A night (or day) at the museum: Getting better for workers?

Emily Searles wants all of her co-workers to know her salary. She isn’t boasting: The development operations manager at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is also a union organizer and wants to keep her bosses accountable. So she posts her pay in BAM’s Slack communications channel to encourage transparency. This way, any chasm in earnings between two employees working similar roles can be brought to light. 

It was this kind of gap that helped launch her labor activism in the first place. Before management and staff at the New York City performing arts venue signed their first union contract covering front-facing workers in September 2020, Ms. Searles found out that a colleague in the same department made $8,000 less than she did. She adds that for years workers had faced low-pay, poor communication from management, and a culture of elitism that implicitly called on staff to trade lower wages for the prestige of working in the arts. 

At a time of new energy in the U.S. labor movement, unions are on the rise at museums and cultural institutions nationwide, and in some cases they are making big wins against chronically low wages and a lack of workplace accountability. Workers at BAM and elsewhere have won increases in base salaries, challenging models that have long perpetuated an economically stratified workforce. 

The path can be two steps forward, one back. But experts and organizers say the long-term effects of unionization could be far-reaching as a new generation of cultural workers asserts its dignity and desire for a workplace voice. 

“This is a truly fertile generational shift potentially going on in the labor movement,” says Jennifer Sherer, a labor expert with the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “People who are learning firsthand how to organize unions will take that knowledge into any job they go into in the future.”

Growing momentum

The trend has been especially visible here in New York, where union organizing has surged since 2019, when lower Manhattan’s New Museum of Contemporary Art won its first contract after grueling negotiations and bitter pushback from management. 

While a handful of museum unions have existed for decades – notably at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art and the New York Historical Society – many more have formed over the past five years. From the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, workers at museums nationwide are winning union contracts after negotiations that sometimes last years. The Philadelphia Museum of Art Union ratified its first contract in October after a 19-day strike.

The wave of museum organizing comes amid the rise of independent unions at other private sector employers such as Starbucks and Amazon, and labor’s highest public approval in decades. According to an August 2022 Gallup Poll, 71% of Americans approve of labor unions, the highest rate Gallup has recorded since 1965. 

In some workplaces, widespread furloughs and layoffs at the onset of the pandemic in 2020 exposed the lack of collective bargaining to safeguard workers’ rights. One of the most significant outcomes of the New Museum’s contract was the net of support it provided for 31 union members who were furloughed in April 2020, says Francesca “Frankie” Altamura, an organizer and former curatorial assistant at the New Museum. 

Union members were able to negotiate a severance package, Ms. Altamura says, which likely would not have happened had the contract not been signed before the pandemic hit. But the union’s power has since diminished. Only seven of the initial 84-member bargaining unit remained employed at the museum by July 2020 – which Ms. Altamura says was management’s attempt to undercut the union’s influence. (A union charge, filed with the National Labor Relations Board, alleged the layoffs were retaliatory.)

Money for exhibits ... and for workers

Workers are pushing their concerns about pay and labor rights at a time of relatively strong finances for museums and cultural institutions. Museums in New York City and elsewhere are expanding and peak revenues are hitting new highs. 

Yet in much of the museum and art world, low wages for public-facing staff members are common – including for jobs that call for advanced degrees. Before the union contract, some staff at the New Museum were making less than $40,000, while the museum director, Lisa Phillips, had a salary of $737,350 in 2019. At BAM, there were full-time staff members who had never received a raise, despite having worked at the venue for years, Ms. Searles says. At both institutions, conversations between colleagues after work revealed these disparities, catalyzing their push to organize into formal unions.

“There’s a real parallel here with what we see in a lot of public employee and education organizing,” says Ms. Sherer, the Economic Policy Institute expert. “People who are deeply invested in their work are bringing demands to the table about their own conditions because they can’t sustain a career over a lifetime in the occupation that they love.”

It’s important to note, however, that museum management is often tied down by donor directives and the specific conditions of grant money, both of which make it difficult to channel funds directly into staff salaries, says Dina Bailey, owner of Mountain Top Vision, a consultant to museums on fundraising and diversity initiatives. And because museum director salaries have historically trended high, museums would have a hard time recruiting the most qualified directors if they reduced salaries, Ms. Bailey says. 

“They took it very personally” 

But beyond wide pay gaps, workers at BAM and the New Museum reported widespread lack of communication between upper management and lower-level staff, as well as a general assumption by museum management that the prestige of the positions should be of greater importance to staff than their salaries. 

“I think there’s this ethos that when you work in the arts, you should be able to consider yourself lucky that you get to do this type of work,” Ms. Searles says. “And that’s why I think the pay is low – it’s almost like a privilege.”

Museum managements have a reputation for fighting hard against unions and during contract negotiations, says Maida Rosenstein, former president of United Auto Workers Local 2110 – the union representing both BAM and the New Museum. It took nearly 18 months and a strike for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Union to reach a contract agreement with museum management, and three years for the Philadelphia Museum of Art Union. 

At both BAM and the New Museum, management tried to convince workers that the union would be bad for the workplace. Ms. Altamura recalls how one longtime museum donor and member of the New Museum’s board of trustees spoke to staff at the museum’s theater about how a union would undermine the institution.

“They took it very personally,” Ms. Altamura says. “People who don’t understand what a union is see unionizing as a very personal affront to their managerial abilities.”

Neither the New Museum nor the Philadelphia Museum of Art responded to the Monitor’s requests for comment. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Brooklyn Academy of Music declined to comment for this story.

Gains that come gradually

The New Museum’s contract now guarantees a minimum annual salary of $46,000 for full-time employees – less than the union wanted, but a firm floor that’s set to increase each year of the contract. BAM’s contract guarantees minimum salaries of $42,000 for assistant positions, with pay grades climbing from there, and outlines processes for which hourly positions can become salaried. 

But the wider effects of unionization on the museum industry will likely take time, as contracts evolve in successive bargaining cycles, Ms. Rosenstein says.

Still, Ms. Searles sees changes at BAM already. At work there’s an open dialogue among her colleagues about salaries, inequity, and workplace culture. She says people feel free to be vulnerable and honest about their working conditions – something many were afraid of in pre-union days. 

“I don’t know if I could go to a non-unionized job after this,” Ms. Searles says.

Editor’s note: One sentence has been corrected to signal that a union charge, alleging retaliation by management, was filed with the National Labor Relations Board.