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This post is dedicated to thinking about changes in museums that have been inspired by the unionization process, that both leadership and union members find productive. These are changes that museums can implement without unionizing, and that lead to staff feeling heard and valued.
Writing about unionization is tricky – there are very strong, highly conflicting views about this in our field. While I hope that this article will appeal to both union supporters and those who are anti-union, I will note that my personal understanding is that most of the time, when staff are unionizing, something has already gone wrong. With or without unionizing efforts, museums can and should do a better job supporting staff and creating healthy work environments.
The organizations I interviewed here have done that. While they moved in this direction because staff unionized, again, all of these forms of staff support can be implemented in non-union museums. As Anne Bergeron, co-author of Magnetic Museums, has said: “Museums, tethered as they often are to academe and scholarship, need to become less hierarchical, less attached to curators/scholars as the standard bearers, and more respectful of all the experts who make a museum a museum, including those who care for the facility and visitors.”
It was challenging to find museums that have “happy” unionization stories – museums that have emerged from the process with both union members and leadership feeling like the institution is stronger due to the existence of a union. I found two: the Sciencenter in Ithaca, New York and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, Connecticut. Despite direct emails to leaders at unionized museums, phone conversations with contacts at some of these museums, and a LinkedIn post asking for suggestions of other museums which was viewed by 1,000 individuals, I could not identify any other museums for this article.
I interviewed both leadership and union representatives at Sciencenter and the Stowe Center in order to better understand what practices made these institutions stronger. At Sciencenter Ithaca I spoke with Michelle Kortenaar, Executive Director, Annie Gordon, Education Program Coordinator and a union representative who is an organizer, negotiator and member of the Labor Management Committee, and Emily Belle, organizer and negotiator for the Sciencenter Workers’ Union as well as a steward. At Harriet Beecher Stowe Center I spoke with Karen Fisk, Executive Director, and Anita Durkin, Visitor Experience and Sr Education Coordinator and chair of the museum’s union bargaining unit. Both of these museums changed leadership after unionization efforts began. They also have relatively small staff sizes: Ithaca Sciencenter has 28 employees and Harriet Beecher Stowe Center has 16 employees.
That said, these two museums are very different in many ways, including collections, missions, locations, and staff challenges. I believe that the strategies these museums implemented can make a difference in museums of any size.
Unions and Museums
I have long believed that museum unions are an imperfect tool, but often the only externally available tool, to address organizational culture issues in museums. While there are other ways to lodge a complaint, such as through state Labor Departments, union advocates note that the grievance process through unions is significantly easier than through state or federal channels such as the Labor Department, EEOC, or Title IX.
Unionization is an imperfect fit for museums for a few reasons. Unions perpetuate some of the systems that employees find problematic in museums. They are hierarchical – traditionally, a union represents all union members, but does not invite all members to join the conversation. They are full of their own at times inequitable rules – the first step in union negotiations is about who gets to speak, and these negotiations often happen behind closed doors, so that most union members will never know the details of the negotiation, only the results. This may be changing: in a recent interview, Adam Rizzo, a former union leader for the Philadelphia Museum of Art union, said that unions are changing the way they understand their role. Unions are now more likely to focus on ongoing engagement in order to keep all members involved and active. When the Philadelphia Museum of Art and AFSCME held negotiations in 2021, these meetings were open to all union members.
It may be that museum unionization is hardest on middle managers, who often are not allowed to attend negotiation meetings, and have little information or support during the transition to a unionized workplace. However, unions can have significant benefits for the people they represent, in particular regarding pay. Notably, nationwide union members earn more than non-union members, and there is evidence that declining union membership is a causative factor in rising income inequality. (See this article and this article, both cited here.)
It is unclear how many museums in the United States are unionized. We know that unions at 50 art museums represent over 15,000 museum workers. (Museums Moving Forward) AFSCME alone includes nearly 100 museums, zoos, and botanical gardens in their list of who they represent. Most of these organizations have unionized in the last 5 years (since 2019).
In museums, the drive to unionize is complicated, and is fueled in part, by:
- Low wages, which are a result of an endemic mismatch between non-profit funding and ambitions and a long-standing tradition in our field of paying entry-level workers minimum-wage, hourly salaries.
- A lack of power on the part of staff who are not part of their museum’s leadership team to impact not only their own work environment but ethical issues such as climate impact and repatriation; this results in looking beyond the existing institutional structure for sources of power.
- Inequities and workplace injustices (for example, sexual harassment, inequitable distribution of salaries between and within departments, and COVID layoffs and furloughs) being perpetrated by some leaders, with little or no consequences or accountability.
- A culture of secrecy in museums, and a culture of competition even within organizations fed by a narrative of underfunding. One example of this secrecy is museums’ unwillingness to make salaries public.
- A movement on the part of unions to gain new members in cultural fields, fueled by declining union membership in traditional union fields. A 2023 NPR article notes that in the 1950s one in three workers belonged to a union; now only one in ten workers does.
Motivations to Unionize
Unions, and people unionizing, have changed since the mid-20th century. In the past, unions were about salaries and safety. Now, at least in museums, while pay matters, unionization is largely about having a voice at the table: the ability to be heard directly by the Executive Director and the Board, the people who make the decisions. Emily Belle from Sciencenter told me that unionization is about “appropriately valuing staff expertise and commitment within the system in which we operate.” Anita Durkin at the Stowe Center described unions as critical for creating a more equitable workspace, saying, “unions are just the people in the bargaining unit; in museums, these voices want to be recognized as having value. Museum workers are trying to figure out how to leverage the union to create new structures [and identify] what power-sharing looks like. Unions are a way to navigate those questions.” Issues that led to unionization at these two museums included:
- Empty supervisory positions, with no apparent move to fill these positions leading to additional burden on other staff
- Leadership that reacted to challenges with anger, leading employees to fear that their jobs were at risk
- Failed attempts to share concerns with management
Unionization and positive change
In my interviews with Sciencenter and the Stowe Center, both union representatives and museum leadership described ways that unionization led to new strategies for allowing non-leadership staff to be heard. Most of these strategies were not directly mandated by unions; they are ways in which these museums went above and beyond to respond not only to union mandates, but to the staff needs which led to unionization. Below I am sharing new approaches these museums shared which can be implemented with or without a union in place, and which may be useful to improving the organizational culture of any museum where non-leadership staff feel unheard and/or unvalued.
Ongoing meetings between leadership and staff
Regular meetings between labor and management is a change that was mandated by unionization. At the Ithaca Sciencenter, these meetings include equal numbers of managers and non-management staff. This group discusses things that affect everyone, including the museum’s COVID vaccine mandate; open positions that need to be filled and who should be on the hiring committee; staff dress code; and policies regarding people bringing children or dogs to work. At the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center these meetings are opportunities for updates, ensuring that union members are informed about upcoming initiatives. They also provide an opportunity for union members to share how team members are feeling about the museum and their jobs. These meetings are followed by a post-meeting email summary to update the entire staff.
Board participation
At the Sciencenter, the museum’s Board now includes a non-voting, non-management staff member. While this ex-officio Board member cannot vote, they can talk and represent the views of staff. This board member also also has the ability to request to speak to the Board in executive session without the Executive Director present. Note that the Sciencenter staff has never asked for a meeting like this, which indicates very different feelings about leadership than prior to unionization.
In addition, every Board committee includes a voting non-management staff seat. These are generally individuals whose work relates to the committee – for example, there is a Development professional on the finance committee, and a Facilities professional on the facilities committee.
Transparency
At the Sciencenter, the entire staff receives the monthly Board packet, as well as minutes from management and senior staff meetings. In addition, everyone receives the full, detailed institutional budget, and has a chance to ask questions. Michelle Kortenaar, the museum director, attends meetings with each department separately to discuss the budget and answer questions.
Michelle shared a story about one staff member who wanted to know why the museum had a large amount of money in assets, but couldn’t afford pay increases for staff. Once Michelle explained that the assets are the building and the endowment, the staff member was satisfied. Emily Belle, Sciencenter union member, noted that this leads to the question, What deeper understandings about museum structure have union members gained through increased transparency? Often, leadership has no idea what staff don’t understand.
Staff support
At the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, time is set aside each Friday for professional development time. Anita described this as a commitment to “continuous learning and nurturing of what staff is doing, and a time to process big ideas, not in front of the public, but in a way to help staff respond to the public.” She also noted that organizationally, this has expanded what the Stowe Center is able to offer. Trainings include reading time, DEI trainings including training related to microaggressions, and training on facilitating public conversations.
Rethinking staffing
The mission of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center is to encourage social justice and literary activism; because of this radical mission, front-line staff expressed concerns for their safety during some conversations. In order to address this problem, the Stowe Center switched to a co-touring model, which means the museum pays two staff members for every tour.
The museum also created new, hybrid positions. Front-facing staff who are invested in participating in the larger work of the museum now spend some time doing front-facing work and some time on another task that meets their interests and qualifications – for example collections, education, or outreach). This has led to a less silo’ed, more connected and involved staff. It also means that four of the five union members who hold hybrid positions are now full-time.
Pay
Pay is both the most intractable and arguably the least complicated aspect of staff dissatisfaction. I would guess that if the other problems can be solved more immediately, many staff teams would be willing to help implement a longer-term plan for wage increases.
That said, not only is pay for front-line staff too low, but it is also often inequitable. A blog post from Corporate Rebels suggests that the ratio between CEO pay and the pay of the lowest staff should be less than 5; a publication from Harvard Business School suggests a ratio of 7:1. This would mean a major change to the pay structure of many larger museums. In an ideal world, the American Alliance of Museums would initiate a museum-wide project to determine ethical pay ratios for museums.
That said, unionization is generally responsible for pay increases. At the Sciencenter, the lowest hourly rate before unionization was $16 per hour; the first union contract brought pay up to $18 per hour. It is now $19.60 per hour. At the Stowe Center, the lowest hourly pay before unionization was $15 per hour (the Connecticut minimum wage); in 2024 it is $21.50.
Calculating compensation as a ratio, the Executive Director of the Ithaca Sciencenter makes approximately four times what the lowest paid person on staff makes. As union members argued while in contract negotiations, and Michelle recently restated, “The #1 donor to your organization cannot be your staff. If you are underpaying them, this is the scenario you are creating. You cannot build a nonprofit on the back of staff. If you can’t exist financially without this, you need to rethink what you do.”
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