Listening to Museum Workers Speak
Nizan Shaked
Introduction
Museum Workers Speak (MWS) launched in 2015 to bring about “social change at the intersection of museum labor, access, and inclusion.”1 Even before 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a wave of furloughs and firings, MWS had already been hearing from museum workers that they were “in crisis, particularly those living paycheck to paycheck, caregivers, emerging museum professionals, and museum workers of color.”2 Since the pandemic, the group has raised money for several rounds of mutual aid distribution, and in the process amassed valuable data sets and analytical summaries.3 This article responds to the voices of museum workers, with a focus on what they need and how we can address those needs. Simply put, it asks: who will pay for change?4
For the Workers, by the Workers
Mutual aid is an autonomous and horizontal mode of organizing. Many mutual aid projects take action during emergencies and are therefore critical in helping people survive materially and emotionally. As activists tailor solutions to the needs of the community from the ground up rather than top-down, they develop new social organizing strategies that have much to teach us about how to shape our future society and our museums. For example, when in 2020 the MWS Museum Workers Relief Fund distributed funds raised from fellow museum workers and allies, they felt that it was not the organizer’s prerogative to decide who is “deserving.” Consequently, they developed a trust-based approach where participants self-selected according to their level of precarity and need. The awardees were then chosen through a system of randomized lottery drawings. Not only can we derive methods of organization from the Relief Fund’s process of distribution, but we can also use their methodologies for collection and analysis of data to help us better understand the labor conditions in the sector. We can ask how such initiatives might be expanded and frameworks developed to administer civil society autonomous of private interest and authoritarian government. While this may sound hopelessly utopian at the moment, I am inspired by the wisdom of artists like Tourmaline, who said on the Podcast Las Culturistas: “now is the time to dream as big as the problems are.”5 If we work to imagine what a true public art system might look like, we will have a playbook to debate, refine, and begin to implement it on several levels.
The MWS Relief Fund created a framework for museum worker solidarity. Generally speaking, the goals of mutual aid are mostly targeted and local. They are not aimed at institutional change on a systemic scale nor do they offer strategies for replacing administrative structures on a national or global level. This observation is not a judgement, but an assessment to help us weave the connecting tissue between micro and macro frameworks for change in museum labor practices, which, as several additional data-driven studies have confirmed, are in need of repair if not a major overhaul.6
Now, in 2025, the crisis experienced by many museum workers is further exacerbated since the current administration, which has been hostile to the meager public support museums had previously, has launched an attack on the narrow advances we have been able to achieve.7 Under such conditions, workers may feel they need to defend initiatives and policies that we all know are flawed and less than effective. But should we? What if we admit that going back not only means returning to a state of crisis, but also, most likely, to a compromised infrastructure that was never able to achieve anything near its democratic ideals. If we connect the struggle of workers to broader legislative initiatives, then we could build a system that captures common resources, such as tax money, that should belong to the public and reroute them to serve entire communities rather than wealthy individuals. Significantly, and in this respect, a large part of worker struggle centers diversity.
Connecting the Macro and Micro Frameworks
The problem with dreaming big for museums is that the administrative framework that determines how these institutions function and shapes their hierarchies echoes the framework of the state and its governmental system. On a macro level, in the case of the US, the state apparatus has been deliberately structured to give the wealthy control over civil society and its cultural institutions through the nonprofit system. These claims are based on my totalizing analysis of the history and structure of American institutions in Museums and Wealth.8 In this book, I argue that it is misleading to classify institutions as “private” when they are heavily subsidized by tax breaks and the public, who pay for tickets, amenities, and items at the gift shop. Such institutions are legally private when it comes to the opacity of decision-making and finances but are public serving by charter and aim to be social in their function. Simultaneously, museums are supported by wealth that is considered private only because it is appropriated as such by a legal system that inherently favors the wealthy.
To understand the power dynamic that keeps museum workers in such precarious financial circumstances, we need to take into account that most board members have a vested interest in the institutions they govern. Many of these institutions hold artists or artworks in the public trust that also circulate in the commercial sector, including galleries, auction houses, and art fairs.9 Confidence in the art market is stabilized by centuries of public collecting, just as currency is stabilized by national banks. The constellations that enhance the value of artworks circulate through or in relation to the museum. In light of this, it is not surprising that museum workers believe that boards prefer to maintain control over content. As MMF’s 2023 Report Workplace Equity and Organizational Culture in US Art Museums finds: “There is an overall belief [by non-executive art museum staff] that the board’s priorities influence leadership decisions far more than a museum’s mission, the interests of neighboring communities, the input of staff, or the interests of museum visitors.”10 The content museums and its workforce are harnessed to serve the interest of wealth.
But art is not gold. To maintain prices, artworks need care. They need to be studied, exhibited, documented, historicized, and analyzed. Art workers invest value in artworks. The visiting public invest money in the institution through fees and purchases and endow the artwork with power by giving it their attention. All levels of government invest in museums either directly, including land-grants and other forms of direct benefaction like percentages of city hotel taxes, or indirectly, through institutional and private tax breaks. However, art market profits are privately reaped at the top, often by museum board members specifically, even though the entire apparatus that gives art its value.
This goes further. When we listen to museum workers, we learn that they are in effect subsidizing the institution by working for unlivable wages, while in many cases—especially in larger collecting institutions—top leadership and professionals make disproportionately high salaries.11 Museum workers often accept lower salaries because they love the job. This has been termed a “passion subsidy,” as highlighted by Amanda Tobin Ripley:
What if we harnessed this conceptualization to insist on worker tax breaks akin to those provided for philanthropic giving, to shift the subsidy from the shoulders of the workers to the realm of the government, which subsidizes so many other necessary and value-producing industries (not to mention many violent and destructive industries as well)?12
While workers subsidize the museum, institutions did not come to the aid of their employees while they were in crisis. Instead, staff created their own structures of mutual aid, including a growing wave of unionization efforts.13 Where MWS—a grassroots effort—and unionization—a reform-oriented labor strategy—meet, a network connecting the micro to the macro forms. Besides the struggles that led to the unionization of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, most of the internal challenges to and protests of museums since the late 1960s have been focused on exclusions in exhibitions, collections, education access, and hiring, rather than on labor practices. Labor struggles in museums arrived relatively late due to the bourgeois character and structure of the field, which won against an earlier desire for museums to focus on popular education.14
To its detriment, the museum workforce was predominately populated by upper-class—and therefore white—men and occasionally women—largely relegated to gendered roles—who could afford to work for low salaries, sometimes even for no salary. When he started his role as assistant director at the Fogg, Paul Sachs, mentor to generations of museum leadership in the US, worked for free, downplayed his Jewish ancestry, and formulated an approach to the museum world based on his point of view as a banker and businessman that privileged the needs of wealthy collectors and philanthropists.15 Foundations established by industrialists (otherwise known as “robber barons”) funded museum training programs that were marked by a preference for “scientific” approaches to social planning. Administrative practices, based on faith in the marriage between state and capital, were developed and continue to shape our museums and society today. These methods naturalize the extractive, exploitative, white-supremacist, and patriarchal character of a pyramid model that ensured the capability of unelected civic leaders to hoard resources and accumulate wealth, which was, in turn, justified by charity. What we hear when we listen to museum workers is that this worldview does not align with their desired cultural and organizational models.
What Do Museum Workers Want?
The findings of MWS confirm what I have been increasingly hearing from my students: workers in entry-level jobs, or even in demanding, advanced posts that require graduate degrees have to look for work outside of their full-time positions just so they can afford rent and the basic costs of living. The passion subsidy is not an idea; it is a concrete contribution that sustains the field. For example, MMF’s 2023 Data Study tells us that “almost three-quarters of art museum workers (74%) cannot always cover basic living expenses (e.g., rent, utilities, food, childcare) with their compensation from museum jobs.”16 This is mostly not the decision of staff in managerial roles, many of whom have confidentially told me that they would have loved to increase salaries for the sake of longevity and stability, as their best workers tend to move on to the private sector or other fields. It is financial decision-making on the executive level that pushes to keep labor costs as low as possible.
When we listen to museum workers speak, we learn that they love their jobs but feel underappreciated, overworked, and underpaid. They want to participate in decision-making and governance, as well as benefit proportionally from the social wealth to which they lovingly contribute. Workers want a more diverse workplace, and they have ideas about how to get there, although many are frustrated by feeling unheard or dismissed. They express desires for their institutions to be more physically accessible to those with disabilities, to be more inclusive, to be more environmentally sustainable. And they definitely want their institutions to pay living wages. We hear frustrations from workers about how programming is dictated by money rather than community. Workers are acutely aware that the pay gap is related to the concentrated wealth in the boardroom, as well as how philanthropic relationships affect content (sometimes to a degree of censorship), hinder DEI initiatives, and create conditions of precarity. Many workers are disturbed by the number of resources invested in fundraising, and this reflects worker long-term vision. Lavish institutional investment in tiered donor circles is now fodder for a spectacle of hierarchy amplified by media gossip. Indeed, gala events have become ripe sites for protesting institutions that are ungrateful to the workers who invest so much of their labor and identity into their jobs. Yes, the way the system currently works means that salary and benefit increases rely on fundraising, but workers are pointing to fundraising as a site of change because they believe that museums can be built on a model of solidarity rather than charity, the precise rationale underpinning mutual aid. This requires different economic models. Workers’ ideas include institution-specific and field-wide changes such as unionization and pay cuts at the top, as well as broader systemic changes like increased taxes on the wealthy.
Another way to formulate Tobin Ripley’s call to wield the passion subsidy argument to benefit workers is to ask how it can turn into bargaining power. One solution is, of course, unionization, which has recently grown in influence and numbers, giving workers collective bargaining power for better salaries and working conditions.17 Tobin Ripley relates this wave to a shift in the identity of museum workers with labor rather than management.18 Some museum workers exhibit anti-capitalist sentiments, as we increasingly hear them call attention to institutions that maintain a capitalist status quo.19 And, it is common understanding that these institutions are profoundly non-democratic.20 For this reason, we would be chasing rainbows if we asked these institutions to suddenly be revolutionary. Diverse strategies can be used to address the conflict between institutions' dependency on wealth and the needs of their workforce. Analyzing the conflicts will help us organize toward solutions.
Challenges to Change
The challenge we face is that the transformations we want to see are either dependent on us changing an entire edifice built on tax law, nonprofit charter systems, and private philanthropy; or else the changes we will make will be too incremental to drive the kind of transformation we seek. One dramatic event was the closing of the Marciano Foundation in Los Angeles in response to their visitor services department attempting to unionize. Distribution of wealth reinforces the hierarchical structure of arts institutions. Top administrative and leadership staff are paid exponentially more than the workers at the bottom so they stand on closer footing to the wealthy philanthropists that fund their institutions.21 They are paid a lot so they can raise a lot more. Because these systems of wealth are sustained by exploitative and extractive practices, the culture that results ends up being governed by the same logic. In other words, museums replicate the corporate models that many of their board members know and understand. If we make museums economically and culturally equitable, we would have to dismantle the top-down approach that sustains philanthropic control of civil society. But what motivates the majority of arts philanthropy is precisely the control that makes the art at the top so colossally expensive.22 Philanthropy is driven by an adherence to the status quo—if not a conservative agenda—even as it claims otherwise.
If we cross the economic questions with a solid DEI goal, one of the first myths we should dispel is that changing the racial composition of the top will somehow bring equity to the bottom. Lack of executive diversity is a reflection of the condition that caused it; it is a symptom of the economic exploitation of people of color and the systems of institutionalized racism that concentrated wealth among white people.
You can’t change a structure by alleviating a symptom; you have to address the cause. “Change comes from the top” is myth and historical fallacy. If change has ever come from the top it was because it was demanded from the bottom. This should be axiomatic in the field. We do, however, have diversity at the entry-level ranks.23 When we listen to museum workers and read the statistics, we find that the bottom ranks—the most diverse—are the least paid and the first affected by crisis.24 To change the composition of museum leadership we need better worker retention, including affirmative action and reparations programs. Equity in museums is an intersectional problem of class, race, and gender. Class, as the least visible issue, is the hardest to solve. Solutions to this problem threaten the status quo and authoritarian power.
How to Pay for Change
Museums are extremely expensive to run; nothing we can even approximate with the scale of mutual aid funding. To achieve autonomy for museum workers and to feature the content that they want to see in their institutions, we must loosen, if not sever, the ties between museum administration and extreme wealth. But how would we fund equitable institutions? Beyond reorganizing our entire economy, there are intermediary solutions that can build the infrastructure for redistribution. One idea is to tax the secondary art market—the resale market, where art prices notably rise—and with it the auxiliary market of art financialization and speculation.25 The rationale is that taxing the art resale market could serve to balance out the extreme polarization of prices, require registries that would help regulate the market, separate a public good from speculation, and consequently lower expenses for public institutions. For example, lowering prices would lead to lower insurance rates that would result in a considerable cost-cutting measure for museums. When it comes to art’s financialization, which is a rapidly growing market for art-collateral loans and other instruments such as fractional ownership, museum workers should benefit from art-collateralization profits that rely on the system in which they invest their underpaid labor. Under current US tax law, interest on business loans is tax-deductible. If art-based loan interest is deductible, the benefit should not be reaped privately, because the increase in art’s price is socially created.26 For this to work, we would need new legislation, with equivalent changes taking place in other major international markets. While this might seem like an impossible idea for now, so was the Green New Deal, which is still on the table as a blueprint for future legislation that offers a broad example with multiple components that will need to be separately legislated one step at a time. This is a model, a mainstream typology of change that is not hard to imagine for when historical tides will inevitably turn, as they always have. Historically, change has always commenced with ideas that were then met by status quo conviction that they are impossible. Rather than make our demands smaller, now is the time, to reiterate Tourmaline’s foresight, to remember what we are fighting for, and to not lower our sights to what we are fighting against.
We can legislate a pool of money for the public funding of art. We can form a think tank on alternative museum funding, and we can also redefine how we use the term “public,” moving beyond its current use as meaning “government.” Specifically, the idea is to develop a funding structure that would not be distributed through the general tax pool but directly, through independent agencies modeled on something like a peer review system. Initiatives like the Relief Fund would serve as exemplars for how to administer distribution that centers museums and art workers. These forums would include representatives from groups like MWS and museum workers who will bring their organizing experience and ideas for alternative governance structures to the table. Workers and specialists across professional, administrative, and scholarly disciplines would workshop white papers, which could then be proposed as legislation. The Museum of Protest has an excellent guideline on how to work toward policy change.27 Museum unions would be invited to contribute perspectives, and there are many other ways in which the sector could be invited to engage, including conferences or town halls where museum workers offer criticism or other ideas to expand these horizons.
There are many resources invested in the art market and its study.28 However, industry-oriented studies ask different sets of questions than data generated in the interest of workers. MMF is right to rapidly bolster our data-driven knowledge that comes from the perspective of labor. This knowledge evidences the rationale for legislative changes. Art speculation profits should be taxed, and legislation should include ways to capture the money circulating by arts financialization and return this money to the workers who are the base onto which these markets exist. The quest for such legislative changes can form a broader base to further our research questions, expand our methodologies of data collection and analysis, and most importantly, open up forums to find and develop solutions driven by the broad base of workers, not executives and collectors. When we weave the data and analysis by MWS with MMF together, they form a larger picture that shows how museum workers contribute to national wealth, showing us how we can equitably redistribute profits.
The author would like to extend deep thanks to Liz Levine for her careful edits and thoughtful suggestions.
Endnotes
[1] “About Museum Workers Speak,” Museum Workers Speak, https://sites.google.com/view/museumworkersspeak/about-museum-workers-speak.
[2] “Statement,” Museum Workers Speak, https://sites.google.com/view/museumworkersspeak/statement.
[3] Gwendolyn Fernandez and Hannah Heller, “Museum Workers Reflect on Their Visions for Museums “Post” Covid: I love museums, but…,” Museums Moving Forward, August 27, 2025, https://museumsmovingforward.com/publications/mmf-publications-exploring-the-tensions-in-us-art-museums/chapters/museum-workers-reflect-on-their-visions-for-museums-post-covid-i-love-museums-but
[4] I am influenced by the strategy of listening to the community, as articulated in the art, activism, and writing of the collective Ultra Red.
[5] Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, hosts, Las Culturistas, “Turn Up the Volume,” May 14, 2025, 1:14, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St8DnDx74VU.
[6] Makeda Best and Mia Locks, “What Problem? The Case for Data on Equity Inside Art Museum Workplaces,” Museums Moving Forward, April 27, 2023, https://museumsmovingforward.com/publications/mmf-paper-what-problem-the-case-for-data-on-equity-inside-art-museum-workplaces-april-2023/download.
[7] For a perspective on insufficient changes in gender and racial statistics see the Burns Halperin Report articles published by artnet News, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/burns-halperin-report.
[8] Nizan Shaked, Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).
[9] Non-collecting museums and other typologies of institutions are part of keeping this universe intact.
[10] Jen Benoit-Bryan, Diane Jean-Mary, and Mia Locks, “Workplace Equity and Organizational Culture in US Art Museums 2023 Report,” Museums Moving Forward, 2023, 20, https://museumsmovingforward.com/data-studies/2022-2023/foreword.
[11] “Arts + All Museums Salary Transparency 2019_View Only,” Google Docs, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14_cn3afoas7NhKvHWaFKqQGkaZS5rvL6DFxzGqXQa6o/edit?usp=embed_facebook.
[12] Amanda Tobin Ripley, “The Passion Subsidy,” Museums Moving Forward, https://museumsmovingforward.com/publications/mmf-publications-the-power-shifting-potential-of-collectivism-in-us-art-museums/chapters/the-passion-subsidy.
[13] “Art Museum Unions Index,” Museums Moving Forward, https://museumsmovingforward.com/research/projects/union-organizing/.
[14] Andrew McClellan, “A Brief History of the Art Museum Public,” in Art and its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium, ed. Andrew McClellan (Blackwell Publishing, 2003).
[15] Although Sachs also advanced students from middle-class backgrounds, this was mostly by way of teaching them how to circulate among and cater to the upper class. Sally Anne Duncan and Andrew McClellan, The Art of Curating: Paul J. Sachs and the Museum Course at Harvard (Getty Research Institute, 2018), 84–141.
[16] Benoit-Bryan, “Workplace Equity and Organizational Culture in US Art Museums 2023 Report,” 49.
[17] A few examples include the case of the Seattle Museum of Art guard struggle. See: Josh Davis, “I’m a Guard at the Seattle Art Museum. This Is Why We Plan to Strike.,” Hyperallergic, November 25, 2024, http://hyperallergic.com/969283/im-a-guard-at-the-seattle-art-museum-this-is-why-we-plan-to-strike/; and Margo Vansynghel, “Seattle Art Museum, security guards agree on contract deal,” The Seattle Times, December 11, 2024, https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/visual-arts/seattle-art-museum-security-guards-agree-on-contract-deal/; for the case of the Philadelphia Museum of Art see: L Autumn Gnadinger and Emily Rice, “Lessons for Workers at Smaller Museums from the Successful PMA Union Strike,” Ruckus, https://ruckusjournal.org/Lessons-for-Workers-at-Smaller-Museums-from-the-Successful-PMA-Union; and importantly the Art Museum Unions Index by Museums Moving Forward, https://museumsmovingforward.com/research/projects/union-organizing/.
[18] Amanda Tobin Ripley, “‘Not Just for Coal Miners’: Unionization in U.S. Art Museums,” Curator: The Museum Journal 66, no. 4 (2023): 609–27, https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12574.
[19] While this is a research question that would be concretely answered by conducting broad questionnaires, this is my general sense from reading the data set, following the rise of museum unionization efforts nationally, and listening to students in my classrooms. Overall, this statement also reflects a political mood, nationally and globally, where a growing intersectional movement of class equity and civil right justice is still growing strong in the face of rising authoritarianism.
[20] Both the MWS report and the MMF 2023 report show worker perception that institutional decision-making is driven by an executive level beholden to donor influence. MMF 2023 and the Mellon Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey from 2022 show that museums are only mostly diverse in entry-level and low-paying, people-facing positions. These reports and surveys also show that institutions have a problem retaining workers of color. These trends reflect hierarchies and a tendency for exclusion that are incompatible with democratic values.
[21] Several museum directors or development officers have, in one way or another, said this to me over the years.
[22] I give ample examples in my book of the ways in which arts philanthropy is motivated by the above, and tax breaks. I also cite multiple books that show this is true in other philanthropic sectors. For a recent analysis, see Andrew McClellan, “Taxes, Tariffs, and the Creation of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Fenway Court,” American Art 38, no. 3 (September 2024): 90–115, https://doi.org/10.1086/733264.
[23] Surveys tell us that museum diversification is happening in entry-level, people-facing positions with the biggest challenge being retention. See Liam Sweeney, Deirdre Harkins, and Joanna Dressel, “Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2022,” Ithaka S+R, November 16, 2022, https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/art-museum-staff-demographic-survey-2022/.
[24] Benoit-Bryan, “Workplace Equity and Organizational Culture in US Art Museums 2023 Report,” 25.
[25] Deloitte’s Art & Finance Report 2023 notes that they “estimate conservatively that the overall size of outstanding loans against art could reach a market size between US$29.2 billion and US$34.1 billion in 2023,” and that “the art-secured loan market is projected to grow between US$33.9 billion and US$40.4 billion in 2025,” https://www.deloitte.com/content/dam/assets-zone2/lu/en/docs/services/financial-advisory/2023/art-finance-report-2023.pdf. See also Riah Pryor, “Art-backed loans are thriving in a muted art market,” Art Basel, August 14, 2024, https://www.artbasel.com/stories/art-market-loans-2024.
[26] Long in planning, auxiliary art-collateral or art-backed loan markets are increasingly growing in the 21st century, and along with the instruments to securitize art have inflated the size of the art market by roughly 50% with major financial reports projecting an upward trajectory. Recent innovations include tokenization for contract purposes, but also for creating securitized digital assets and further developments in fractional ownership, geared toward pure investment with little regard to art as cultural content. Museums are a major linchpin of this operation, but get little, if anything, in return.
[27] “8.1 Lobbying and Policy Change,” Museum of Protest, https://museumofprotest.org/guides/guide-lobbying-policy-change/.
[28] Sam Lefebvre, “A Generous Grift: Museums, Finance Capital, and the Clash of Cultural Workers and Collector-Trustees,” The Lab, https://www.thelab.org/a-generous-grift-museums-finance-cultural-workers.