Do Unions Really Work in a Museum Setting?

They’re not famous for promoting excellence or initiative.

M useum staffs are returning to the office, some summoning GPS because they’ve forgotten how to get there. The mood will likely be kvetchy, tetchy, and toxic. Everyone’s in an inquiring state of mind, too. Staff’s thinking, “How can we unionize?” Directors and trustees are asking, “How do we keep a union out?”

On Thursday, I wrote about the reasons, from a museum worker’s perspective, for pushing for a union. Today, I’ll dwell more on philosophy but, being me, on practicalities. What does a union mean in a museum setting?

What’s the mood in museums? At this moment, the 800-pound gorilla, my few and dwindling curator and director friends tell me, is the painful, awkward reunion of staffers who’ve Zoomed for the last year, the furloughed staff who’ve now been rehired, and museum top brass. I’ll make what seems an obvious point, except it managed to escape, as did COVID from that Wuhan lab, the imagination of the museum master class.

If a staff accustomed to working together, in person, at the office, during regular business hours is allowed to work flexibly at home via computer for many months, once all are reunited, the employer will find that he or she has a different staff. Most will have acquired bad work habits.

Communication skills atrophy, as do attention spans. Getting up, dressed, out the door, and to a desk — not to mention working at that desk and behaving with civility — will seem exhausting. Every museum will have a COVID kook or two or three. Their voices skirling like bagpipes since they haven’t talked for a year, they’ll demand double-masking for all and sundry down to that portrait of George Washington in the galleries. And why is that portrait still there? He was an enslaver. They’ll be intensely annoying.

Even people who aren’t, by nature, introverted, hysterical, hypochondriacal, or neurasthenic will be insecure and snappish. After all, for months last year, many museum staffs circulated open letters calling their bosses racist and sexist.

Message to staff: The boss wasn’t amused and doesn’t have amnesia.

It needn’t have taken a management brainiac to see that lockdowns, however lazy and lovely for some, would reap a whirlwind. This is one of the many reasons I argued, starting last spring, that museums needed to open as quickly as possible. Bringing people back together after an unprecedented trauma isn’t as easy as flipping a switch.

Museums had an obligation to the world of culture to show that communal spaces weren’t killers. Directors and senior staff opted instead, and selfishly so, to take the Zoom path. They worked from home and collected big paychecks. Few bothered to pressure local and state health officials when public-health bureaucrats kept their museums closed. Life in the lockdown lane was too good.

Most museums furloughed low-paid staff. Thousands lost jobs. Many museums, though, paid their staffs during lockdown, or at least their professional staffs. Since there’s no way a museum curator or librarian or art handler or conservator can productively work for more than a few weeks, if that, without a collection, files, books, a conservation lab, or the public, museums paid most of these people for staying home and doing next to no work. That’s negligence on the part of the trustees. Almost all museums in America are charities, and a charity mustn’t spend its tax-exempt money on no-show jobs or people who are on call.

It’s a nice thing to have done, but it’s still negligence.

And what do lots of museums have to show for it? A surly, ungrateful staff threatening to unionize. Paid or unpaid, staffers stewed and seethed during the long COVID escape from reality.

I have nothing against labor unions. They work well in an industrial or commercial setting where big numbers of employees do similar work, and that work is fungible. Unions protect the lowest common denominator, not the best and the brightest. In a creative setting like a museum, they’re a bad fit. Unionized workers are hard to fire for poor performance. A good example is a bad teacher. How do you deal with a failing fundraiser or curator or graphic designer or art conservator? These are three of the many jobs in a museum where you actually have to know what you’re doing. A union is as likely as not to say, “Suck it up, Bossman, this flop’s a flop, but he’s our flop, and he’s going nowhere.”

The museum culture is as different from the industrial culture as it can be. Arts people are idiosyncratic, not regimented. The work’s bespoke, not assembly-line, and it’s creative and collaborative. A poor performer or a cog has to be set free, or the entire place is disrupted or, worse, paralyzed. Museums are filled with navel-gazers. Urgency isn’t the coin of the realm. Productivity is hard to measure. The director sometimes needs the power to say, “Do this, and do it fast.” A union can slow things to a crawl. Workers file grievances if they feel they’re pushed too hard or if they simply don’t want to do what the director says needs doing.

Newly unionized workers think they’re getting new power, but they’ll lose access to power, whether the power is held by their supervisor, a chief curator, a director, or anyone else in management. Their shop steward is their funnel to management, and while he might be a saint, chances are, he’ll be as flawed and compromised, or as deaf, dumb, and blind, as a non-union boss. The unionized guards at the National Gallery in Washington have complained bitterly for years about harassment and retaliation within the unionized ranks.

Over the years, I made dozens of deals with individual staffers allowing them to handle family illness and child care. Some wanted to work less, others get a promotion and work more. Some wanted time to go back to school or finish their dissertations. Some needed help with a booze problem, and some were in the middle of a testy divorce. They needed time off to go to court.

A good supervisor and good staffer agree on the accommodations that need making. This is difficult if not impossible where there’s a union in the middle. Unions are equalizers, which means everyone gets treated the same. Once a staff unionizes, management will suggest that every special pleader take it up with the union.

Over and over, union advocates say they seek transparency. I think a union delivers obfuscation. “Getting around the union” inevitably tops management’s daily agenda. A museum union has a local president and shop steward, but grievances enlist the national union’s bureaucracy.

I wrote a few stories in recent months about the dozens of open letters and manifestos from museum staffs itemizing grievances and grudges. Some sounded reasonable, but most revelatory was the absence of interest in art or the public — the twin causes that museums serve. It’s human nature to be self-absorbed, but pay, promotion, who’s been dissed, who doesn’t listen to whom, and who wants more power seemed enthroned side by side with another deity, and that’s politics.

Starting with the Trump era, younger staff clamored and connived to drag their museums into an advocacy position on such issues as police shootings, illegal immigration, climate hysteria, the Palestinians, and trustees who own oil wells, make tear gas, or cavort with Jeffrey Epstein, to name a few vogues. There is art treating some of these themes, as good art is omnivorous, but this menu of obsessions has nothing to do with art. It’s sheer politics and, it seems to me, ideological, selective, and uncritical.

Museums are 501(c)(3) organizations, which means they can’t dive into advocacy politics, and, in any event, I go to a museum to see art and to experience nuance and complexity. I don’t go to experience a rehash of the front page of the New York Times. Nobody does. Museums exist to serve the public, not the staff.

Much as woke staff tried, and successfully, to hijack their museums in the service of anti-cop, anti-Semitic, and charlatan-run Black Lives Matter, they’ll hijack their union and make it a vehicle for eternal protest. And the United Auto Workers, the union most busily organizing culture workers, won’t mind. Like fashion labels, unions have different lines. Museum unions can very well be their radical line.

I suspect that the new museum union affiliates will be very, very political. As with many public-school teachers’ unions and unions such as SEIU, boutique left-wing politics will outrun such bread-and-butter concerns as wages and working conditions. There’ll be a constituency in the union that’ll like this. Museum workers at the Getty, who harassed their supervisors to plaster Black Lives Matter on the museum website, seemed bored with their jobs. “You must say Black Lives Matter,” demanded pushy, petty martinets. Why chase a $1,000 annual-fund gift from a new donor or rewrite that label so it makes sense when you can be saving the world? Neither scholarship nor the visitor is well served. And why would anyone in leadership want to share power with that?

This returns me to inclusion, diversity, and equity. If inclusion means respect, collegiality, and collaboration, I’m for it. If diversity means an openness to people of all backgrounds, I’m for it, as long as there’s no slide in expectations and qualifications. If equity means fair pay, I’m for it.

Problem is, the “you’re either an oppressor or a victim” crowd see them differently. Trashing merit, talent, entrepreneurial spirit, and bottom-line results comes first, since those are the stuff of oppression. It seems this is where union ideology and woke poison overlap. In a unionized museum, the best curator ever, or art conservator, or fundraiser, or designer gets the same pay and benefits as the time-serving blob in the next office. Seniority rules in a union setting. A young high stepper is going to get a layoff notice before that time-serving blob.

And who’s most likely to cry over not belonging, to need a support team to finish a project, to demand timeouts with Play-Doh and puppies? I suspect it’s the low achiever, the mediocrity, and the quickly offended. In a museum setting, will that be the union’s target constituency?