Pay Rate for Access Workers Now (PRAWN 🦐)

Accessibility as a field is growing, however, compensation often remains stagnant or is framed as a volunteer opportunity. Access workers in cultural institutions -- often disabled themselves -- are chronically underpaid and undervalued, with the exception of the most established few. The compensation that access workers receive also varies widely depending on the type of access work performed.

The Pay Rate for Access Workers Now (PRAWN) project came out of a desire to build connection and shared knowledge among access workers in the hopes of establishing an industry standard and raising the bar for the way that access work is materially valued. We hope to build collective power to achieve greater salary/pay transparency and clearer industry standards by mitigating uncertainty about how much to charge for access-related tasks. We hope to make entering into access work more accessible and to ultimately achieve more equitable pay for the community.

This project values access workers’ labor, and acknowledges that we are always more powerful in collaboration with each other. We value the wisdom of disabled people’s embodied experiences and experiences as workers in the field. We recognize that access workers often work in individualized positions and sectors; because of this isolation, we hope to find other means of connecting and working in horizontal relationship.

Questions? Contact AccessPayTransparency@gmail.com

This project is community-based, and managed by disabled access workers Madison Zalopany and Alison Kopit.