry or your work that hasn’t come up yet?
We’re overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated by the industry at large. The CRM industry is going through a crisis, and more than anything, that’s why we decided to take the risk and organize, to show people that it can be done. For a long time, people have said that you can’t organize the crews. But you can do it, and you have to do it. It takes some sacrifice, sticking around if the company retaliates against you and standing up for yourself if they try to union bust. But unions give us, the people who do the work, a seat at the table.
People have been saying since the 1970s that we need a union, and the industry has never taken that threat seriously. Yet the industry has consistently failed to make the necessary changes to make the field of archaeology a career that people can do and be successful in. I don’t trust the industry to solve itself. It needs people in a union standing together, forcing its hand and holding it accountable.