Museum workers at the MFA Boston have reason to celebrate with the ratification of their first union contract as of June 2022.

The win is the product of 18 months of negotiations between the newly-formed MFA Union and the bosses at the Museum of Fine Arts. It’s been a long road since the workers voted to unionize in November of 2020, but an increasingly less lonesome journey with the wave of union activity among museum workers in recent years.

The union push at the museum is part of a larger movement observed at diverse workplaces nationally and locally. Workers on the ground level at large businesses like Amazon, Apple, Chipotle, REI, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s and more have won union recognition or have union drives in progress. Local businesses have gotten in on the act, such as City Feed and Pavement Coffee. Notably these drives have taken place in workplaces that have not traditionally enjoyed union representation. A common denominator among all of them is that the workforce is taking their fate into their own hands and exercising their rights in the workplace as outlined in the National Labor Relations Act and stewarded by the NLRB.

Though the history of modern museums operated for the public good dates back to the 18th century, we’re still in the early phase of passing along that good to the workers that make the museums possible. The win for the MFA Union is a step toward equity in a long-overlooked workplace

Two main and inter-connected concerns have inspired the recent union wave in museums, helped along by the pandemic pressures: a hunger for social justice and a demand for economic equity. 

On the one hand, the spate of high-profile, racially-motivated killings of BIPOC folks in the last decade has spawned a national reassessment of the status of civil rights in America. The conversation, significantly, has advanced beyond a preliminary concern with getting a handful of BIPOC individuals into high-level leadership positions and has grown into a more broad-based critique of the mechanisms that enact and preserve racial inequalities for the BIPOC community at large. The museum workforce wants to see its own workplace dismantle the institutional mechanisms that preserve social and racial injustice.

On the other hand, museum workers also deal with familiar economic stressors and witness a familiar divide between the haves and have-nots. Via The Art Newspaper:

“Workers saw tremendous, ever-widening wage inequalities in their workplaces: boards of trustees composed of billionaires, money pouring in from other billionaires, huge sums spent on massive construction projects, museum leadership salaries going up,” Rosenstein says. “And yet, at the same time, the word to the staff was: ‘You’re lucky to be working here, you should not expect anything, and you cannot demand any security in your job’.”

The twin concerns of social and economic justice make natural bedfellows, given that economic inequality is maintained in part through the maintenance of racial divides, attitudes, and antagonism in society. These factors laid the groundwork for a worker’s movement in the museum world, while the pandemic imbued the movement with a sense of urgency. Museum workers were one of many industries hit hard by the realities of the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, the museum workers hit hardest were the ones with the lowest compensation, highest precarity, and smallest voice in the organization. Via Bloomberg:

In response to concerns about social justice, museums – whose leadership skews nominally progressive  – attempted to mimic the level of concern they saw around them. Museums used the social crisis as inspiration for curation, though the ideas embodied in the art were rarely folded into workplace practice. Via NYT:

Indeed, some have accused museums of being hypocritical when they champion progressivism in their art exhibitions and embrace new diversity policies in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd protests while challenging the efforts of workers to seek better pay and conditions.

The leadership at museums, as with most workplaces, will not prioritize equity in the workplace unless some external pressure is applied, whether it’s reputational damage, work stoppage, or otherwise. The tactics used to cheat employees out of compensation are equally banal and appalling. Via Jacobin:

“The museum is very PR-conscious,” Rosenstein told Jacobin. “But when it comes down to their own workers, they want to get away with the same things any corporate employer wants to get away with: paying people as little as they can, keeping people part-time, without benefits, and miscategorized as temporary or seasonal hires. Half of our unit makes under $20 an hour, and the negotiations are very reflective of that.”

As the social and economic pressures mounted, many museum workers saw a union push  – at the MFA Boston and elsewhere – as the best path forward. Via Boston Globe:

“This has been a long time in the making,” said Catrina Vear, 36, a manager of institutional philanthropy at the EcoTarium. “I don’t think the pandemic necessarily caused this action; I do think it was an accelerant.”

The history of museum drives does not extend back far, and comes decades after other industries have already had their union moment.

Labor historians track the emergence of organized labor in the museum workplace to the early 1970s, “...when an organization called the Professional and Administrative Staff Association of the Museum of Modern Art, also known as PASTA, started picketing.” Via NYT:

[PASTA] was heralded at the time as the first self-organized union of professional employees at a privately financed museum. Organizers complained that staff were poorly managed and underpaid, leading to a strike in 1971, and another in 1973 that made the cover of Artforum magazine and popularized demands for transparency from museum trustees that are still echoed today.

Labor historians credit the museum worker’s lack of organization to factors particular to the museum world as well as factors depressingly familiar across different labor sectors. In particular, there was an ideological barrier to organizing insofar as museum workers thought of themselves – or were encouraged to think of themselves – as a class distinct from the laborers in more strongly organized industries. Via Bloomberg:

Before the current wave of actions, unionization at cultural institutions like museums and zoos was rare, according to Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian and professor at University of California, Santa Barbara. That’s in part because the work appealed to privileged individuals, he said. Museums emerged from a 19th-century tradition of noblesse oblige — an inferred responsibility of the privileged to be generous to those less so — and attracted a well-educated and generally upper-class staff, he said.

The sense of noblesse oblige is powerful, but not powerful enough to erase material need. And the composition and sensibility of the museum workforce has evolved into a membership that can identify its common interests. Via NYT:

“We have gotten further away from the myth of the cultural worker just being grateful to have a job in this sector,” she explained, adding that younger workers have a better understanding of their value. “We are the ones who make museums.”

Via The Art Newspaper:

“Traditionally, museums have been staffed by people who didn’t actually need to make that much money from their work,” Finkelpearl says. “But a big demographic shift is taking place amongst many museum workforces. That is resulting in new ways of organising amongst existing unions, and new types of unions emerging…”

What PASTA — the Professional and Administrative Staff Association of the Museum of Modern Art — started has been taken up in large part by the Local 2110 UAW.

Via Artnet:

Local 2110 UAW’s ranks of museum workers have been growing by leaps and bounds in recent years. In New York, the Tenement Museum and New Museum joined in 2019; the Shed in 2020; the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hispanic Society of America, and the Brooklyn Museum in 2021; and the Jewish Museum in 2022. (Whitney staffers recently protested contract negotiations outside the opening night party for the Whitney Biennial.)

…Other New York institutions have been members for decades; the Museum of Modern Art and the New-York Historical Society since the 1970s, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts since in 2005.

These strides have not come without struggle. The bosses at museums are capable of the same retaliation and union-busting activity at any workplace. Workers involved with or sympathetic with union organizing have received negative performance reviews, or have even been fired. Via NYT:

Workers involved in union organizing at the Art Institute of Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History have argued that they received negative performance reviews because of their union advocacy…

At the Museum of Natural History, an anthropologist, Jacklyn Grace Lacey, said she was fired after organizing to expand the union membership of District Council 37, which has two union shops at the museum, one representing guards and another representing clerical workers. Those shops together comprise roughly 250 members; District Council 37 is working to add a third local that could include dozens of employees to the union ranks with titles like curator and scientist. Last week, the union filed for arbitration with the museum over Lacey’s firing.

While the union-busting is nothing new, some of the ways the union drives have proceeded speaks to a new digital age of organizing. For example, a worker group called A Better Guggenheim uncovered a big payout for the director of the museum, Richard Armstrong, at a time of supposed pandemic-related austerity. ABG dug up the information in Guggenheim’s IRS filings and used online platforms to make the news go viral, helping expose the distance between administrative talk and action.

Elsewhere, “employees at the New Museum…started comparing their wages to the executive salaries disclosed in the financial reports that museums and other nonprofits must publish.” The employees used online spreadsheets to make the information both accessible and potentially anonymous, limiting the danger of top down retaliation.

There is even a popular podcast dedicated to the push for equity in the artworld workplace, “Art and Labor,” which functions as an advocate for, “fair labor practices for artists, assistants, fabricators, docents, interns, registrars, janitors, writers, editors, curators, guards, performers, and anyone doing work for art & cultural institutions.”

For all the effort put into organizing, what benefits can workers expect to enjoy?

In broad terms, the big picture benefit is greater job security during times of crisis, such as the pandemic. Via Bloomberg:

Workers at unionized cultural institutions experienced 28% fewer job cuts on average than those at non-unionized workplaces during the pandemic, according to a report by Cultural Workers United, a program run by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), one of the leading unions representing public-service workers.

After 18 months of negotiation the workers of the MFA Union can finally taste the fruits of their labor guaranteed in real contractual terms. Among the benefits the Boston-based workers will enjoy, Artnet reports:

As part of the contract, salary increases of at least five percent go into effect July 1, with additional three percent raises in July 2023 and 2024—or a 13.5 percent increase over the next three years.

There are also improvements to retirement and transportation benefits, as well as the establishment of a new workplace diversity training program, labor management committee, and a formalized grievance procedure.

It’s a time to celebrate for these unionized workers, but also a time to remain vigilant. Museum workforces that vote to unionize must prepare themselves for sometimes contentious negotiations. Via NYT:

“I naïvely thought that you win an election and most of the work gets done,” said Adam Rizzo, the president of the Philadelphia museum’s union, “But the work gets harder as you negotiate with management and continue to do the weekly outreach.”

Unionized museum workers who have successfully negotiated a contract must not grow complacent, preparing themselves for future contract negotiations. Every benefit is hard won with struggle, but for those museum workers who love their job and the cultural value they bring to their communities, the alternative is unthinkable.

“At the end of the day, working in the arts or a non-profit is still a job. You can’t eat prestige.”

-Catie Rutledge, [Art Institute of Chicago]’s coordinator of philanthropy

Support and say hi to the MFA union.

Support and say hi to Local 2110 UAW.

Say hi and have a listen to the “Art and Labor” podcast.