The election results among staff at the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) were unanimously in favor on June 6. Voting with UAW Local 2110 occurred a month after workers at the institution announced their intention to organize for a variety of issues including fair wages and better benefits.

AFAM was created in 1961 and changed its name from the Museum of Early American Folk Arts in 2001. The institution’s public galleries are located near the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts in Manhattan, while its administrative offices, archives, and collections center are located in Long Island City, Queens. The museum’s collection of approximately 8,000 works of art from the United Stated and abroad, with the oldest examples from the turn of the eighteenth century. The union will include curatorial, retail, education, and information technology staff.

Other institutions located in New York City and across the Northeast that have unionized with UAW Local 2110 include the Dia Art Foundation, the Jewish Museum, the Museum of Fine Art in Boston and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

On June 6 and 7, hourly-wage employees at the Glenstone Museum held their own vote, joining Teamsters Local 639. A press statement said the group of 89 workers included all of the institution’s hourly guides, café workers, registration, grounds, engineering and maintenance, community engagement, and housekeeping staff. 

Glenstone staffers have called for livable wages, better benefits, and safer working conditions. A press statement on the vote said that many of the hourly workers had second jobs, part-time employees did not receive health care benefits, and that staff had been forced to work outdoors “during extreme heat and cold”.

A private museum, Glenstone was founded by billionaires Mitchell and Emily Wei Rales for the couple’s personal collection in 2006. The couple live across a pond from the institution’s galleries and have appeared on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors List since 2010. A expansion of the museum, designed by architect Thomas Phifer, was completed in 2018 at an estimated cost of $219 million.

According to the Washington Post, staffers faced union-busting strategies from museum leadership, including an appeal signed by Mitchell and Emily Wei Rales delivered to the homes of workers on June 3. The letter stated, “It is our sincere hope that you give due consideration to voting NO and keeping the Teamsters out of this special place we’ve built together.”

“We have said from the beginning of this process that we respect the right of our associates to decide whether to join a union,” the museum said in a statement to The Washington Post, which first reported the news of the union election results. “We accept the results of this election and intend to negotiate in good faith with the goal of achieving an equitable contract for the members of this new bargaining unit.”

“These workers defeated a sophisticated union-busting assault personally waged by some of the wealthiest people in America,” Local 639 president Bill Davis said in a statement. “I want to welcome them to our local union, and I look forward to helping them negotiate a first Teamsters contract.” 

After ten months of bargaining, members of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU/SEFPO) Local 535 officially went on strike on March 26 after rejecting the museum’s latest offer.

The union said AGO’s “last” offer failed to provide a livable wage and include protections against contracting out for part-time workers, which make up 60 percent of the museum’s staff.

Event setup coordinator Mark Thornberry has worked at the museum for 15 years, but said wages at the museum are not keeping up with rapid increases in the cost of living in Toronto. “It’s terrible at the moment. It’s rock bottom, and hat’s tough because people love working at the Art Gallery of Ontario,” Thornberry told CBC News. “It seems more and more that the employer doesn’t care about them.”

OPSEU local president Paul Ayers says public service employees struggled through the Covid-19 pandemic and three years of wage freezes, and cannot afford to keep up with inflation.

“The AGO Foundation paid out its CEO, Stephan Jost, over $390,000 in ‘consulting’ fees between 2020 and 2021 alone – on top of his $406,000 salary,” Ayers said in a press statement. “Yet there’s no money for wages? The gallery can absolutely afford to bring forward a better offer.” 

In an emailed statement, AGO spokesperson Andrea-Jo Wilson told ARTnews, “The AGO is hopeful that we will reach a negotiated agreement with OPSEU soon. The museum remains ready to negotiate and fully available to work constructively with employee representatives to reach a reasonable and fair agreement. When operations resume, updates will be published at ago.ca.”

The workers strike also follows the AGO’s recent announcement of a major expansion expected to cost $100 million CAD ($740 million). The five-floor, 40,000-square-foot expansion, devoted to modern and contemporary art, will be named after Canada Goose founder Dani Reiss, who donated $35 million CAD ($25.9 million). The Canadian government has also invested $25 million CAD ($18.5 million).

The museum’s latest audited financial statements ending on March 31, 2023 show a deficit of $3.8 million CAD ($2.86 million). While administrative expenses went down from the previous year, costs for food and beverage and art acquisitions (both gifted and purchased) significantly rose from the previous fiscal year.

“It feels great to have a contract that’s the culmination of all of our organizing efforts,” Julie K. Smitka, an associate producer at the museum, said in a statement. ”It’s transformative for our workplace. Not only are there increases that exceed what the Guggenheim historically granted, but we now have rights at work that are legally enforceable.”

Per union spokesperson Maida Rosenstein, the agreement guarantees a minimum 9 percent wage increase over the next two and a half years, as well as increases in retirement contributions, four weeks paid family leave, and funding for career training retroactive to July 1. The contract also guarantees minimum rates for full- and part-time employees. (Find a summary of the contract here.)

The alliance of conservators, curators, educators, visitor service, and digital marketing workers, and administrative staff at the Guggenheim voted to join Local 2110 United Auto Worker (UAW) in 2021. UAW also represents workers at the New Museum and the Whitney Museum, among other cultural institutions in New York City.

The Guggenheim workers’ demands included wage equity, more transparency, and increased job security.

The move came two years after some 160 art handlers and facilities workers at the museum joined a separate labor organization, International Union of Operating Engineers Local 30, which also includes workers at New York’s MoMA PS1. The three-year agreement ratified with Local 30 guaranteed salary increases by approximately 10 percent over the course of the contract. Unionized employees were no longer required to contribute to health insurance premiums, while improvements were promised to safety operations and scheduling protocols.

The Operating Engineers unit reached one of the first successful contracts in the wave of unionization seen by museums nationwide in the past five years. Other success stories include the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum, and more recently, the Whitney Museum.

“There is a spiritual aspect to labor just as there is to making art,” Alan Seise, public programs manager in the Guggenheim’s education department and a member of the union bargaining committee, said in a statement. “The contract puts into writing that the labor we all do at the museum is important, valuable, and worth protecting. It recognizes the dignity and humanity of everyone who works to enrich the lives of our visitors. I’m proud to have been a part of bringing the Guggenheim a little closer to the ‘Temple of the Spirit’ it was founded to be.”

Today, the PMA union shared via Instagram a petition calling on PMA director and CEO Sasha Suda and General Counsel Al Suh to honor the contract’s agreed upon terms. The group has also filed a grievance against the leaders.

“Now, days before this contract provision is scheduled to take effect [Suda] and [Suh] have confirmed that they intend to renege the agreement. They intend to only award a pay bump on an employee’s fifth, tenth, twentieth anniversary of employment,” the Instagram post reads. For example, it continued, an individual who has worked at the museum for 25 years will “never receive a longevity increase, while someone whose fifth anniversary falls within the term of the contract will receive $500 or $250 added to their base pay rate.”

Some 180 PMA employees voted to unionize in August 2020 amid a swell of labor actions at cultural institutions across the country. The PMA Union, an affiliate of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, District Council 47 and comprised of 180 workers, voted overwhelmingly in favor of the contract last year, ending a 19-day strike. Negotiations had stalled on the issue of salaries, with the union rejecting the museum’s initial offer of wage increases totaling 8.5 percent over the next 10 months and 11 percent by July 1, 2024.

But Rizzo is now back at the negotiating table, and the museum has added another controversy to its growing docket. As ARTnews‘s Alex Greenberger reported at the time, the vote came in the wake of major turmoil at the museum stemming from allegations of mismanagement, sexual harassment, and discrimination, in addition to the financial fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Like most museums in America in 2020, the PMA terminated a portion of its workforce—85 employees, in this case—and struggled to respond appropriately to the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing and ongoing Black Lives Matter protests. In a letter to its staff, Timothy Rub, then museum’s director, and president Gail Harrity used the phrase “every individual life matters,” spurring a missive from five Black employees that alleged leadership of a “lack of compassion and empathy.” 

The PMA has yet to comment on the union’s protest over the late-hour counter to the contract provisions.  

In that post, the union said that the new terms are “not only nonsensical,” but “will have the opposite effect of the intent of the provision. Instead of rewarding employees equitably and fairly for their service, management will be causing even greater inequity and chaos to prevail in the PMA pay structure.”

The three-and-a-half-year labor agreement provides expanded benefits for the unionized workers, including raises and improved job security. 

In August 2021, Whitney workers voted overwhelmingly to affiliate themselves with UAW Local 2110, which also represents workers at the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum in New York. With the vote, the Whitney employees joined the wave of organizing at art institutions across the United States driven by the financial fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. 20% of the Whitney’s had been laid off since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, while wages had stagnated despite rising rents and inflation in New York City. According to the union, half of the Whitney’s employees made less than $20 an hour.

Negotiations began that November, but soon stalled on issues including healthcare and retirement benefits, job security for full-time and part-time staff, and wages. Meanwhile, members of the union began staging demonstrations outside the Whitney’s luxe events, including the 2022 Whitney Biennial and, most recently, the Art Party in February, to bring attention to the situation.

“We’re thrilled to have reached an agreement with the Museum that raises minimum pay rates across the board at every employee level,” Ramsay Kolber, a curatorial research associate and part of the Union Bargaining Committee, said in a Local 2110 statement emailed to ARTnews. “The contract also has wage increases that will continue to lift salaries even higher over the next two years.” 

The new contract sees significant, long-term wage increases: employee wages will be raised by 15%, retroactive from January 1, 2023. Additionally, they will receive a $1,000 signing bonus and 9.5% raise over the course of the contract. The minimum hourly wage has been raised from an hourly rate of $17 to $22, and by June 2025, that wage will be increased to $24 per hour. 

Under the new contract, the museum will be obligated to offer extra hours to permanent workers before hiring temporary help. Part-time staff will now receive paid holidays as well as first consideration for open full-time positions. 

“We’re excited to have a contract that recognizes our contribution to the Museum,” Sandy LaPorte, a Facilities Supervisor added in the statement. “We work out of the limelight and have sometimes felt underappreciated and unheard. With this contract, our jobs are protected and we have a voice at the Museum.”

A spokesperson for the Whitney told ARTnews that the museum is “pleased to reach an agreement with UAW Local 2110. After negotiating in good faith for many months, we have finalized a contract that serves the best interests of our staff. We look forward to a longstanding and productive working relationship with 2110.”

Temporary employees at the museum, who refer to themselves as “casuals,” unionized in 2021 with OPEIU (Office and Professional Employees Union) Local 12. The unionization process was prompted by massive layoffs of “casual” employees during the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, those employees numbered around 100, but were then shaved down to 35. Before unionization, most of the “casual” workers did not make the Minneapolis-suggested wage of $15 an hour.

The workers have criticized the way museum leadership handled the economic hardships of 2020, pointing out that the leadership at Mia only took a 15% pay cut whereas leaders at other museums sacrificed much more of their high salaries to keep staff on retention.

“Instead, Mia officials decided to layoff those that are in the lowest-paid positions and the most precarious of financial positions,” reads a 2021 petition from when the Mia staff were first agitating for unionization. “As a result, these decisions have disproportionately affected Mia’s BIPOC staff (which primarily retain non-managerial or grant-funded positions in the museum).”

The union now represents 150 curators and other non-managerial staff who have been fighting for a 16% wage increase over two-and-a-half years, as well as medical benefits.

The union has said that the MIA presented a counter-proposal that offered 15% in wage increases over two-and-a-half years, but only if 9 of the highest paid curators agreed to leave the union. The museum said in a statement that it never offered such a deal.

“Mia and OPEIU have exchanged a number of proposals as part of the ongoing negotiations, which at times have included proposals about changing the unit composition as one component among many ideas to resolve differences about wages, salaries, and benefits,” wrote a Mia spokesperson in an email. “But Mia did not ‘ask’ that curators leave the union and any bargaining unit changes would need to be mutually agreed upon along with all other terms.”

The proposal sparked the decision to picket the museum, which is not an official strike but rather for informational purposes, union workers said.

The counter proposal was “unacceptable” given that the museum has enjoyed a windfall in donations and is operating with a historic $38 million budget this year, unionized workers have said.

“Mia has a record budget this year. (Mia) continues to spend millions of dollars on acquisitions and leadership level salaries,” unionized worker Debbi Hegstrom told the Reformer. “We need to see the love. We need to see how much they appreciate us with a paycheck.”

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to add a statement from a Mia spokesperson.

“After 14 months of bargaining, our members voted overwhelmingly in favor of ratifying our first contract! We’re proud of having secured a strong agreement that we can build on,” a post from the union read.

The MASS MoCA staff voted to join Local 2110 UAW, which also represents museum workers at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim, in 2021. The workers were demanding a minimum hourly rate of $18 for the first year of the contract, with increases in 2023 and 2024.

At the time, two-thirds of the staff were making $15.50 an hour. After several rounds of failed negotiations, which the union claimed were often done in bad faith, unionized MASS MoCA workers staged a one-day strike in August.

While details are not yet available, a statement from MASS MoCA confirms wage increases, as are professional development reimbursement, a bonus for full-time employees eligible for retirement, and a “LemonAid Fund,” a mutual aid fund set aside for employees facing “sudden hardship.” Some of these benefits went into effect this past October, but are now being formally accepted as part of the union contract.

“This contract is a result of the willingness of each party to listen and genuinely consider the other’s objectives and concerns,” MASS MoCA director Kristy Edmunds said in a statement. “The way forward requires a shared optimism for the future, and the ability to meet our field-wide challenges with creativity and care.”

The MASS MoCA employees were not the only museum workers to lead a strike this year. A much longer one was waged by the union of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where workers striked for a total of 19 days this fall.

A strike also recently took place at the New School, which includes the Parsons School of Design, one of the nation’s top art schools. Workers there announced that they were be pausing their strike after a tentative agreement was reached with the university. The strike saw 1,300 active adjunct professors—nearly 80 percent of the teaching faculty at the New York school—striking for three weeks, making it the longest-ever adjunct faculty strike in the history of the United States.

The strike followed an initial one day warning strike in mid-September and 15 hours of negotiating over two days last week, PMA Union President Adam Rizzo told ARTnews Tuesday.

“We were able to clear non-economic issues off the table and that was really encouraging. We thought we’d wrap up the contract on Friday,” said Rizzo. “But when we got to the economic issues like pay and benefits, the Museum said, ‘We won’t budge on any of these things’ and that’s what led us to vote on the strike.”

The strike comes at an awkward time for the Museum as their new director, Sasha Suda, began her first day on Monday.

“We were out here this morning setting up and they were hosting a coffee meet-and-greet for Sasha and senior management right inside,” said Rizzo. “That was disappointing.”

Rizzo, who serves as the museum’s coordinator of college and pre-professional programs, recalled meeting with Suda when her appointment had been confirmed this July and described her as a “lovely person.”

“She comes from a union staff, she said to me that she was proud of the work that the union was doing and I was really hopeful it could mean some change,” said Rizzo. “And maybe it still could.”

A representative for the museum said that Suda would not provide a comment for this article.

Suda’s appointment comes after former director Timothy Rub stepped down in July last year. Rub had been the subject of extensive criticism after the New York Times reported in 2020 that then-assistant director Joshua Helmer had been accused of inappropriate behavior towards female staff starting in 2016. Helmer quietly resigned in 2018 and then joined the Erie Art Museum, where, according to the Times, he was accused of similar behavior. Rub apologized to staff for the PMA’s handling of the situation shortly after the Times expose published, but did not reference the issue in his resignation last year.

Rizzo said that the issue with Helmer had been a major factor in the staff’s decision to unionize, along with their problems with James A. Cincotta, the Museum’s previous director of retail. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s published an investigation in February 2020 — one month after the Helmer story broke — alleging that Cincotta slapped, punched, pinched, and shoved numerous colleagues.

In an interview with the Ottawa Citizen Leslie Anne Miller, chair of the Philadelphia museum said that she hoped Suda’s gender would be seen as “emblematic of the institution’s ongoing commitment of furthering D.E.I. [diversity, equity and inclusion] in everything we do.”

Meanwhile, the negotiations with the union have dragged on for two years. The PMA said it believes it offered a satisfactory contract.

“The museum respects the right of employees to organize and go on strike but is disappointed that the union decided to strike despite the significant wage increases and other offers made by the museum at the last negotiating session,” the PMA said in a press release Monday.

The PMA provided a list of points that they had offered the Union: wage increases totaling 8.5% over the next 10 months and 11% by July 1, 2024; minimum annual salary for exempt employees that is more than 10% higher than the current lowest annual salary for these employees; four weeks of paid parental leave; accelerated eligibility for health benefits for new hourly employees; accelerated vacation accrual for hourly employees; a more flexible remote work schedule; and job security protections that ensure the museum will not use a temporary employee, term employee, subcontractor, or volunteer to lay off or furlough a current union staff member.

Rizzo said that he was happy the museum had extended, for example, healthcare eligibility, but that the overall offer was not enough. The union, he said, is seeking higher quality, affordable healthcare for the staff, and that the offered wage increases hardly make up for inflation, especially considering that the staff hasn’t received raises in three years. He added that, in negotiations, the PMA has never said it cannot afford the union’s higher demands.

“If they told us they couldn’t afford to meet our demands, legally, they would have to open their books to us and they’ve never done that,” said Rizzo.

Meanwhile, the union said that while PMA staff salaries are 30-60% of the industry standard, depending on the position, senior management earns well above industry standards for its roles. For example, said Rizzo, PMA’s Chief Operating Officer makes $400,000 per year. According to the Association of Art Museum Directors’s 2022 Salary Survey, the median salary for that role in the Mid-Atlantic region is just over $229,000.

Despite the difficult situation, Rizzo said that the atmosphere at the strike is lively and that they’ve been touched by the support they’ve been receiving.

“It’s super fun to be out here with our colleagues, music and tambourines, talking to the community,” he said. “Obviously we’d much rather be inside doing our jobs.”

The MASS MoCA staff voted to join Local 2110 UAW, which also represents museum workers at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim, last summer. Since then, the unionized employees have been trying to bargain for their first union contract.

The union is hoping to obtain a minimum hourly rate of $18 for the first year of the contract, with increases in 2023 and 2024 that get the minimum “closer to $20 per hour” by the end of the contract, according to the announcement of the one-day strike. MASS MoCA’s current offer is a $16 per hour minimum with no guaranteed increases, the union said.

With two-thirds of the staff making $15.50 an hour, most of the Museum’s employees are living well below a living wage, according to MIT’s living wage calculator for Berkshire County, where MASS MoCA is located and where most of its employees live.

“Many of us live locally in North Adams. By raising hourly rates to something more livable, MASS MoCA would not only be supporting its employees, but helping lift the community,” said Isabel Twanmo, a box office representative who is on the union’s negotiating committee, said in a statement.

Maro Elliott, the manager of institutional giving and a member of the union’s negotiating committee, said in a statement that the hope with the new contract is to “create a more accessible, equitable, and just workplace.”

“While we respect our employees’ right to strike as a means of expressing their views, we are also disappointed in their decision, given the positive and collaborative environment that we have worked to foster during our collective bargaining process with the UAW,” a MASS MoCA representative wrote in an email to ARTnews.

The union is not just striking for better pay but in protest following what it has called a pattern of bad faith negotiating. The union has filed several unfair labor practice charges against MASS MoCA with the National Labor Relations Board, one of which was filed after the museum promised “additional raises” to certain employees if they convinced the union to lower its wage demands, according to the press release.

While MASS MoCA did not deny this in their emailed statement, the museum claimed to have been “negotiating in good faith with the UAW in order to reach a fair contract for both sides,” and that they have worked towards certain objectives “when their proposals have provided for a positive employee experience, and supported our museum culture of teamwork, collaboration, and excellence.”

“We’ve made significant progress towards reaching a contract and look forward to getting back to the bargaining table to continue our negotiations,” read the statement.

“Throughout months of bargaining, MASS MoCA’s representatives have been antagonistic toward our union, telling us the arts and artists come first. We all love MASS MoCA but we also have to live,” said union worker Maro Elliott in a statement.

Staffers at the Baltimore Museum of Art voted 89-to-29 Thursday night to unionize amid an industry-wide movement to secure higher wages and better working conditions. BMA employees will join the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Council 67, according to the Baltimore Business Journal.