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Key Findings

This section is an overview of key findings from MMF’s research on art museum unions. One throughline is that the process of union data collection and analysis is challenging and subjective due to complex federal and state laws, choices made by workers about how to form and define their unions based on unique circumstances, frequent campaign updates, and much more. As researchers, we have had to make decisions based on our individual expertise and organizing experiences and the data available at any given point. We invite your feedback on this living resource: what are your key findings and what would you like to see more of?

  1. Workers at X% of unionized private nonprofit art museums first publicly announced their union campaign in 2019 or later. This is a X% increase from pre-2019 numbers.
  2. In contrast, new union growth has been slower in public and university art museums. Only X% of public and university museum unions were formed in 2019 or later. As we discuss in the spotlight, there are often additional legal and structural challenges in organizing unions at these types of museums.
  3. The average time it takes to negotiate a first contract13 for private nonprofit art museums is X days, X longer than the current US average.14
  4. Leadership at private nonprofit art museums has opted for a formal and often time-consuming election process X% of the time, rather than voluntarily recognizing the new union. 100% of new union elections since 2019 have been successfully won by workers.
  5. X% of private nonprofit art museum unions have been able to ratify a first contract without any strike actions (defined as either: a strike where a temporary work stoppage is held by workers or a threatened strike where union members vote to strike or publicly announce plans for a strike).
  6. X% of private nonprofit art museum unions that have formed since 2019 have sought wall-to-wall representation of all eligible workers (or as close as federal labor law will allow) within a single museum.15 X% of unions formed since 2019 include workers from more than one department under the same union contract. These trends sit in stark contrast to many private nonprofit art museum unions formed before 2019, which could be considered craft unions where bargaining units were defined by occupation rather than industry (e.g., curators only or art handlers only).16
  7. Like older unions in the private sector, unions at public and university art museums are more likely to be organized along craft divisions and therefore more likely to be members of bargaining units that represent workers across larger structures, such as municipalities or universities. X% of public and university museum unions have workers who are part of a larger unit with non-museum employees.
  8. Some workers within museums have been unionized longer than others. PASTA MoMA17 (1971) has long been celebrated as the first union of administrative staff members in museums, and there has been a lot of recent press about new union efforts. Yet some workers at museums including the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Brooklyn Museum—particularly those in positions like art handling, engineering, and security—have had separate unions dating back years and sometimes decades.18 This raises questions about who counts as a museum worker in popular discourse, media coverage, and academic scholarship. MMF does not want to replicate the professional or non-professional hierarchy that dominates narratives of museum professionalization and labor history—and so often reinforces racial and class divides among workforces. In order to get a clear picture of the museum unionization landscape, we need to include all museum union workers.

Taken together, these findings confirm our personal experiences and anecdotal observations: union membership in private nonprofit art museums is growing and unions are representing more workers across departments than ever before. The collective power of these union workers across the sector, particularly toward achieving more equitable workplaces, demands that we take this movement and these workers seriously. See the zine Museum Unions Enact Workplace Justice developed by MMF’s Museum Union Contracts & Equity Study Group for more data on how union contracts seek to formalize equity efforts. Despite the many legal and institutional challenges to organize unions that we will dig into in this project, we invite you to also feel hopeful about the future of museums with workers’ voices leading change from the ground up.

  1. ^ An organizing campaign can take anywhere from a couple months to years before going public, depending on the size of the institution and the individual circumstances at that workplace. Most unions publicly announce their campaigns once they have reached a target threshold of confirmed support for unionization among eligible staff.
  2. ^ In this data point, we are comparing our dataset (2005–present) to a study by Bloomberg Law cited by Celine McNicholas, Margaret Poydock, and John Schmitt, “Workers Are Winning Union Elections, but It Can Take Years to Get Their First Contract,” Economic Policy Institute, May 1, 2023, https://www.epi.org/publication/union-first-contract-fact-sheet/.
  3. ^ See eligible employees and wall-to-wall in the Glossary of Terms for definitions.
  4. ^ The one exception to this trend is SFMOMA OPEIU Local 29, established in 1971 as a wall-to-wall union.
  5. ^ PASTA stands for Professional and Administrative Staff Association at the Museum of Modern Art.
  6. ^ Often this is because the museum in question receives some portion of its funds from a municipal government (like the Brooklyn Museum) or a university (like the Harvard University Art Museums). In these cases, so-called “blue collar” workers (custodians, security guards, workers in trade industries like carpentry and masonry) have a longer history of unionization, and were part of larger craft union organizing efforts across cities and campuses (in New York City, there was a large push to organize museum maintainers whose salaries came from municipal funds during the 1950s, for example). For more information about these earlier organizing efforts, see: Amanda Tobin Ripley, “‘Men! Let’s Stick Together This Time’: A Review of Collective Action in US Art Museums, 1930s–Present,” Museum Worlds 13, no. 1 (2025): 94–107, https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2025.130109.