Posts tagged Guggenheim
Changing institutional culture from the inside out: why more and more US museum workers are forming unions
May 19, 2023 // Organising efforts at Storm King, the PMA, the Hispanic Society and elsewhere reflect a trend that has been growing in the US art and heritage sector over the course of the past five years and accelerated with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Workers at more than 20 institutions have formed a union since 2020 or are actively in negotiations for their first contract, including the Jewish Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and Mass Moca in Massachusetts. In March, after 16 months of negotiations, workers at the Whitney Museum of American Art, who had formed a union in spring 2021, ratified their first contract. State of the unions: why US museum workers are mobilising against their employers Tom Seymour The issues prompting workers to form unions across the country and across a broad range of industry sectors are remarkably consistent: wages, benefits and working conditions. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of wage and salary workers who belonged to a union in 2022 was 14.3 million, a 1.9% increase on 2021.
Workers at Dia Art Foundation Vote to Unionize
September 15, 2022 // More than a hundred staff members are now represented by the Local 2110 UAW across Dia’s many locations, which includes their large museum in Beacon, in New York’s Dutchess county, as well as galleries in Manhattan and Bridgehampton, with outposts in New Mexico and Germany.
Workers at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art plan one-day strike
August 22, 2022 // About 100 workers at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) plan to conduct a one-day strike on Friday, August 19. Nearly all workers (96 percent) supported the action in a recent vote, and they plan to picket in front of the museum during visiting hours. The workers are fighting for a living wage in one of the country’s most expensive states. Will Lehman, Kristy Edmunds, Tenneco,
Opinion: How to Unionize the Artworld
August 15, 2022 // The AWC envisioned a more egalitarian artworld. Leading artistic and cultural institutions like MoMA relied on the labour of hundreds of people, from artists to archivists to cloakroom attendants, and the group felt that they should all have a voice in institutional decision-making, including the ability to bargain over pay and working conditions. As well as empowering art workers, the AWC also sought to make art more available to the public. In one creative act of protest, artist Joseph Kosuth designed a lookalike MoMA membership card, emblazoned with the AWC logo, which purported to grant the cardholder free entry. Unfortunately the AWC, like many radical groups of the era, was not long for this world. Members voted to solidify their project by forming an art workers’ union in 1970, but its scope was ill-defined and the effort fizzled.
State of the unions: why US museum workers are mobilising against their employers
February 4, 2022 // TA report by the American Alliance of Museums, published in April 2021, found that museums closed to the public for an average of 28 weeks during 2020. More than 75% of those surveyed stated that their income fell by an average of 40% that year, while 56% went through rounds of layoffs and furloughs. Rehiring, in most cases, is off the table. Those who kept their positions have had to pick up the slack.
‘We are in crisis mode’: Museum workers are turning to unions over conditions they say are untenable
November 4, 2021 // The coronavirus compounded the stressors of past years. According to a report by the American Alliance of Museums in April, museums in the United States locked their doors to the public for an average of 28 weeks starting in March 2020 because of the pandemic; nearly 30 percent remain shuttered today. Lost revenue from the forced closures hit the bottom line hard: Three-quarters of all museums surveyed said their income fell an average of 40 percent last year.