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

June 22, 2024

Discussion via Zoom moderated by Liz Levine, MMF Publications & Events Manager

Olivia Dowdle, author of “Bridging the Gap: Reimagining Hierarchical Structures in Museums”

Amanda Tobin Ripley, author of “The Passion Subsidy”

LIZ LEVINE (MMF) Both your pieces tackle the question of pay––for Amanda, through the theoretical lens analyzing “passion” work, and for Olivia, around your attempts to negotiate salary increases for yourself and your fellow front-of-house staff––but then call into question the efficacy of simply raising salaries as the pathway to a more equitable museum workplace. My read is that you both identify “worker agency” as the missing piece in the conversation around pay and pay equity. Can you each speak to that from your experience and research? Or, to put a finer point on it: if workers are making more money, why does it matter if they have a say in it?

OLIVIA DOWDLE (OD) One of the ways that I realized getting a raise wasn’t enough was that even when we received more pay, we were not really in control of anything that happened to us. We didn’t really have any power. As public-facing workers, we’re on our feet all day; we’re interacting with people. There are times our health isn’t prioritized because we don’t have anybody advocating for us at a higher level. When we all did get our pay increase, we were so happy about it, but it was still under the guise of, well, we [museum leadership] gave it to you, we’re the ones that did it for you.

AMANDA TOBIN RIPLEY (ATR) A lot of what you’re saying is resonating. In terms of pay, there were these secret raises that people would get. I got a couple merit raises, and I was told very explicitly: do not tell other people because other people are not getting this percentage of raise this year. It sows distrust when there’s no transparency around it. People can easily question what that other person did to deserve that raise. It pits workers against each other, instead of thinking about how we can better our situations collectively. It’s really so much more about dignity than it is about pay. We should have the agency and power to determine how we live our lives. I think there is a sense in this field that because I’m giving so much of my heart and soul to this place, I deserve to also have some say over it. And I could problematize that sort of entitlement, but I think it is very present.

Because of the history research I’ve been doing and looking into MoMA’s background, I was really excited to read your story, Olivia. A lot of the labor movement in museums is primarily being driven by front-of-house workers, and it was really interesting to see those throughlines. The fact that they gave you a bonus in $10 gift certificates is incredibly insulting. They’re basically paying you in scrip. This is a modern-day version of that.

OD It definitely resonated when you talked about your vision for what museums can look like in the future. I love the collectivist mindset because that was one of my biggest challenges when I was talking to people who weren’t front-facing staff. There was a disconnect in seeing all of us as workers together. I think that there’s a great need for mindset changes in general, that whatever affects people at the bottom affects people at the top. It’s all interconnected.

MMF Going along with that, Olivia, can you tell us a little bit more about what it’s like being a public-facing worker? What do you hope other museum staff understand about your experience?

OD One of the things that’s unseen is the knowledge that is expected of us. I’m not just selling art books; I’m selling the experience of being at the museum. That sort of expectation is not something that’s written into the job description when you start, and there’s no training. The other thing is the physical strain on the job that I don’t think people expect when you’re working at a museum. It seems like it would be different than working a commercial retail job, but it comes with all the same stuff.

MMF Amanda brings up the paradigm of the “passion tax,” where passion for the work is the thing that that supplements the low pay. I’m curious if you, Olivia, and your colleagues experienced the passion tax in your public-facing positions?

OD I think it’s rarer for front-facing staff to have that experience. For a lot of us, we just needed jobs, and we found one here. Visitors would always tell us “isn’t it such a beautiful place to work?” There was this idea that you work at an institution like this so it can’t be that bad because you have beautiful views. I guess this is why we had such a high turnover rate. There’s not enough passion or responsibility to make you want to stay.

MMF Right. You can get paid more and live closer to home in a “regular” retail job. So what are you sacrificing for?

Okay, I want to take a step back and ground us more in history. In the last part of your piece, Amanda, you mention the several collective shifts we have experienced in the art museum sector over the last half-decade including, “formal labor unions…salary transparency campaigns, mutual aid drives, and mobilization against unpaid internships.” As a museum labor historian, can you trace the lineage of collective pushback against the passion tax for us?

ATR The earliest thing I have found in archival research is from 1936. Security staff at the Brooklyn Museum came together to protest the fact that they were going to have to start wearing uniforms and pay for them out of their own pockets. They pointed to the hypocrisy that the museum wasn’t covering uniform costs but were spending lavishly on donor parties. One of the things that I’m trying to tease out about the passion subsidy is that we are subsidizing these institutions just as much, if not more, than philanthropy.

There were workers organizing [unions] in the 1950s, but the first wave of organizing as we’ve thought about it collectively as a field was in the 1970s. What Liz and I are trying to do with the Art Museum Unions Index is to also point to these earlier organizing efforts from especially the front-of-house staff, security staff in particular. In the 1970s, the Professional and Administrative Staff Association was formed at MoMA, I think largely in response to the women’s movement. There was this realization that these highly educated women were entering the museum world and getting paid abhorrent salaries under the assumption that they were doing it for fun until they got married. But the movement was also protective of the prestige of museum work, and many wanted their working conditions to reflect their status as “elite” workers. Today, I’m really curious about the way that the museum labor movement is rethinking the nature of the institutions themselves and the whole funding model. I’m thinking a lot about the protests of Decolonize This Place and calls for divestment and repatriation. These efforts connect to issues about what museums do in society, and invites us to ask questions like “do we need museums and what are the other opportunities?” And I’m thinking about how a labor union can be an effective political tool to shift the needle and allow us to envision something new.

MMF Let’s talk about Olivia’s letter to museum leadership. In it, she explicitly highlights the impact of low pay on the institution. Turnover is expensive for an organization, but I rarely see a focus on retention as a business strategy in tough financial times. Do you think the passion subsidy can also be beneficial reframing for the institutions themselves?

ATR Retention is a huge cost. There’s so much institutional memory that’s lost. This goes back to the mistrust and fear and how these workplaces can be so individualistic and competitive. I believe that unionization drives can actually help begin to bridge the labor management gap and resolve some of this fear and mistrust by working together with clear and common purpose, with awareness of each other’s job’s roles and responsibilities, and with mutual respect rather than being dismissed or seen as replaceable.

OD Your idea of the passion subsidy was really interesting for me to read in relation to my experience. I had this concrete number that I could look at: $250,000 [in sales] after nine months of working there. But then to also think about the fact that how little I was paid was subsidizing the institution. There are so many people that don’t have a number to look at to compare their pay to how much they earn for their institution, it’s about helping them realize that they’re being underpaid to keep the museum open.

MMF When you first told me about seeing that dollar amount, Olivia, it was such a provocative idea to me, as someone who’s never been able to see any value amount related to the labor that I put in. It struck me as a radicalizing moment for you and your fellow bookstore workers. Amanda, how do you think we can apply this radicalizing experience to other roles within the institution with a collectivist mindset?

ATR Olivia’s piece made me think, “how would I calculate that?” I started doing the mental math: I brought in those grants, student groups that paid admission, all of these things. But how much can I take credit for personally? Liz, you’re right to point out that I never did any of it on my own. It was always in a team. We all would joke about, “God forbid we actually did the math and figured out what we made hourly,” because it would be so pathetic. But what does that knowledge enable? Let’s figure out how much that subsidy actually is, on a departmental level or maybe an institutional level. We have 990s, but how do we break that down in a way that would make sense?

MMF That information is so inaccessible, if not maliciously, somewhat by design. As a museum worker, I always felt the silos. At first, they seemed like a natural product of the institutional structure: of course I’m going to feel so far away from other workers, and I’m going to feel like I’m in competition with them. It’s only natural that you think about your work in an individualistic sense when it’s encouraged by the system in which you are working. Does that resonate with you both?

ATR Yeah, and I’ve worked in much smaller museums, and it felt that way too.

OD I think that’s something that front-facing workers can teach back-of-house staff. There’s already a collectivist mindset, to a certain extent, amongst public-facing workers because we rely on each other to make sure that we’re functioning properly. Within my institution, it felt siloed between public-facing and non-public facing. It’s interesting to hear more about how within non-public facing staff, it’s even more siloed. Having these conversations is so important. When we looked up how much money we had made, and I saw my number, and my coworker saw his, and we all saw it together, it was a collective experience: oh my God, we’ve brought in so much money. Maybe there’s a way to facilitate those types of experiences for non-public facing staff.

MMF That’s such a welcome reminder, Olivia. We talk about these organizations as learning organizations, as creative organizations, but there’s so much knowledge that it’s just lost in the ether because we aren’t seeing each other’s work, and sometimes we’re not even fully seeing each other as colleagues.

Okay, so both of you name big structural shifts that need to happen in order to reorient institutions as led by the needs and experiences of its workforce, but I’m afraid many of us are so stuck in what is, that it’s hard to imagine what could be. Olivia, paint us a picture: what does it look like to have a community- and worker-centered structure, specifically that centers the experience of public-facing staff?

OD As you can see in so many different social movements throughout history, supporting the people most oppressed liberates others. If people in higher up positions within an institution were more invested in the issues and challenges being faced by the public-facing staff, that would have ripple effects throughout the entire institution. In my article, I also talk about the importance of viewing each other as workers, from public-facing to non-public facing staff, trying to bridge that gap to create more of that collectivist mindset across the entire institution. I think all of the power lies in that.

MMF How about for you, Amanda? What does a museum workplace that celebrates passion rather than exploits it look like?

ATR I know it’s hard to picture. One of the things I want to hold on to is that passion is a good thing. We should cultivate jobs that people feel fulfilled by and that have purpose in the world. My hope is that a subsidy model can leave room for that. It’s not a solution to say, “let’s get rid of passion,” and everyone goes to do the most boring desk job in a cubicle. I’ve also been thinking more and more about [worker-owned] cooperatives and what they could look like. What would a worker-owned museum look like? What could it do?

MMF Before we close, I want to leave a few minutes for any final comments or questions. What are you sitting with at the end of this conversation?

OD I was struck by Amanda’s point that the pink-collar sector of museums is more susceptible to the passion tax. More museums are unionizing, and there’s so much unpaid labor that goes into that effort. Do you think that’s going to be a challenge that’ll be faced in the museum sector because there are so many women that are passionate about this work who will also be leading these efforts?

ATR The president of a local museum union has a spreadsheet of every union member’s birthdays and birth chart information. There is something around the language of care and the language of community, or collectivism, that is about radical feminist ways of being and building. And, like you’re saying, it’s so easy to get exploited. I just hope that that’s something we can try to struggle through together as we navigate these next few years of what it looks like to have different structures in place in these institutions.

MMF I sit often in the place that you named, Olivia, where learning about the history of this collective struggle is at once inspiring and also demoralizing. I really appreciate you all taking the time to both acknowledge what the challenges are, especially for those in the most precarious positions, and then also give us an insight into what it would look like to have a radically feminist, worker-centered museum in a future that I think we can start building now.

OD That’s a museum I’d work at.

ATR Let’s make it happen.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.