Art-Museum Strike in the City of Brotherly Love 

Scabby the Rat vies with Matisse in a fight that didn’t need to happen.

I’ ve been following the extraordinary strike of workers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The museum’s guards have always been unionized. In August 2020, though, 89 percent of the rest of the staff voted to join AFSCME (the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees). The new bargaining unit includes, among others, visitor services, tech, fundraising, marketing, teaching staff as well as conservators, librarians, and curators — everyone with no supervisory role.

Two years later, having no contract and no raises, 99 percent of union members voted to strike, with only one dissenter, according to the union. I hear he’s gone on an indefinite field trip chaperoned by Jimmy Hoffa.

Before 2020, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art was, I think, the only museum in the country with a unionized staff above and beyond guards and clerical workers. Since then, professional staffs in dozens of museums have unionized, and PMA’s is the first among them to strike.

Local 397, the new AFSCME affiliate, has been on strike since September 26. It represents a tad more than half of the museum’s 350-member staff. Non-union staff are keeping the museum open. The PMA is determined to open a splashy exhibition on Matisse in the 1930s on schedule, on October 20. It looks as though they’ll do it. I’ve talked to friends in Philadelphia who’ve been to the museum since the strike. They tell me it’s up and running just fine, though I’m sure, internally, lots of work isn’t getting done.

When I write, I focus on what’s serious but try to make space for local color. At the PMA, where strikers troop, a rat float big enough for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade cautions scabs to think twice before they help hang those Matisses. Nearby, an inflated fat cat dressed in a tuxedo strangles a worker in one paw. The other paw sports a diamond pinky ring. The PMA strikers are almost entirely bourgeois, white-collar staff at a grand museum, not coal miners. Still, it’s good to see old-style iconography of labor aggrievement, even if the fat cat looks as if it came from an old production of Annie.

The PMA’s shop steward spoke this past weekend at the Philly trans march and also the city’s women’s march, which seems to have risen from the grave. Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s Soros-backed district attorney, took time off from springing violent criminals to join strikers on the picket line. Somewhere in the City of Brotherly Love, there must have been an Indigenous People’s relay race, and no doubt Local 397 was there.

The museum has offered a pay raise — about 11 percent — through June 30, 2024, four weeks of paid parental leave, flexibility for remote work, and quicker access to benefits for new hourly employees. Surely no one’s going to be able to buy a diamond pinky ring. The two sides have agreed on many issues.

It seems to me that even with a sweetened deal, the strike won’t make the staff better off, at least financially. The unionized staff hasn’t had a pay raise since it, well, went union in 2020. At 10 percent this year alone, inflation is viral, thanks to, well, the Washington pols whom the unions pushed in the 2020 election.

That raise? It’ll disappear quicker than a rat eats a Philly cheesesteak. And union dues? I believe AFSCME dues are 1.5 percent of base pay. I don’t know what AFSCME does for strike pay, but the strikers aren’t getting PMA paychecks. By June 30, 2024, strikers will be in a deep hole.

This isn’t the museum’s fault. The Covid mass hysteria is still, as I predicted, diminishing museum attendance. Close a museum for months at a time and regular visitors will change their habits. The PMA’s visitorship is about 60 percent of what it was before Covid. This is about average, according to a museum-industry survey conducted by Artnet this past spring. It means less income from admissions, the shop, events, and the restaurant. The museum looks and feels rich and, after all, played a supporting role in the Rocky franchise, but it’s not Philadelphia Story–loaded. It has an endowment that’s not too shabby but with lots of strings attached.

The stock market isn’t exactly roaring these days. Earned income from the gate is down from 2019. That’s reality. The PMA’s trustees are required to keep its finances on a sustainable path. That’s reality, too. The contract eventually negotiated will be a new baseline for future financial commitments.

The museum’s negotiators aren’t mean. They’re prudent. They probably know that while the labor market for tech staff, fundraisers, and PR people might be hot, for art librarians, museum educators, assistant curators, and others on the art-program side, hot it’s not.

How did we get here? The Covid layoffs, mostly of low-paid workers, aren’t the only reason the PMA and so many other museums unionized. Young staffers, many coming from prestige colleges, assume that protest is as much a rightful part of workplace culture as it is on campus. They make their opinions known and expect them to count. I’ve read the union’s promotional material and open letters from strikers. “You don’t listen to us,” they say of senior management — “listening” is now de rigueur in most museums with a kvetchy culture. Strikers lodge this complaint against trustees, too, whose meetings they want staff representatives to attend. That’s ridiculous.

Unions such as the Teamsters and AFSCME have been developing a boutique niche of culture workers for the past few years, targeting younger staff especially. At the PMA, unfair pay and promotion and an old boy’s network are said to have existed for years, to the disgruntlement of many.

The Covid lockdowns led to layoffs but also, for staff forced to work from home, isolation and suspicion. “Am I next?” many asked. Then came the George Floyd race riots. What was en flambeé turned volcanic. Hence, an 89 percent vote to unionize and, two years later, a 99 percent vote to strike, with that one dissenter, now, I hear, taking scuba diving lessons from Luca Brasi.

There’s another issue at the heart of the staff’s discontent. In 2021, the PMA opened a fancy Frank Gehry–designed $233 million renovation and addition. The project was in the works for 15 years, and the place was a construction site for a long time.

These big building projects put lots of pressure on the staff. I’ve been through two of them, and sometimes it feels as if every day is moving day. It’s easy for supervisors, especially senior management, to focus on big issues surrounding the project and to disengage from the day-to-day grind that’s life for the rest of the staff. There will also always be personality types, especially in nonprofits, who look at an expenditure of $233 million, news of multimillion-dollar gifts, and glitzy openings, and wonder why they can’t get some of that dough, and resent it.

At times like those, senior staff have to be, collectively, a soothing presence and a bit of a psychiatrist. This doesn’t seem to have happened at the PMA. There are many land mines along the road to an expanded and renovated museum. Sometimes they’re cost overruns. Sometimes fundraising turns sour. Sometimes, especially these days, it’s an infuriated staff.

I am not against unions and don’t doubt the courage and conviction of the workers on the picket line. In museums, though, unions work best for guards, who are trained to perform duties in exacting, uniform ways and don’t have much if any discretion. For creative staff, though, unions cater to the lowest common denominator and, rhetoric about equity aside, really don’t work. Rewarding someone for exceptional performance isn’t possible. Neither is giving a high-stepper more autonomy or freedom.

The museum has a very good new director, Sasha Suda, who started the week that workers went on strike. The PMA has a chief operating officer who’s in charge of negotiations, so she has kept out of it.

During this emotional time, naïve staff members may not have thought about what a union can and can’t do. An ugly cultural moment entranced them. Now the leaders of the bargaining unit, as a point of pride, have to show that all this Sturm und Drang brings dollars and cents. They should think about asking Judge Crater if he has a spare bunk.

On another front, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), the trade association for museums with budgets over $2 million, has indeed, as I predicted, relaxed its ethical guidelines on the use of money from the sale of art. In the past, the ironclad rule required that money from selling, or deaccessioning, museum art could only go toward buying more art. Museums routinely do this. They sell art that’s duplicative or that no longer fits the mission to buy better things.

During the Covid crisis, AAMD temporarily and unwisely suspended the rule, with guardrails. Museums using art for operating budgets had to be truly beggared by the lockdowns, for instance. The tweak was spectacularly abused by the Met and the Baltimore Museum of Art. The Met, with a $4 billion endowment, was never even remotely broke. Baltimore tried to use $60 million in art sales for staff pay raises and an endowment for a race-based hiring scheme.

The American Alliance of Museums (AAM), the trade association for the entire museum community — including art, history, and children’s and science museums — has always allowed money from the sale of art and artifacts to be used for “direct collection care.” Last week, AAMD voted to align its ethical policy with AAM’s.

I wish AAMD hadn’t done this. It opens the door a crack for raiding the vault for cash. That said, it very carefully defines what “direct collection care” means, and it’s art conservation. Many museums skimp on this since the art doesn’t cry to be cleaned or repaired. If the rule’s observed, and these are ethical guidelines, not laws, museums won’t get much new money.

This is a case where I look at the AAMD committee that devised the new rule and ask whether or not I trust their judgment. Rod Bigelow, the director of the Crystal Bridges Museum, chaired the group. I admire him and know most of the committee members and respect all of them. The change was approved in a listless vote. It was done by mail, and though 109 of the group’s 200 directors approved, lots of directors didn’t vote. I think everyone is sick of hearing about it, sick of the controversies and conniving, and plans never to revisit it.