Workers at the Milwaukee Art Museum voted to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in 2020
Art museum workers in the U.S. are in the midst of the most exciting period of labor organizing in decades. Since the launch of the New Museum Union in January 2019, there has been a 223% increase in new organizing at private, not-for-profit art museums alone. Though precarious working conditions long predate the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a boom in organizing in its wake after institutional responses exposed and exacerbated worker exploitation, unsafe working conditions, and layoffs and furloughs, predominantly affecting front-of-house workers.
Museum workers are also enacting liberatory unionism, a term I borrow from labor journalist Eve Livingston. In liberatory unionism, workers are not simply organizing for higher pay and better working conditions, but are also connecting labor struggles with resistance to racism and gender oppression. Museum workers are joining what’s been called a “new labor activism moment” in pursuit of not only a more just cultural sector, but also a radically restructured society. The potential of this movement is immense. Not only does the cultural sector influence larger economic trends, but the role of museums as sites of knowledge and cultural authority means that enacting liberatory unionism in the museum can influence how people understand labor and solidarity, and in consequence, how communities shape and are shaped by the larger world.
I wrote about this phenomenon in my dissertation,“Another World is Possible”: Liberatory Unionism in the U.S. Art Museum Labor Movement, recently completed at The Ohio State University. In the study, I conducted many interviews with museum workers, organizers, and activists, and made site visits to picket lines and union events. I also analyzed social media, demographics, labor contracts, and archival documents. Through the data, I was able to create a well-defined picture of the current flood of organizing and identify the goals, rhetoric, and historic achievements of these museum workers. The following is a brief summary of my findings.
Unionization is an Act of Love
Unionization is an act of love for museum workers. This is a message workers communicated again and again, complicating the dynamics of so-called “passionate work,” in which workers are expected to sacrifice mundane concerns like a fair wage because their love for the job can suffice. By highlighting their love within a challenge to the status quo, museum workers are rejecting the idea that passion alone sustains workers. They also share in public criticism of museum practices, addressing the institution of the museum – with all its colonial baggage – from a place of love. Multiple participants shared that if they truly hated museums, they would simply move sectors. Their love for museums motivates them to demand more, to band together in order to shape a new and more equitable kind of museum.
Pay Equity
Graphic from the Instagram page of Art Institute of Chicago Workers United highlighting pay inequity in the museum
In a field where, in 2023, over half of workers earned less than $50,000 – 20% less than U.S. employees’ median annual salary — it is perhaps not surprising that a full 73% of interview participants cited low pay as their top reason for organizing. Workers described their experiences of a decline in real wages amidst rising inflation, ballooning student debt, a housing crisis, and a decades-long retrenchment of the social welfare system, issues which they share with workers in other sectors. Museum workers also work in direct proximity with some of the nation’s wealthiest individuals who often serve on museum boards. Organizing efforts, like this Instagram post from the Art Institute of Chicago Workers United, also regularly draw attention to what museum director and scholar Lauren Lessing describes as “the most egregious pay gap” in U.S. museums: the extreme imbalances between museum leadership and the lowest-paid workers.
Unionization has led to immediate increases in compensation for unionized museum workers. At the Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh, the minimum wage jumped from $9.00/hour in 2021 to $16.00/hour in their 2023 contract—a 77.8% increase. Meanwhile, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, one worker earned $35,000 in backpay under new contract provisions that recognize the extra labor performed during lengthy staffing transitions.
Transparency
Unionization campaigns demand access – and corrections – to the financial calculations that result in low wages and extreme pay gaps. It is no coincidence that much of the contemporary organizing wave occurred after the grassroots Art + Museum Salary Transparency campaign went viral in 2019. Museum workers anonymously shared salary information in an online spreadsheet. The revelations around pay discrepancies and injustices directly influenced organizing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and, in turn, helped inspire other museum workers across the country to unionize. Access to more information serves as a powerful organizing motivator. As one interview participant implored, “Make it make sense to me. Sit me down and really walk me through the numbers if you want to make other concessions elsewhere that lead to me not being paid more for my labor.”
Protections
The dangers of coming to work during a pandemic also motivated many unionization campaigns. Workers faced return-to-work orders, insufficient personal protective equipment and social distancing precautions, and other new policies delivered unilaterally from managers who often remained safely at home. Other longstanding safety and security concerns that workers mentioned include: sexual and physical harassment; unsafe working conditions, particularly during installations; burnout, which leads to rising levels of heart attacks and strokes, depression and anxiety, and drug and alcohol abuse; concerns about climate change-driven weather conditions like heat waves and hurricanes; the threat of active shooters and other kinds of violence; and the pervasiveness of temporary contracts and widespread career precarity.
DEAI
Instagram post from Philly Cultural Workers United highlighting DEAI initiatives as a priority for the union campaign
Museum workers also organize unions to enforce institutional promises around diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion (DEAI). Many pointed to the 2020 racial justice uprisings in response to the murder of George Floyd and described institutional responses to these events as “hasty,” “bungled,” “reactionary,” and “empty.” Workers were frustrated that their DEAI proposals were frequently ignored or made ineffective. Says one worker, “If there is a sense of anybody listening, it’s very performative, and unionizing felt like this way that they would have to take us seriously.”
A union contract “gives teeth” to DEAI proposals. For example, some unions negotiated for paid lactation breaks, expanded parental leave policies to account for a wide range of fertility journeys, and bereavement policies that apply to chosen family members. Some contracts protect DEAI committees, mandate paid DEAI training for all staff, or ensure that multilingual employees are compensated for extra translation work. Traditional union protections are also vital: some describe “just cause” provisions – which protect workers from arbitrary or unfair disciplinary practices and termination – as critical for encouraging workers to come forward about workplace complaints or abuses. Others note that union protections can support gender nonconforming workers. As one full-time organizer says, “It's your basic contract language – as long as you’re creative about how to apply it – that is still really the strongest stuff you could get” in terms of protecting marginalized workers.
Collective Voice
Museum workers ultimately turn to labor unions to expand their collective voice within the workplace. As organizers Kait Roelofs and Tat Scott put it, “People who choose to work in arts and culture often do so because they care about the work being done and have an opinion about how to approach that work.” Yet traditional museum hierarchies have very little room for shared decision-making. Museum workers describe having exhausted traditional methods of requesting change, ultimately turning to unionization.
Some Caveats
Museum workers, of course, realize that “unions can never be the cure-all.” Many acknowledge the exclusionary racist and sexist histories of labor unions and recognize that unions have had to make extreme concessions around the scope of bargaining in response to corporate and legislative attacks on labor power. Others note the limitations of a first contract, and the resistance they face from museum management to even standard contract provisions. Says one worker, “We spent four months on a bulletin board. To get the language around a bulletin board that we could both agree on. Four months for a bulletin board.” Several spoke of their lofty ambitions going into bargaining, and their realization that they need to continue to build power over time to enact more radical contract language.
Even with these caveats, however, museum unions wield significant power to build cross-racial, cross-class, and cross-sector solidarity. Unionization is forever transforming the sector and laying the foundation for more equitable living wages, safer work experiences, connections across class and departmental boundaries, and greater control over museum operations. Labor organizing in and of itself is transformational, too. In the words of museum worker and organizer Maya Brown: “...to me organizing is the practice of identifying a future that you would like to have for yourself, for a community, for a global situation, and beginning the process of building an alliance with others towards that future.” It is this vision that excites me as museum unions continue to build power, as one piece within a larger labor renaissance in the U.S. Museum workers are actively building alliances, directly confronting worker exploitation and attacks on legal and civic rights, and envisioning alternative futures.
