Cameron Kiszla/Park Labrea News/Beverly Press
AFSCME, which assisted the Marciano Art Foundation’s employee organizing effort and protest, shown here, is also working with MOCA employees to unionize.
As a promising wave of organizing helps shift the narrative around labor unions in the U.S., recent polls suggest public support is at its highest rates in decades. This follows a record year of strikes, in which teachers, hotel employees, and health care workers have turned local struggles into national movements. Meanwhile, toxic work environments, exploitation, and substandard conditions—both expression and incitement of the obscene inequality that defines our era—continue to drive workers in tech, service industries, and various pockets of the gig economy to seek representation. More diverse memberships, including in sectors historically peripheral to the labor movement, are redefining what it means to be a unionist.
As part of this trend, organizing in art museums, nonprofits, and cultural institutions is having a moment. Workers are drawing attention to the gulf between institutional mandates and internal labor practices, and challenging assumptions about what kind of workers deserve protection. In spaces long insulated by prestige, they are questioning the normalization of uneven labor rights.
Taking inspiration from newly formed unions at the Guggenheim, the Tenement Museum, and the New Museum in New York, employees at the Marciano Art Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art, both in Los Angeles, recently submitted union cards to the National Labor Relations Board. Marciano, an outgrowth of the Guess fashion empire that remains a caricature of anti-union animus two decades after moving its sweatshops from downtown L.A. to Mexico, immediately laid off the museum’s entire staff and folded, citing low attendance. MOCA initially issued a dismissive statement. But bruised from a series of controversies, and striving to establish itself as a relevant civic beacon on downtown L.A.’s re-emergent Grand Avenue, it quickly pivoted and voluntarily recognized the union in early December.
Before Marciano and MOCA, there was the Museum of Tolerance, which in 2018 became the first major museum in L.A. to unionize. The process illuminated familiar cracks in the facade of mission-driven organizations, and offers an example of how people with no union background or even familiarity are turning to organizing.
Josie Cha, a former docent at the Museum of Tolerance who led efforts there, described frustration with permanent part-time status, insecurity, and low wages; in short, a working environment that contradicted the values she expected to share with an organization dedicated to human rights.
“I assumed we would start with minimum wage, get raises regularly, and be paid comparably. But no,” says Cha, who recently left the museum after six years. “I didn’t know anything about unions. But I figure we need some kind of representation, some kind of outside intervention.” She first went to SEIU, but found a better fit with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which now also represents MOCA.
Cha and her colleagues had a growing sense that employees should be compensated fairly and have a voice. But a decision by the museum’s founder-CEO, Rabbi Marvin Hier, to pray at President Trump’s inauguration in 2017 was a turning point. “This is the work we’re doing—anti-bigotry, anti-racism. And what does Trump stand for? So, of course we don’t like it. They keep telling us we’re apolitical,” Cha says.
“Surprisingly enough, these organizations that believe in the social justice movement, there’s been a lot of pushback about having a union in their workplace.”
Hier, who has praised Trump for moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and proclaiming the occupied Golan Heights “now Israeli territory forever,” is no stranger to controversy, like that surrounding a Jerusalem MOT branch built on the site of a historic Muslim cemetery. And it was not lost on Cha and her colleagues, as they fought for better pay, that Hier’s salary has routinely been outsize among nonprofit leaders, at more than $800,000 in 2018. “The reason we unionized was for representation,” she says. “But these things made us madder. I came here to learn and grow and to do things I thought would be good for the world. Not to be intimidated and exploited.”
When Cha began to organize, management responded swiftly, bringing in anti-union consultants for mandatory meetings with staff. “It was so difficult for staff to go against the authority figures,” Cha explains. “They brought in consultants to intimidate us and lie to us, to talk us into not voting ‘yes.’” (The Museum of Tolerance did not respond to a request for comment.)
Ling Esangga, organizing director for AFSCME District Council 36 in Los Angeles, described encountering similar pushback at two leading nonprofit legal-aid organizations: Public Counsel—the nation’s largest pro bono firm, specializing in sex trafficking, immigration, and social justice work—and Asian Americans Advancing Justice. Contracts were negotiated at both organizations last year.
“Surprisingly enough, these organizations that believe in the social justice movement, there’s been a lot of pushback about having a union in their workplace. There’s a lot of discomfort and employers discouraging employees from unionizing,” Esangga says.
Maybe it’s not so surprising, suggests Nelson Lichtenstein, a distinguished professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the school’s Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy. He points out that owners, patrons, or philanthropists at mission-driven organizations may feel a sense of self-righteousness, and that labor rights can get relatively short shrift. “They feel they’re doing the Lord’s work. That’s true whether it’s a health clinic, a nonprofit, or environmental group … [As if] the workers are just grubbing around for an extra dollar when ‘we’re saving the planet.’”
Rob Young/Creative Commons
MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles
Material conditions are driving workers in sectors we don’t readily associate with unions to take action. The days of getting by on minimum wage now seem quaint, certainly in a coastal city, and even with half of states raising the floor in 2020. And particularly in urban centers hit by an affordable-housing crisis, the prestige of working for a cause, being around art—or for that matter, unpaid internships—is of increasingly suspect value. Psychic income doesn’t pay the rent the way tangible dollars do.
“Unionism and collective action, the left, the socialists have said for a century, this is a good thing in itself no matter what the character of the leadership,” Lichtenstein says. “That’s why I think this is an important struggle, beyond just the material conditions. It’s an ideological and cultural struggle of great importance, for the whole society.”
In the case of museums, low-wage and part-time or temporary workers, many of whom have advanced degrees and are expected to have the depth of knowledge required of public-facing roles, are pointing out an obvious and entrenched hypocrisy. “I think there’s this cultural thing … this idea you’re lucky to work there,” says Olivia Leiter, an MFA student and employee with MOCA’s education department.
Kit Lamb, a 30-year-old worker in the A/V department at MOCA and a former gallery attendant at Marciano, describes an intersection of the art world’s exceptionalism and the economic insecurity his generation has grown up with. “It’s created this kind of precarity … you have to be an underling, cut your teeth, be recognized within the community. So it can create a lot of situations for coercion or abuse,” Lamb says.
Kent Wong, director of UCLA’s Labor Center, points to a “major shift” in the modern workplace, where a living wage, solid and consistent benefits, and extended job security are now hard to come by, particularly for a new generation of workers. Wong highlights the cultural climate—the women’s marches and other spasms of dissent that continue to reverberate, perhaps with a cumulative effect. “[Young people] see growing economic inequality, massive tax breaks for the one percent spearheaded by this administration. They’re struggling to pay rent, buy clothes. These contradictions are heightened at the workplace,” he says. That’s especially true in the museum world, which is dominated at the top by the ultra-rich, while workers barely eke out a living.
Conservative efforts to reify the 20th-century archetype of a unionist as a white male factory worker assembling cars in the Midwest distract from the reality that the modern labor movement includes women and people of color and service industries, from janitors to home health care specialists to the fast-food workers leading the Fight for $15. But the renewed interest, fresh blood, and progressive gains are hamstrung both by the law and by social climate.
“This is the big conundrum,” Lichtenstein explains. “Yes, undoubtedly today there is a great interest in collective action … But the labor law is terrible … So bad that any management that wants to can prevent the union if they’re willing to put up with a certain expense, a little bit of public shaming. They can just delay, delay, and fire a few people.”
In the case of museums, workers are pointing out an obvious and entrenched hypocrisy. “I think there’s this cultural thing … this idea you’re lucky to work there.”
The experience of the Marciano Art Foundation simply closing its doors when workers sought to collectively bargain is instructive. Breaking a union, Lichtenstein notes, “just doesn’t have the same shaming character, the bad PR that either racial discrimination or sexism has.” The mix of younger, more diverse, and more educated workers at cultural institutions facing the same suppression of labor rights could, over time, create a broader sense of popular discontent with these practices. But for now, Lichtenstein says, “the heads of museums can do this and still get invited to the good parties.”
Amid the drive for transparency and accountability in cultural institutions, employees may find ways to leverage the formidable PR machines they’re up against. For MOCA employees, the timing was important. Things came to a head when new director Klaus Biesenbach took the helm in 2018, explains Brenda Escobar, a full-time floor lead who, along with Lamb and Leiter, is part of her union’s organizing committee. Biesenbach instituted several changes at MOCA, including a free-admission policy. “It was all happening at once, but the museum was still the same,” Escobar notes. “Everyone felt like, ‘Wow, there’s a lot going on but we’re still not getting paid well, still no benefits …’ I felt like workers were not being thought about in that process.”
Biesenbach’s press tour included a targeted message of “civic responsibility.” Speaking of the drive to organize, Escobar mirrors this language: “We’re trying to give access and education to people, and trying to create this community, and that matters a lot for people. We care about the institution.”
Lamb pointed to a spreadsheet that went viral last year, in which more than 3,000 museum employees anonymously disclosed their salaries, as a “galvanizing” moment. “Throughout both Marciano and MOCA, the spirit has been very much treating this as a movement within museum labor. And taking inspiration from East Coast museums that have done this, to see how we could make this more the standard,” he says.
Despite leaving the Museum of Tolerance, Cha has been brought in to speak at other L.A. nonprofits where workers are facing hardships and abusive behavior. Esangga acknowledged that AFSCME is in the early stages of developing organizing committees at several other Southern California institutions in 2020, though she declined to give details.
Mike Sukal, AFSCME’s national organizing director, reports an uptick in inquiries from cultural-institution employees across the country, signaling the union’s intent to expand its presence in that sector. “This is definitely a coordinated national effort,” he said.
Cha balances the enthusiasm. “You don’t know how exhausting it is to unionize. It took me years … And I think unions have a lot of work to do themselves … Hopefully organizations will take that feedback.
“But every worker needs representation. We need representation.”
