MMF: Publications | The Power-Shifting Potential of Collectivism in US Art Museums

Olivia Dowdle

Introduction

As a recent college graduate, I began working in a bookstore at a major US museum with the intention of learning about how a large cultural institution functions. During the year and a half I spent there, I discovered an institutional hierarchy that undervalued, undercompensated, and disregarded the labor of its workers, particularly its public-facing staff.

Bookstore workers are some of the most visible workers externally: we interact with thousands of visitors a day and directly contribute to the institution’s millions of dollars in store sales. Internally, however, we are relatively invisible: we are some of the lowest paid, have the least amount of decision-making power within the institution, and are generally undervalued compared to the revenue our labor generates. After months of work, I found that managerial staff were out of touch with the needs of their workers and unwilling to make space for those voices and concerns to be truly heard.

In recounting my experiences as a public-facing worker, I intend to highlight the more covert and rarely acknowledged inequalities museum workers face within the hierarchical structures of these cultural institutions. There is an extensive amount of labor put into creating and maintaining museums from all levels, yet I believe that the labor of public-facing staff is particularly undervalued. We play a crucial role in connecting museums to the community by facilitating the museum experience for visitors and keeping the institution open and operating: museums cannot exist without the labor of public-facing staff. As it stands, public-facing workers at cultural institutions are not given monetary compensation nor decision-making power proportional to the organization’s reliance on their labor.

The lack of recognition and value for the labor of public-facing staff has implications on the value of labor at all levels of cultural institutions. Shifting focus to the inequities public-facing staff contend with as workers illuminates the pervasive structural problems that museum workers at all levels struggle against.

Undervalued and Undercompensated Labor

At the end of a record-breaking fiscal quarter, my managers announced to me and my fellow bookstore associates that we had amassed over a million dollars in sales, exceeding our plan by nearly $300,000. To thank the staff for our labor during peak tourist season, we were awarded three $10 vouchers to use at the museum’s cafe. Management’s attempt to reward our staff, coupled with already unlivable wages, highlighted an institutional inequity.

Immediately following the announcement of our $10 vouchers, my coworkers and I commiserated over the labor that had facilitated the millions of dollars in sales. A widespread Covid outbreak amongst staff had left five employees, including myself, to keep our main store and three satellite stores open. In addition, leadership had volunteered our bookstore staff to work a series of summer festivals throughout the city. Our store was sending three to four staff to these events nearly every Saturday and Sunday, all while the museum was experiencing record-breaking visitor numbers through peak tourist season.

While collectively recounting our labor in the last fiscal quarter, one of my coworkers taught us how to use our point-of-sale system to look up the sales we had made for the museum. I learned that after working there for nine months, my personal sales had reached $250,000. After a year and a half, that number reached around $500,000. I was not alone in this realization; my coworkers each took turns looking up their sales and were astounded to see six-figure numbers attached to all of our employee accounts.

Despite ringing up half a million dollars in sales during my time as a bookstore associate, I struggled financially. I was often living paycheck to paycheck and was unable to find any safe, affordable housing close to work. I was devastated to see the exact value generated by our labor in contrast to how little we were paid. Our wages never equitably reflected the monetary value of our labor. We discussed how these isolated examples were symptomatic of larger structural issues and could not be solved by those three $10 vouchers.

Our access to this information was a unique fluke in our system that resulted in a radicalizing moment for me and my coworkers. Most museum workers do not have access to or are unable to quantify the value of their labor in this way. If they did, how might our perspectives on pay equity change industry-wide? How might we be emboldened to demand the changes necessary to make museums more equitable? My experience confronting the monetary outcome of my labor left me searching for a new avenue to advocate for our needs as workers.

New Paths for Advocacy

Our collective frustration that day led me to write a letter to our museum leadership to share our experiences, express concern for our conditions, and to call for higher wages. I wrote this letter in an attempt to break through the deeply siloed structure of the museum. I wanted to give non-public facing staff at the highest level an intimate look into our material conditions and needs as public-facing staff. Reaching out to our museum director felt like a last-ditch effort since, up until this point, voicing our concerns to management had yielded no significant action to improve our conditions.

This is an excerpt from that letter:

My colleagues and I should not have to prove through exceeding sales goals that we are deserving of living wages, and we are due monetary compensation for this exceptional accomplishment.

Because numerous store associates have had to leave this job for lack of pay, it’s imperative that the bookstore associates be paid a starting wage of 24.00 an hour. I understand that changes like these require careful planning and don’t happen immediately, but I implore you to consider that these low wages are fatiguing the lives of your staff every day.

Aftermath

I quickly received responses from museum leadership. In their emails, I was notified that conversations about wages were being had behind closed doors, and I would learn more by the beginning of the new year. While I was not given access to this decision-making process, I was assured that I was a valued member of the museum’s community.

The responses I received were contradictory. How can I, or any public-facing worker, feel we are valued members of the museum’s community when we are excluded from our own wage negotiations? Did a museum community truly exist if we were not invited to share our concerns and needs? My frustration grew as I realized the structural inequities I was fighting within my department existed beyond our store and permeated up to the highest positions at the museum.

At the start of the new year in 2023, our director announced that the minimum wage at the museum would be increased from $18 to $22 an hour. Initially, I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing my economic situation was improving. However, what should have been a celebratory moment amongst the bookstore associates was a reminder of management’s disconnect from our material needs. We had been told by managers how generous it was that the director had given us an increase (despite it still not reaching a livable wage). Although the wage increase improved our immediate conditions, nothing had changed structurally to ensure we were given true decision-making power within the institution long-term.

While on the surface it seemed that museum leadership had understood and acted upon our concerns, the wage increase reinforced that decision-making practices would continue without including public-facing staff in the conversation. Witnessing leadership apply temporary fixes to institutional structural issues caused me to question previous methods for seeking change in my workplace.

Imagining a More Equitable Future

These experiences with museum leadership, although frustrating, helped me envision a more community- and worker-centered structure for my museum and others like it. Rather than giving the appearance of participatory decision-making, wage negotiation meetings should be held between workers and managers to address workers’ immediate material needs. There should be no need for letters written in desperation to have one’s voice heard, but an established system of direct communication and collaboration between staff and leadership.

Beyond these more immediate concerns, it’s imperative that when we work toward equity in the workplace, we work to change hierarchical power structures on an institutional level. Public-facing workers must be given greater influence and decision-making power to ensure that changes within the institution reflect the true material needs and concerns of the people affected.

While policy changes and wage increases are crucial, only a redistribution of power within these institutions through the formation of museum workers unions will lead us toward long-lasting structural change that benefits everyone, starting with those in the most precarious positions. To combat the siloed structures and entrenched inequities at museums, unions would help facilitate the redistribution of power and ensure that workers’ needs are being advocated for and prioritized. Fighting for change unified, with a focus on those with the greatest needs, will create a ripple effect of change for all.

One of the greatest challenges museums face in enacting structural changes is shifting our perceptions of each other as workers. Non-managerial staff within cultural institutions are so isolated from one another that we have lost sight of our commonalities as workers. It wasn’t until I began to seek out conversations with people outside my department that I realized many of the structural changes I was fighting for mirrored those needed by other staff in other parts of the museum.

As non-managerial staff we all suffer under these conditions, and we can build solidarity from our experiences when we make the effort to talk to one another. Seeking an end to the siloed structures of cultural institutions necessitates an intentional effort to view each other as unified workers. Only then will we succeed in shifting power to build a more equitable future.