Posts tagged museum workers

    Penn Museum workers demand raises, protest Univ. pay proposals in picket after authorizing strike

    July 10, 2025 // “The average annual salary in the bargaining unit is less than $45,000,” Shaw said. “We’re looking for raises that will not only allow workers to keep up with increases in the cost of living, but to do better over time.” Union leaders also handed out flyers that emphasized Penn’s continued “lowball pay proposals” despite the University’s “annual operating budget of $4.7 billion.” “It’s not so much to ask from the University of Pennsylvania, the largest private employer and one of the wealthiest in the city,” Shaw said.

    Toledo Art Museum Workers Move to Unionize

    April 18, 2025 // Organizing under the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), some 100 workers will form the new union, which emerged after TMA’s glass technicians came together under Teamsters in 2007. The new unit will include staff from the visitor services, glass studio, research, education, curatorial, and library departments, among other eligible sectors, and is expected to grow upon selecting a representative.

    Workers Unionize at NIAD, Richmond’s Progressive Art Studio

    October 17, 2024 // After NIAD workers delivered a letter of intent to executive director Amanda Eicher Tuesday morning, the organization’s board executive committee voted unanimously to recognize NIAD Unidad.

    Unionized Science Museum workers await contract as cultural nonprofits face changing labor market

    April 1, 2024 // Inspired in part by pandemic-era lay-offs, as well as record inflation, Twin Cities labor movements have seen an uptick in mobilization. Janitors, school teachers, university graduate students, plow truck operators, firefighters, nurses, rideshare drivers and coffeeshop baristas have all recently taken their arguments for better pay and working conditions to the public picket line, or threatened to. Museums have had a lower-profile in those labor efforts, but workers at the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis and Science Museum all have unionized in the past four years with the goal of collective bargaining for employee-friendly contracts. Most of the Science Museum’s workers were laid off and sent home when the pandemic forced closures in March 2020, only to be gradually called back months later into a climate marked by social distancing and general uncertainty. Hazard pay for frontline staff in visitor services disappeared after a few months. Workers rallied and got it back.

    Strike by Philadelphia Museum of Art workers shows woes of ‘prestige’ jobs

    October 10, 2022 // Organizing one workplace can serve as an example for other similar workplaces to do the same. Adam Rizzo, art museum educator and one of the union’s leaders, says when it formed, it also created a new chapter, Local 397, which employees at other museums could join.

    US unions see unusually promising moment amid wave of victories

    March 16, 2022 // Gebre said the nation’s unions should send far more organizers and money to back the union drives at Starbucks and Amazon. “The rest of the labor movement should be willing to lend a hand,” even if they don’t get any of the members, said Gebre, who was recently named Greenpeace’s chief program officer. “That’s what solidarity means.”