The United States has recently seen a well-documented surge of interest in labor organizing. Union approval is at its highest rate since the 1960s, and even the 2024 Republican National Convention featured a prominent labor speaker. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has reported that annual union petitions, which are filed by workers seeking a union election in their workplace, have doubled from 2021 to 2024. While the overall unionization rate remains low (about 10% overall, 6% in the private sector), the number of unionized workers in the private sector has finally begun to increase after decades of decline.
Much attention has been paid to “traditionally” unionized industries like transportation and manufacturing, which have both seen major victories (e.g. the Teamsters’ UPS contract renegotiation, the UAW’s stand-up strike against the Big Three, and the unionization of a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga). Interest has also focused on less traditionally unionized but still recognizably “working class” organizers, like service employees at Starbucks and Whole Foods and warehouse workers at Amazon.
However, unions have seen some of their greatest success in an unexpected area: cultural institutions. The Legal Intelligencer reported that over 60,000 cultural workers unionized in 2022 alone, and thousands more have followed. Beginning in 2020, a growing number of employees of cultural institutions like museums, zoos, aquariums, and conservatories have responded to an array of grievances by organizing, from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to, among many others, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and, in Ohio, the Gateway Film Center, Wexner Art Center, Columbus Museum of Art, Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, and Cleveland Institute of Music.
Many of these workers shared the same concerns as everyone else—pandemic safety, workplace discrimination, sexual harassment, and stagnating salaries failing to keep up with inflation and housing costs. For example, Jacobin noted that a recent job posting at the Guggenheim lists its base salary as $55–60,000, which, given the average cost of a New York studio apartment, would require an employee to spend 72% of their income on rent.
They also have a similar type of class dynamic as that seen in the private sector. Just as much as any corporation, nonprofit cultural institutions are run by the rich. Nonprofit boards are generally made up of wealthy donors, and prominent cultural institutions typically dole out extremely high salaries to their top executives. They have very little in common with their employees who are struggling to get by.
Cultural institutions can also be uniquely exploitative because of their competitive nature. It is extremely difficult to break into cultural fields like art, music, and film; it requires aggressive networking, intensive baseline education (often accompanied by ruinous student debt), and a lot of luck. Working for a conservatory or a museum can give workers a leg up in these fields; as some have put it, these workers are paid in “cultural cachet.” This is another tool for exploitation—it leads workers to justify the undervaluing of their own work, and makes them terrified of losing their competitive jobs for speaking out against poor wages, unsafe working conditions, and sexual harassment.
The strain of the pandemic and inflation pushed these workers past the breaking point, and thousands have organized through the United Auto Workers (UAW), the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Cultural Workers United (AFSCME-CWU), and other unions. While it is often difficult to negotiate a first contract, several institutions have successfully inked collective bargaining agreements, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (the latter including a 14% wage increase).
For all the attention that has been rightfully given to Starbucks, Amazon, and UPS workers, it is no less significant that working people now have a voice in running the institutions that help form the backbone of American art and culture. These unions increasingly have the power to make sure that these institutions serve their workers as well as their communities.
Sources:
Jordan Konell, A Perspective on Increasing Unionization in the Arts and Culture Sector, The Legal Intelligencer (Oct. 22, 2023).
Kathleen Cancio, Workers at Ohio cinema house are latest to form a union through AFSCME, AFSCME Blog (Nov. 26, 2024), https://www.afscme.org/blog/workers-at-ohio-cinema-house-are-latest-to-form-a-union-through-afscme.
Anni Irish, Changing institutional culture from the inside out: why more and more US museum workers are forming unions, The Art Newspaper (May 18, 2023), https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/05/18/changing-institutional-culture-from-the-inside-out-why-more-and-more-us-museum-workers-are-forming-unions.
Anni Irish, Museum Workers Are Tired of Being Paid in Cultural Cachet — So They’re Unionizing, Jacobin (Aug. 19, 2023), https://jacobin.com/2023/08/museum-workers-cultural-institutions-pay-conditions-unionization.
Tyler Walicek, A Unionization Wave Is Reshaping Museums and Cultural Institutions Across the US, Truthout (Nov. 27, 2021), https://truthout.org/articles/a-unionization-wave-is-reshaping-museums-and-cultural-institutions-across-the-us/.
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