Around 2018, a strange sort of document began to circulate around email lists of precarious cultural workers. We found ourselves staring into glowing screens, at spreadsheets methodically comparing salaries between cultural institutions around the country. The transparency shock these spreadsheets created made the gap between staff pay and executive—the ugly inequality of the money moving through these institutions—hard to ignore.

So in January of 2019, New York’s New Museum staff, in some cases facing poverty wages in an ever more expensive city, sent a letter to the National Labor Relations Board declaring their intent to unionize with United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2110. The once famously progressive institution—who in the 70’s had adopted “new” to stand for institutional transparency and a horizontal approach to management—responded to the workers coldly. It saw fit to hire a union busting law firm to ensure the New Museum’s future would be “100% union free.” This inspired union support among heavy hitting curators and art world specialists, and a visible struggle followed. By October 2019,  Local 2110 achieved its first contract with an average salary gain of 8%, and a minimum full time salary bump from $35,000 to $46,000.

New Museum curators and staff were certainly not the first to join a labor union—guards at the Metropolitan Museum had bargained for their contracts since the 1950’s, the IUOE Local 30 had represented MoMA art handlers since the 70’s and PASTA (Professional and Administrative Staff Association) union had formed at MoMA in 1971 among other examples.  And yet, it’s clear today that the New Museum unionization, followed soon after by the Philadelphia Museum of Art employees, marked a fresh moment at the intersection of arts and labor.  It arrived at a moment in Capitalism when workers with advanced degrees were experiencing that same sinking feeling of barely paying bills and the existential anxiety once known primarily by uniform wearing, clock -punching blue-collar workers. 

This new wave of museum unionization did not appear from nowhere. For decades, museum curators and senior staff typically came from economically privileged  social backgrounds. While their work for art and culture was genuine, their pay was often nominal—a “passion subsidy” In Amanda Tobin Ripley’s phrase. But two developments disrupted this system. Starting in the 1970s, larger numbers of working class people began seeking professional degrees in Art History and Arts Administration. And yet, that coincided with the end of what had been called the American Dream. Following the financial collapse of 2008-2009, the 2011 Occupy Movement asked Americans to look at the dismal 99 vs 1 percent economic reality and consider alternatives. It had been a decade in which NYC groups like Occupy Museums, Gulf Labor, and Decolonize this Place dragged museums onto the political stage. By 2019 the stage was already dressed for  union solidarity.

Now a floodgate has opened. Museum workers across the country have bravely organized themselves. They’ve risked their jobs in a tough economy to face off with management. They’ve  encountered responses ranging from institutional closure to total preemptive contract victory. Some museum employees were forced to set up picket lines or go on strike. Despite the malignant forces of Covid and the second Trump regime both emerging in the years since, powerful waves of unionization have also hit higher education and auto plants alike. Inspiring pro-labor leaders have emerged, from UAW’s Shawn Fain to the newly elected DSA members nationally. Most of all, it’s been driven by the courage and organizing grind of rank-and-file workers.

But we must not give this a too-rosy glow. These have been the years of DOGE, which displaced over 300,000 workers, terrorizing the nation’s union stronghold of public sector workers. Trump’s regime has violently demonised the social gains that elevated racial equity in the workplace. Despite notable union successes, overall, union density has continued to decrease overall. And yet these losses no longer represent where Americans are at with unionized labor.  The losses are the result of the raw power of capital—power that is newly, shockingly visible. 68% of Americans approve of Unions—a 60 year high, with approval by younger workers higher. We know today that Americans see the benefits of worker solidarity over competition for scraps as oligarchs attempt to grab the entire feast off the table.

It’s at this moment at once scarier than any in recent memory, but also more full of promise—a promise emblematized in NY mayor Mamdani’s win the Labor Art Review brings you the first set of REPORTS. They chronicle a seven year cycle since the New Museum’s win. Though presenting an incomplete panorama of the territory, our intention is to deliver some of the texture, voice, and strategies of this movement. We hope to let you see some of the patterns echoing through US museums as their workers actively seek to change their conditions.

Why museums? True, they are a tiny part of the grand scheme of labor, accounting for less than 1% of the US workforce. And yet, we feel there is something profound about the transformation happening in them now. Museums elevate individual achievement—temples where the myth of genius is propagated. They draw the wealthiest and most powerful in society to bask (and rebrand) in their antiseptic glow. Scurrying about these magnetic attractions of art and money are the viewing public and the staff. Museum workers might not be super rich, but are often highly educated,  neck deep in cultural capital‚ and in proximity to wealth.  They are historically the last sort of people to unionize. 

In these reports, we chronicle how a new spirit of solidarity is increasingly causing curators to stand together with gift shop workers and guards. We see that a mutual struggle is necessary. It’s a process that is of course full of contradictions, but we believe a path forward is to be found in it.

-LAR