It shouldn’t be surprising to see museum workers organizing unions, when we are in the midst of an upsurge of labor protest. But only a few years ago, who would have thought these people, long taken for granted by their museum directors, invisible to the art world and ignored by the media, would become front page news?
Why museum workers are organizing
When we think of museum workers, we may think of the curators whose names we see in art reviews or museum publicity. Overlooked are the museum workers we actually encounter — the security guards in the galleries, the public-facing staff at information booths, behind the counters in the shop or selling us tickets, or taking our coats, or leading tours. Not to mention the more invisible staff assisting the curators, creating the publicity and developing the website, digitizing the collection, or the art handlers who move and install the art work.
It’s a bit of a shocker when news stories reveal their wages. At these cultural institutions so precious to us, many or even most of their workers do not even make a living wage, some only minimum wage or a few quarters above. “Ancient art, Ancient wages,” chanted by striking Museum of Fine Arts workers, speaks for museum workers nationwide.
When a few museum workers published the crowdsourced “Arts + All Museums Salary Transparency” Google sheet, over 3,000 more shared their salaries and benefits. Now people could look at pay for their and other job categories, and they saw the exploitation was systemic and nation-wide. Of course they would start talking union — they were seeing unequal pay for the same work, white men making more than women and people of color, and museum directors earning earning high six figures while denying even cost-of-living raises to their employees.
A union wrests wage and benefit data from the employer when bargaining begins. This makes the system-wide injustices personal, another critical moment when power shifts to the workers. That was when the Philadelphia Museum of Art Union learned that one in five employees were making less than $15/hr, half of the hourly part-time employees were making less than $12/hr, and 60% of full-time employees were making less than $50,000/yr. They also learned how much less they were earning than their peers at other museums — about 1/3 less than median pay in their region and their peer group nationally.
Awareness of these wage disparities compounded dismay over other museum scandals. For years arts activists were calling for a “racial reckoning” over museum hierarchy, collection and exhibition; exposing sexual misconduct and bullying by managers; and protesting donors for egregiously immoral exploitation.
Eleven museums unionized in 2019, but since then another 23 formed, as both mass layoffs during the pandemic and the George Floyd uprising exposed every injustice with a new urgency. Museum workers were not only demanding (and winning) some dramatic pay increases, such as The New Museum Union’s $6,000 increase for the lowest paid full-time employees.* They were making a broad claim for a share in power within the institution, which only unionization could give them.
They were demanding and winning
- protection from overwork and assignments outside of their job description;
- protection from discipline and firing without just cause;
- measures for health and safety;
- and notice before layoffs, with severance pay and continuation of health insurance.
“We’re so over these systems of oppression.”
These are the more familiar trade union concerns. But the unions were forming during a broad confluence of social struggles, and workers in many museums were placing these demands in the broader context of racism, gender discrimination and anticapitalism. Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, immigration demonstrations, Native American pipeline protests, the Sanders campaign, the Resistance against Trump were spilling over into museums, with museum activists out in the street and then leading widely publicized attacks on museum culture. (more…)