Matt Rourke/AP Photo
The bronze statue of Sylvester Stallone portraying the boxer from the film “Rocky III” stands outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where a museum union has been fighting for a contract for two years.
A weird thing happened in May 2019: A spreadsheet went viral. The Art/Museum Salary Transparency 2019 spreadsheet was passed around among museum workers, who filled in details about their position and then passed it further along. When it all came together, there were obvious discrepancies.
This spreadsheet (which included details on noteworthy museums such as New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art) coincided with, and was partially responsible for, a wave of unionization efforts among major museums across the United States, including the Guggenheim and the Tenement Museum in New York, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which recently ratified its first contract. The Art Newspaper reported that 13 percent of museums were unionized in 2020, the highest level since 2013.
Adam Rizzo saw his workplace, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, galvanized by the revealed salary information. The workers started having informal conversations, meeting up at each other’s houses and falling into discussion about working conditions. “We kind of realized at a certain point that we were actually talking about unionizing,” Rizzo, who is serving his second year as president of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Union (PMAU), told me.
While organizers succeeded in unionizing the facility, the PMAU still does not have a contract, despite two years of negotiations. Now, the union is raising the stakes with public pressure campaigns, deliberately timed rallies, and a looming strike. The PMA is a beloved institution, iconic for its appearances in the Rocky movies. Workers at the museum believe they deserve respect from management, given that they keep this cultural icon running.
In early 2020, the staffers had just gathered enough union cards to vote, after aligning with AFSCME District Council 47—and then the pandemic hit. The unionization effort was forced to pause as everyone adjusted. Many museum staffers faced economic uncertainty when lockdown measures caused layoffs or furloughs.
“The pandemic had created even more precarity for so many people,” Rizzo said, “that it only kind of strengthened everyone’s resolve to move forward.”
The vote moved forward in July 2020, and by an 89 percent vote, the PMA Union became the first “wall-to-wall” museum union, with union eligibility covering the entire workforce. But two days before the vote was finalized, the museum laid off about 100 workers.
“It was a bittersweet moment,” Rizzo said.
Amanda Bock has been involved with the union push since close to the beginning, and is now a union steward. Before she began work with the PMA, Bock worked in a different museum as a temporary worker for four years. She is no longer in that position, but Bock still feels passionate about the need to improve working conditions for the entire museum.
“It’s really about a larger issue of jobs in museums being precarious,” Bock said. “A lot of work in museums is unstable either because it is a temporary job that can go on forever or because the pay is not competitive.”
The PMAU launched a public pressure campaign to bring awareness to the fact that many staffers were being paid less than $15 per hour.
Aside from job stability, staffers have complaints about how management has handled harassment within the museum. In 2018, according to The New York Times, a museum manager was ousted after harassing multiple staffers, two years after complaints were first lodged. An executive was also ousted for physically assaulting a co-worker. The PMA also offers no paid leave for a workforce that is disproportionately female. And while the staffers have insurance, many of them forgo it because of extremely high deductibles.
All of this has led to what Rizzo called a “generally hostile, unpleasant exchange” of union negotiations. It is not uncommon for management to dig in their heels to try to delay progress toward an initial union contract, but the PMA has stalled negotiations for over two years now.
In that time, the museum has offered measly raises of 2 percent, and hired Morgan Lewis, a union-busting law firm, despite having in-house lawyers on staff.
The staffers are not discouraged. The PMAU launched a public pressure campaign to bring awareness to the fact that many staffers were being paid less than $15 per hour. In March, the museum acquiesced and raised everyone to that threshold.
But the contract negotiations continue to lag. Last week, the union hosted a rally to raise even more public pressure on the museum, timed with the AFL-CIO convention, which was meeting in Philadelphia at the time. High-profile speakers such as Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, spoke. The union raised thousands of dollars for a strike fund, in the event that workers see no other option for winning the first contract than to strike.
Organizing is, by definition, an effort for the collective interest. When the employees began having those informal conversations in 2019, they realized that the hierarchy of the museum meant they hardly knew what the others’ jobs consisted of. Rizzo likened the hierarchy to that of a for-profit institution, when information has to run up ladders before it can run down them (not to mention extremely high salaries for executives). Bock also notes how high turnover makes her job harder, and how having those discussions illuminated how her challenges were not necessarily unique to her job.
Anti-union management often forgets what Bock made sure to point out: “This was not only a good thing for workers to do, but it was also ultimately a really good thing for the museum.”
The first Rocky movie featured Sylvester Stallone running up the steps of the PMA, a legendary scene meant to portray persistence against long odds. Union members now face a similar fight as they rail against a major institution with a massive endowment, just to earn their basic rights at work.
