Best Practices in Ethical Planning of Professional Meetings

“Best practices in ethical planning of professional meetings” By Betsy Taylor Published in 2012 News: a Publication of the Society for Applied Anthropology. 23(4) : 26-28 http://sfaanews.sfaa.net/2012/11/01/best-practices-in-ethical-planning-of-professional-meetings/ Did SfAA disgrace itself by meeting in Baltimore in a hotel notorious for mistreating its workers? Baltimore is my hometown and many there tell me so. But, I tell them that we anthropologists are waking up. We might not be able to undo the damage we did to Baltimore workers and their already unlevel playing field. But, if we learn from mistakes, this is a time of surprising opportunities for socially responsible meetings. There has been a burst of creativity in labor organizing by hotel workers. Professional associations are growing new ethical muscles with new coalitions. For instance, in 2006, creative leadership from the American Studies Association, the union UNITE-HERE, and others, created a non-profit Informed Meetings Exchange (www.inmex.org) that manages socially responsible meetings for free. To identify best practices in professional meetings, I interviewed leaders from six peer professional associations, two labor unions (UNITE-HERE, AFL-CIO), and INMEX. I found that good protocols mostly came after bad conflict within professional organizations (e.g., disputes about labor, GLBT, or immigrant issues, or, financial loss from boycotted meetings or hotels). But, this article arises in the hope that we can learn before mistakes – with interdisciplinary sharing of lessons learned. If challenges are seen as systemic, we can avoid mere blaming of individuals or factionalizing conflict. For instance, in other professional associations, staff members spoke of severe stress in such conflicts, as they can feel responsible for things beyond their control. So, we need protocols for socially responsible meetings that respect and listen to multiple perspectives, material interests, and ethical values (members, leadership, staff, workers, general public, social movements and civil society, etc.). This article culls seven best practices from these interviews, and, then explores two big emerging challenges where best practices have not gelled. Best Practice #1: Standardize a mixed methods toolkit for preliminary assessment of possible sites: e.g., Lexis-Nexis search to identify ethical problems; quantitative benchmarks (such as, level of unionization in the city, percentage of hotel beds handled by unionized labor); attention to the list of recommended, at-risk-of strike, or boycotted hotels on hotelworkersrising.org portal for hotel workers unions. Best Practice #2: Communicate & work with civil society to understand the cultural and political terrain in potential sites, anticipate social justice issues and initiate linkages before and after the meetings.     Labor unions: know the names of unions involved and communicate directly with them. Labor unions have strong research units, access to local and subaltern knowledges, and can provide timely as well as long term analysis of social justice trends in a city and region Develop a list of national social justice groups to contact in host cities (e.g., Human Rights Campaign, NAACP, etc.) who can help identify additional, locally important, groups and issues. Honor local knowledge: Local SfAA members and community partners channel crucial insights. Publicly engaged & community-based field-trips and forums during the meetings can  powerfully connect SfAA with local justice movements and issues. Communicate with the public. For instance, if SfAA decides not to meet in a city or state, have mechanisms to quickly send out press releases to appropriate politicians, public officials, media and civil society organizations to help struggling social movements by demonstrating that significant revenues are at stake. Best Practice #3: require written answers to social justice questions in Requests for Proposals sent to potential partners. Ask Convention and Visitors Bureau of the potential host city to confirm or deny whether the city has a living wage ordinance. To discourage 'bad actors' from applying, put questions on the first page of a questionnaire to hotels regarding Active Sustainability Programs and Unionization of Employees (including information re/ when labor contracts were renewed or will expire, history of labor problems, etc.) Best Practice #4: Clarify and prioritize values among members to identify and weigh ethical concerns. Regular quantitative surveys of SfAA members are advisable. But an anthropological organization should value qualitative reflection methods – such as the “Socially responsible meetings” roundtable we are organizing for 2013 meetings. Track SfAA resolutions to identify emerging SfAA ethical concerns. Best Practice #5: Regularly review legal documents and time-frames for contracts with hotels and vendors. Possible components include: no penalty change in conference venue when "force majeur" issues arise; include active picket line as a contract-breaking condition; bids solicited only from unionized hotels; language that stipulates if job actions arise once the SfAA is under contract no penalty will be incurred if the SfAA does not fill its allocated room block Best Practice #6: Develop checks and balances within organizational structure. Clear demarcation of tasks permits constructive reflection on what goes wrong, where and when problems arise, and how to improve systems or reorganize roles. Division of responsibilities encourages multiple points of view and healthy debate and innovation. We are not clear about what current SfAA procedures are, because inquiry generated no response other than that “force majeur” language is in hotel contracts – but we suggest the following organizational roles and steps:  the Executive Board generates a list of potential cities to be researched  SfAA contracts with INMEX to handle negotiation and coordination of meeting before and during the event. INMEX is a non-profit that implements socially responsible meetings for free. According to President Eisenberg's report, 2011 meetings were 16% of $499,000 expenses. This suggests that contracting with INMEX could free up about $80,000 for other purposes. The SfAA currently subcontracts its management to a for-profit company, Professional Management Association (whose CEO is Tom May)  results from preliminary assessment of possible sites compiled and circulated to SfAA leaders, board and hired personnel  A subcommittee of the Human Rights and Social Justice Committee examines conditions in potential sites in a formal report to the SfAA President, with its recommendation  The President directs the contracted meeting planner to evaluate the top three candidate cities  all of these reports are presented to the Executive Board for final decision  an SfAA organizational body be specifically mandated to coordinate and encourage civic / public engagement during the meetings – to connect the themes of the meeting, with the places where we are meeting (for more see below). This tasks overlaps with mandates of several existing committees (Program, Human Rights and Social Justice, SAR-SfAA Collaborative, Student) so further discussion is required as to which unit is most appropriate. Best Practice #7: Communicate protocols and values for decision-making in a transparent and constructive way. Conflict within professional organizations about site selection damages trust and costs money if members boycott meetings. When conflict or mistakes happen, encourage open reflection on what did not work, when, and why. It is important to regularly invite new ideas, observation and analysis, yet not diffuse responsibility so widely that everyone and noone is accountable. Post protocols for site selection on SfAA website. Finally, there are two areas where problems are intensifying, but no clear best practices have gelled. First, the cost of meeting attendance poses increasing ethical challenges because more and more anthropologists cannot afford it. Macrostructural forces and austerity ideologies shatter jobs, lower wages and eliminate travel benefits (see Sarah Kendzior's chilling analysis of the economics of attending AAA annual meetings for adjunct faculty). Meetings are a time for ritual display of professional qualifications, and for job interviews -- so a culture of shame and silence suppresses discussion of impacts on the underpaid, overworked or under(un)employed. We live in economic times when the labor problems of the 'working poor' in hotels and hospitality industries are converging with the labor problems of the 'working poor' in academe and professions. It is inaccurate to argue that we should accept bad wages and work conditions for hotel workers -- to create cheap meetings for underpaid anthropologists. The same forces push down all wages (except for the top 1%). In 2011, meetings provided 38% of SfAA revenue, and cost 16% of SfAA total expenses. Meetings, therefore, represent a major cash donation by individual members, many of who are increasingly cash-strapped. The Human Rights and Social Justice Committee could be asked to research this question. A second important area of experimentation involves a reconceptualization of what professional meetings are – from specialists gazing at each other, to public scholars turning outward to engage publics and particular places. Annual meetings must be a chance for professionals to meet with each other, to 'talk shop', to hone skills within their specialty, to preen in ritualized, mimetic dances of status and prowess. But, meetings also necessarily happen in place. This placedness of meetings provides unique resources for professionals to fulfill both their civic and scholarly mandates simultaneously – to engage the intellectual dimension of public issues, to serve the public good by addressing issues of public import, to strengthen quality of thought and enlarge capacity for reasoned, public deliberation. Because of the placedness of ethnographic methods and professional identities and history, this already happens organically at our meetings. Local anthropologists set up field-trips, forums, panels that bring diverse voices together, at our meetings, to think through multi-dimensional questions in situ. However, we could be more intentional about this. We can also make unique contributions to other disciplines, because our immersive methods and organizational culture gives us a uniquely rich toolkit for public and civic engagement. Other professional associations (such as the American Political Science Association) are starting to identify this as a goal, and anthropologists should be integral to such interdisciplinary reflection. There is interest in Human Rights and Social Justice Committee in researching these possibilities.