Public and University Art Museums

This spotlight focuses on unions at art museums not included elsewhere in the Index, specifically public and university art museums. The primary goal of this spotlight is to explore the similarities and differences between public and university art museum unions and unions in private nonprofit art museums.

The Art Museum Unions Index launched in 2024 with a focus on private nonprofit art museums. We decided on this initial subset of art museums because the narrowed dataset allowed for increased confidence in our analyses. This new spotlight highlights the unions at public and university art museums, which are a critical piece of the art museum unionization movement but present unique challenges from a data analysis perspective. For example: how do we calculate operating budget information for a university museum when we only have access to the university’s budget as a whole? It is not particularly useful to compare the operating budget of the University of Pennsylvania ($15.1 billion in FY24), for example, with the private sector, where X% of unionized museums have annual operating budgets of less than $20 million.

Many of the public and university art museum unions are older and therefore less well-documented in the press and on social media, making it difficult to find publicly available data on the sizes of their bargaining units, election and contract negotiation dates, and other key campaign details. Additionally, many of these workers are represented by unions and in bargaining units that represent many non-museum workers as well—there may be only three museum workers in a bargaining unit of over 4,000 university workers, for example. These kinds of situations are critical to understanding the diverse range of union experiences for museum workers but complicate our ability to draw conclusions specifically about the experiences of unionized workers in these museums.

Finally, and most importantly, unlike our data on private-sector art museum unions, we do not have the confidence that the data we have collected thus far reflects a representative sample of the unionized public and university museums. Based on initial research, we can safely assume that there are dozens of universities and municipalities across the country that may employ a small number of unionized museum workers, making them difficult to track down. Given these complications, we have chosen to keep this spotlight separate from the rest of the Index.

This spotlight reflects our best understanding of unions at public and university art museums based on the data available. We focus on data points shared across as many unions as possible—such as parent union affiliation, whether they are part of the contemporary wave, and if there is more than one union representing workers at the same institution. As always, we welcome additions, corrections, or questions through the red COMMENT button in the lower right-hand corner to improve the accuracy of this archive.

What does public vs. private mean in art museums?

As we discussed in the Introduction, the line between public and private in art museums is difficult to define.⁴⁰ As nonprofits, private art museums exist for the public good, and their tax-exempt status reflects this mandate. Sometimes private art museums receive public funds that directly support staffing costs, which explains why American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)—traditionally a union of public employees—organized museum maintainers (including custodians and security guards) at private art museums like the Met and the Brooklyn Museum in New York City in the 1950s. Complicating these dynamics is the growing analysis and criticism of how philanthropy—private support of the public good—sustains inequality. Critics have noted that even though philanthropy is widely viewed as a sacrifice on the part of the donor, it can actually yield financial gains through our complex tax systems.⁴¹ Others note that philanthropy can undermine democracy, as it is left to the “whims and passions” of an elite few that “dictate which issues get addressed,” rather than mass consensus.⁴² Art historian Nizan Shaked draws attention to the moral issues at the heart of “public-private partnerships” in the museum sector, noting that they:

allow museums to claim they are public when it comes to taking money, but private when it comes to transparency and accountability. Built on the principle of small government and a civil society and uncoordinated gray zone.⁴³

In a union campaign, this “unregulated and uncoordinated gray zone” can be particularly cumbersome for workers to navigate. The case of the Walters Museum of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, illustrates how complicated and impactful the private-public question can be. During their early union organizing, Walters Workers United (WWU) encountered many hurdles pertaining to the museum’s murky status. When WWU sought institutional financial information, as required for public entities under Maryland state law, leadership at the Walters claimed it was a private institution and, therefore, not subject to the Maryland Public Information Act. In response to WWU’s request for voluntary recognition, leadership claimed the union fell under the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees the private sector. This decision would have had an enormous impact over the composition of their bargaining unit. After two lawsuits against the museum over the course of two years, the city finally concluded that the museum was a public institution. This ruling enabled the two parties to come to an agreement regarding a union election, which workers won on June 14, 2023.⁴⁴

How is a university art museum different from a public or private art museum?

University museums are funded and governed via larger university structures; they exist as a single component of a more complex organism. These museums were for the most part founded to support the internal academic community of their host institution, rather than the general public (although they of course do this as well, and the exclusivity of this purpose has been widely debated for decades). University art museums tend to be highly embedded in wider campus life, in ways that go beyond finances and board structures, by, for example: collaborating with faculty to support interdisciplinary object-based lessons for academic courses;⁴⁵ liaising with career services to provide career exposure and training opportunities to students;⁴⁶ and acting as a platform for sharing and advancing the university’s research and art historical/museological practice.⁴⁷ They also rarely charge admission fees. Each university art museum’s deep and varied relationship with the larger university manifests in labor organizing, as well.

One manifestation of the interconnections between university art museum workers and other campus workers is in the overwhelming prevalence of craft unions, which historically unite workers based on job functions and skills. Thus a union of custodians or electricians unites individual workers from various departments, subdivisions, buildings, and even regional campuses in a single bargaining unit. There may only be one or two art museum workers represented by a craft union, although they are represented by a contract that covers their colleagues at these other locations.

While most of these examples predate the contemporary unionization wave, in which there has been a clear shift towards wall-to-wall organizing, the case of the union at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) illustrates the persistence of the craft union model in university settings. In 2020, amidst the surge in new organizing across not only museums but libraries and other sectors as well, librarians and archivists across the University of Michigan began organizing to join the existing union for non-tenure-track faculty at the university, the Lecturers’ Employment Organization (LEO), established in 2003 as an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). These workers saw an affinity with their colleagues across the university based on the internal university employment classification system. After exploring various organizing options, they ultimately formed the LEO-GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) unit, determining that they shared a community of interest that the “University might deem ‘reasonable.’”⁴⁸ The other workers at the museum do not currently have union representation.

How do unions at public and university art museums differ from private-sector art museums?

Although this data is drawn from an incomplete sample of unions at public and university art museums (see below for the full list included in this dataset), there are both clear parallels with and significant diversions from union trends in private sector, nonprofit art museums. Trends in wall-to-wall organizing versus craft union organizing within art museums represent a microcosm of larger shifts in the US labor movement. The rate of wall-to-wall art museum unions is much higher in post-2019 labor unions, regardless of whether the museum is public or private; yet university museums (with the one exception of the Wex Workers United at Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts) have so far continued to organize along departmental, or craft, divisions. As we explore below, these and other distinctions are critical to understanding the specific experiences of unionized workers at public and university art museums.

Finally, we write this spotlight in 2026, after years of successful legislative efforts to erode labor rights in the US. One notable example is for university art museums in Florida. After the passing of Senate Bill 256 in 2023—which mandated a 60% threshold for dues-paying members while simultaneously making it more difficult for workers to pay those dues—the unions of an estimated 63,000 public employees in Florida were decertified in 2024 alone.⁴⁹ This includes at least three unions at university art museums represented by AFSCME. We expect this likely affects many other museum unions in states where similar bills have been passed or are being put forward. While we do not count these decertified unions in most of the data visualizations below, they are critical to understanding the state of museum labor.