The Union Movement Hits Museums Nationwide

Eager unionistas may be disappointed once they join up — and see the results.

A bout 20 museum staffs have either unionized in the last year or are trying to form unions. Until now, museum unions have been few, far between, and mostly limited to guards and clerical workers. Now, after the upheavals of the last year and a half, the drive to unionize isn’t a blip or even a trend. It’s a movement. It’s bound to intensify. The staff of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art unionized in 1971 — it was the country’s first museum union. For close to 50 years, it was nearly alone.

Why are we here? I’ll write today on what museum workers are thinking and saying. This weekend, I’ll write about why I don’t think unions work in a museum setting. The drive to unionize is inseparable from the push for, to use the lingo, inclusion, diversity, and equity. At their best, these mean fair pay, fair treatment, and expansive recruitment and hiring. At their worst, they’re fancy words for mediocrity.

What are museum staffers thinking and saying? The trustees of the Hispanic Society, in New York City, tried to terminate the staff’s pension system, which would make me want to join a union. The museum, a unique national treasure, has been closed to the public since 2017. This, in itself, is a scandal. Facing the trustees, the staff demand to know, “What the Franklin-Delano-Roosevelt are you doing?” But they aren’t getting any answers.

Amanda Tobin, the assistant director of education at Mass MoCA, one of my three local museums, said pandemic-related layoffs stimulated the union drive. Of 160 staffers, 120 lost their job when the museum was forced to close and lost all of its income from events and admissions. “We felt very disposable,” she said. She also correctly complained about “directors and high-level staff who kept their jobs and make six-figure salaries.”

Museums, like corporations and college faculties, have evolved into a system of haves and have-nots. Director compensation and perks swell while salaries at the bottom stagnate. When museums cut their budgets, as they did last year and after the 2008 financial crisis, the axe fell mostly on low-paid workers, the young, or frontline workers. Highly paid curators and director cronies rarely take a hit. I’ve seen this happen many times.

Museums are among the few places in the not-for-profit sector, or in any sector, where very rich people, called donors, are in the mix with low-paid workers. Frontline people and contract workers see the donors, hear about fundraising, read about them in the newspaper, and read annual reports. The contrast glares, irks, and growls. And the rich keep getting richer. Museum stock portfolios have done well the past few years. With all this money sloshing around, workers ask, “Why can’t we get some?” This isn’t unreasonable, by the way.

Last year was a tipping point. Layoffs frightened museum staff. By and large, since the financial crisis, museum staffs have grown. Those still on the payroll — underworked, isolated, anxious, tethered to computers — were bound to foment mischief. The murder of violent ex-con, fentanyl addict, and drug-pusher George Floyd — sorry, I mean the “Gentle Giant” — put people in a protesting frame of mind. Does “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore” sound prophetic?

At Mass MoCA, Maro Elliott, a museum fundraiser, said wage increases, family leave, and better health insurance are on the union docket. Karissa Francis is a 30-year-old visitor-services assistant. She’s a leader of the successful union effort at the Whitney, in New York City. She says she makes $30,000 a year, is worried about health insurance and job security, and hasn’t gotten a raise in two years.

An assistant manager of gallery experience at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum, Elizabeth Norman, said, “The missing piece is working fully in partnership” with the senior staff. The Walters staff hasn’t unionized yet, but it’s trying. Organizers at the Milwaukee Art Museum complained about the leadership’s “take it or leave it” approach to the staff and the museum’s “culture of privilege.” Jon Feng, who works in the visitor-services department of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, calls the union vote there “a redistribution of power.”

Having read dozens of open letters from aggrieved staffs last year and the union PR this year, I think many directors and high-end administrators grossly botched the care and feeding of the staff. Most but not all of the upset came from museums with directors who’ve been there for years. Ruts are inevitable, I know, but many places were ruled by a “let’s leave well enough alone” approach. Unfair or uneven pay, diminished benefits, turgid climates within departments, and the emergence of a second-class citizenry become part of the furniture, there but disregarded.

There’s no excuse for this. It’s bad leadership. Directors consumed with fundraising, marketing, and building projects forgot that pater familias is a big part of the job.

The workforce temper has changed over the past few years, too, so much changed that directors were playing with fire when they kept their museums closed. Young college graduates enter the workplace from the campus, and the lowest-paid workers in museums tend to be young. Often they’re term-limited or kept below 20 hours a week so the museum doesn’t have to give them benefits.

I won’t critique the quality of higher education except to say that Millennials and the oldest Gen Z cohort are experts in grievance. They learn in college that something’s wrong if they’re not traumatized. Even as children, they were empowered consumers whose voices, they believed, had to be heard. They’re practiced whiners and brow-beaters, too.

They’re also the performance-trophy generation. They expect praise, thanks, and add some hosannas while you’re at it. Deficiency never resides in the individual but in a group, and unjustly so. They’re fed the line that people are either oppressors or victims. How does a supervisor in the workplace evaluate an employee who blames everything on racism? It’s impossible.

It was clear to me when I was a museum director, possibly because I worked at Phillips Academy, a high school, that workers in their 20s would be a management challenge. I looked at the MFA union’s website, which has photographs of the key people driving the union. Most are young. Some are gullible but most are acting generationally. They think they deserve to share power. They want more control over their work lives. Wanting more workplace autonomy is one thing, and it’s not a bad thing.

Not every director facing a union is a baddie. The Walters’s director is a kind, well-respected, commonsense leader, as is the Whitney’s. The director of the Guggenheim, much pilloried, is a good director, too. Faddishness explains some of the juice powering the union movement. This will wax and wane. Workers at the Portland Museum of Art, in Maine, voted 16–10 to join the United Auto Workers union. But I hope the Walters, in Baltimore, fights the union and fights it hard. The museum is small, financially stable but not rich, and it’s not in New York, where every left-wing idea will have a big constituency. It has already given its lowest-paid workers big raises. The staff has more to lose than gain by unionizing.

Directors and trustees didn’t notice the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s union drive while it was percolating. A long, expensive renovation project at the museum was getting on everyone’s nerves because of noise but mostly because of its cost. Two high-profile sex-harassment scandals at the museum, happening long before COVID, exposed simmering, inchoate fury among women on the PMA staff. When layoffs came in 2020, the climate was already roiled and ripe. The union effort there won 89 percent of the votes.

Workers at LA MoCA voted to unionize in 2019. It registered with no one since it’s the most screwed-up museum in the country. The New Museum unionized in 2018, but it’s a contemporary art space and in crazy New York.

The United Auto Workers has cultural and white-collar affiliates. It’s doing the most to push the union agenda in museums, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees is in the game, too. The new union representing the staff at the Carnegie museum network in Pittsburgh is a United Steelworkers affiliate. Organizers haven’t been sleeping. The UAW has done a great job networking with museum staff with publicly expressed gripes. I’m sure staff has been promised the moon, the stars, and the ring around Saturn, but that’s savvy marketing.

Judging from the Black Lives Matter euphoria in museums last year, I can’t say that questioning and challenging are strengths in the museum community. Since they’re arts people and most are well-educated, I’d expect to see more skepticism. I hope their art history is more rigorous than their politics and economics.

There are more sticky problems in the drive to unionize. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has what’s called a wall-to-wall union. It’s a new concept and the PMA staff is the first to try it. A wall-to-wall union doesn’t segregate workers by job. Guards, curators, educators, art handlers, cafe workers, greeters, assistants, fundraisers, and PR and IT people are all in a single bargaining unit. The theory’s simple. Tobin, the museum educator at Mass MoCA, said, “The bigger the unit, the more say we have.”

Bigger’s not better, in this case at least. Bigger means more strife and more division.

At the MFA in Boston, the new union, supported by a 133–14 vote late last year, represents 30 departments and includes curators, art conservators, fundraisers, and staff in the IT, PR, and visitor-services department. The biggest, about 500 workers, is the United Steelworkers union representing the Carnegie museums. That’s the art museum, the natural-history museum, the science museum, and the Andy Warhol Museum. It embraces curators who don’t have reports, scientists, educators, art handlers, and administrative staff. There are too many people in the bargaining unit who have little in common.

I don’t think a wall-to-wall union will work, and I’d hate to be in one as a curator. Staffers, I’m sure, got a surge of egalitarian pride when this experiment started. “I know more people now across the museum, like, by name,” Adam Rizzo, the PMA union president, said. “What they do and what their lives are like.” Nice, but I wonder how long the warm and fuzzies will last. After a few days feeling like Norma Rae, they’ll wake up in On the Waterfront.

The curators, at the top of the hierarchy of creative workers, now have one vote each just like everyone else, and they’re now vastly outnumbered in a bargaining unit dominated by service, tech, and fundraising people. The Whitney wrongly agreed to recognize a UAW union without a fight. It’s wrong because workers who don’t want a union disrupting their professional lives deserve the right to vote “no,” even though, in the Whitney’s case, they’ll probably lose. Instead, the Whitney is trying to narrow the bargaining unit from a wall-to-wall behemoth to a small union excluding most curators, term-limited employees like curatorial fellows, and staff members with a direct report.

At the PMA, the first thing the union demanded was a mask mandate. It wants a two-tier system for handling harassment and retaliation claims, one managed by the union, the other for non-union staff, even though the museum holds the bag on liability. The union wants to address what it calls “severe understaffing” caused by the new expansion. It says the museum administration didn’t budget for the personnel needed to handle so much more space. The Pronoun People are in the mix, too. They’re running a new language handbook for the staff. Bargaining for a contract hasn’t started, but that’ll be a doozy of a fight.

Now, museum unions have to bring home the bacon. They’re heading toward negotiating that first contract and will need to show results on wages and benefits. Naïveté might have led many to vote “yes” on union election day. Expectations are high, so disappointment’s a threat. The Tenement Museum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side unionized in April 2019. It took 17 fraught, unhappy months for union and management to agree to that first contract. It’s only a ten-month contract, so the fun and games commence again this fall. The New Museum’s first contract, a five-year deal, has only tiny wage increases.

Money-smart directors and trustees will probably look at the COVID lockdown craze with deep curiosity and interest. So much staff basically worked on an on-call or as-needed basis. Why, they’ll ask, shouldn’t we convert these staffers to gig workers? In California, art museums were shut for a year. Are there curatorial positions who can be converted to consultants?

Another memo to young unionistas: Most union contracts first and foremost protect seniority. And union dues will take a bite from paychecks. Years ago, the Worcester Art Museum staff unionized. At the time, MoMA was the only museum with a union. Two years later, the Worcester staff voted the union out.