Current Wave (since 2019)
The current wave refers to the significant uptick in new union-organizing campaigns in private nonprofit art museums since 2019. In this spotlight, we explore this surge and how these unions compare to those formed prior to 2019. Since we are defining a new union campaign as a group of workers who join together to collectively bargain for a shared contract, each of the new unions represented in the graphs below are distinguished by having separate contracts, even if they are organizing in solidarity with other workers at the same institution. Although this project is currently tracking only private nonprofit art museums, there are workers at dozens of city- or university-owned museums and non-art museums who have formed new unions since 2019. We hope to highlight these museums in future iterations of this project to help us tell the broader story of museum labor in the 2020s.
The early 2020s have seen a sharp increase in new organizing efforts in museums (and new sectors in general, such as nonprofits, gig work, front-line service jobs, the tech and video game industries, higher education, and more).33 As of 2023, two-thirds (67%) of Americans approve of unions (up from 48% in 2010); while high, the percentage is less than the peak of 75% in 1953.34
In this context, we wanted to take a closer look at the contemporary movement of museum union organizing. While the COVID-19 pandemic instigated a burst of organizing activity across the country as work and working conditions altered and/or were laid bare, the starting date of 2019 for this wave indicates that these workers’ concerns predated pandemic layoffs and furloughs and reflect long-standing and systemic workplace inequities.
The New Museum Union has often been credited as kicking off this new era, with their campaign announcement in January 2019 leading to an unprecedented wave of new organizing:35 Frye Art Museum (May 2019); engineers at the Guggenheim Museum (June 2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Marciano Art Museum (November 2019); and the Shed (January 2020). Amidst record layoffs (largely in response to pandemic-required museum closures, although not without controversy36) and a global uprising against racial injustice, museum union drives increased rapidly: Philadelphia Museum of Art (May 2020); Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh (June 2020); Milwaukee Art Museum (August 2020); and the Walker Art Center, Portland Art Museum, and Museum of Fine Arts Boston (all September 2020). New organizing in 2021 and 2022 continued apace, with a slowdown in 2023 and X new campaign announcements thus far in 2024.
This surge of new organizing speaks both to broader socioeconomic conditions and to the power of workers talking to each other. On and offline, museum workers are recognizing shared struggles, seeing the gains made by their colleagues in similar institutions, and asking: how can we do that? See the abundance of resources for and by museum workers in the Appendix for a glimpse into the cross-museum solidarity charting a new path in a historically individualistic and hyper-competitive industry.37
New Private Nonprofit Art Museum Unions Formed Before and After 2019
Workers at X% of unionized private nonprofit art museums first publicly announced their union campaign in 2019 or later. This is a % increase from pre-2019 numbers.
Private Nonprofit Art Museum Workers Covered by a Union Contract Before and After 2019
We collected the bargaining unit size (number of members that a union represents) from a variety of sources including the union’s self-reported data, the National Labor Relations Board, HR or management’s records, and news articles. The ranges represented by the hatched lines in this graph reflect the complexity of reporting union sizes due to conflicting reports and how the size of a bargaining unit often shifts over time as museums grow, downsize, and/or reorganize their staff. We present this data to demonstrate the growth of union workers since 2019 with an acknowledgment of its limitations to show the full picture of the museum labor movement. Beyond the scope of our initial dataset, for example, we estimate that there are at least 15,000 museum workers nationwide with union representation.
New Union Campaigns at Private Nonprofit Art Museums by Year
Positions Represented by Private Nonprofit Art Museum Unions Before and After 2019
This chart breaks down private nonprofit art museum unions by specific types of positions38 to compare the compositions of those formed before and after 2019. Two notable trends: X% of unions that have formed since 2019 have sought “wall-to-wall” representation of all eligible workers (or as close as federal labor law will allow39) within a single museum and X% of unions formed since 2019 include workers from more than one department within the same unit. These trends sit in stark contrast to many 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). For some of these unions, such as those of the Walker Art Center or Tacoma Art Museum, wall-to-wall organizing has involved navigating significant legal hurdles to to allow security staff to join the same union.
Certification Process for Private Nonprofit Art Museum Unions since 2019
X% of new unions formed at private nonprofit art museums since 2019 held elections rather than being voluntarily recognized by museum leadership. 100% of new union elections have been successfully won by workers.