Maxwell L. Anderson
Over the course of the pandemic, among the many inequities that have become even more visible, the revelation that the richest Americans have profited throughout the quarantine has exacerbated the resentments of cultural workers. In a few cases, the chequered pasts of some museum trustees or their questionable sources of wealth have led to some high-profile board resignations or departures, emboldening the rank and file to challenge the long-held tolerance of high executive salaries and opaque institutional decision-making.
The precipitous layoffs of entry-level staff and educators when the pandemic began soon came to seem particularly unjust. More often than not, it was people of colour who bore the brunt of layoffs, given their higher numbers within the service side of shuttered cultural organisations. As discontent grew, a number of museums became the focus of union drives by employees, who saw their job security vanish while directors issued expressions of solidarity with Black Lives Matter but seemed insulated from the immediate trauma being experienced by much of their workforce.
Behind the immediate questions of fairness in the labour market loom larger unknowns. For the last generation, museums have been complicit in fostering a fanciful business model tied to blockbuster exhibitions and events. Meanwhile, their mission to serve the community and their obligations to the care of collections, research, education and scholarship have taken something of a back seat. The evaporation of ticket sales during the pandemic revealed the hollowness of this erstwhile business model: most museums rely very little on admissions income, apart from some outliers in big tourist meccas. As a result, when the carousel of shows came to a halt, staff members were able to see much more clearly how their institutions worked – and notice that little changed at the top.
Panic at the outset of the pandemic led the Association of Art Museum Directors to lift temporarily a ban on selling art to pay for collection care (which can be more widely defined than the phrase suggests), which has led to a flurry of disposals of artworks from cash-strapped institutions before the exception ends. The covenant against monetising the art collection was universally held until Covid-19 descended, and it may now be too late to put the genie back in the bottle.
But, as Christopher Knight has reported in the Los Angeles Times, while museums were shrinking staff, the investment portfolios of some institutions were growing, in some cases by as much as 40 per cent. These factors across the national and museum landscapes combined to lead staff to demand fair and ethical governance, management, and investment practices – resulting in union drives. Should museums have temporarily increased endowment draws by a percentage point or two instead of firing lower-paid employees? Had they taken that path, it’s more likely that museum staff would have kept their jobs, and levels of resentment would have been kept to a minimum.
Instead, several museums are now entering into a new phase, one in which collective bargaining will replace a patchwork of employment practices. There will be benefits to entry-level workers, newly represented by shop stewards who will negotiate fixed increases to base pay, and improved benefits. Less salutary for many will be last-hired, first-fired policies, that can have a corrosive effect on workplace performance. Staff at museums across the north-east often look to a long-standing example of success: the Professional and Administrative Staff Association of the Museum of Modern Art (PASTA), which was formed in 1971. It represents a large swathe of the museum’s employees, and can be credited with negotiating higher bargaining-unit salaries than those at non-unionised museums. Only time will tell whether the satisfaction level of newly unionised staff will, museum by museum, rise. But one thing is certain: boards and C-suites are now paying more attention to the needs and rights of museum staff, unionised or not. There is hope that, tiring of bread and circuses, they will turn their attention towards a greater care for communities and collections as well.