Museum staff at the Art Institute have ratified their first collective bargaining agreement, a year-and-a-half after they led a then-nascent charge to unionize workers across some of Chicago’s major museums.
Staff at the Art Institute were the first at a major Chicago museum to unionize when they voted to do so in January 2022. Union members work in roles spanning the museum’s operations and include art installers, curators, custodians and retail staff.
Museum staff were joined by employees at the Art Institute’s affiliated school, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, to form the Art Institute of Chicago Workers United. The staff voted to join the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a public service union that also represents staff at museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Nontenure track faculty at the Art Institute’s school later voted to join the union; they are still in the process of bargaining for their first contract.
More than 500 workers at the museum and school are covered by the new collective bargaining agreement, which AFSCME Council 31 said included scheduled wage increases and three weeks’ required notice for layoffs. The contract was ratified by a 95% vote, said Anders Lindall, a union spokesperson.
Museum and school staff will see their wages rise between 12.25% and 16.25% over the course of the four-year contract, with lower-paid members seeing higher increases, the union said. The contract will also raise the wage floor from the city’s $15.80 minimum wage to $17 immediately and to $18 in 2025, according to Lindall. Staff will continue to be eligible for merit raises, the union said.
“We have a seat at the table,” said Myia Brown, assistant director in the school’s career services department and a member of the union’s bargaining committee. “That is like the biggest overarching goal that we had, and we got that.”
The contract requires open positions to be posted internally with qualified in-house candidates guaranteed an interview, the union said. It will also establish a joint labor-management committee that will meet to continue to evaluate the museum’s pay structure, Brown said.
“The Art Institute deeply values its employees and is happy to have reached a contract agreement that meets the needs of our staff and allows us to continue providing a world-class education and cultural experience,” said Alexandra Holt, the Art Institute’s executive vice president for finance and administration, in a statement. “This process has been an important step in building the future of our institution and we are so pleased to all move forward together.”
Since the Art Institute staff unionized last year, staff at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, the Field Museum, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Lincoln Park and the Newberry Library, a research library on the Near North Side, have all voted to unionize with AFSCME Council 31.
Museum workers across the city have told the Tribune they see joining a union as a way to secure higher pay and less precarious working conditions.
At the Art Institute, the impact of furloughs and layoffs during the pandemic exacerbated existing concerns museum staff had about their working conditions, employees said. The wave of unionizations within museums over the last several years is part of a broader trend of organizing in workplaces where unions have traditionally struggled to take root, such as in the retail and food service industries.
Anna Feuer, acquisitions and collections manager in the Art Institute’s library, said a lack of transparency surrounding museum-wide decisions that affected staff, such as letting vacant positions go unfilled or cutting paid time off, led in part to workers’ decision to unionize.
“It really was a pastiche of issues that affected not just our day-to-day work life, but the prospect of the Art Institute and the School of the Art Institute as places where you can build your career and make a living,” said Feuer, who has worked at the museum for almost nine years.
AICWU has accused museum management of slow-walking contract negotiations, which the museum has denied. Shortly before reaching a tentative agreement with the museum at the end of July, the union began raising money for a strike fund.
“They didn’t want us to have a union, they didn’t want us to have a contract,” Feuer said. “Every time we did an action, a public action to draw attention to what was happening, they moved. There was progress.”
In a statement, the museum said management “came to every session prepared and focused on reaching a contract that is both fair to staff and supports the future of the institution.”
The Art Institute union also includes more than 600 adjuncts and lecturers at the museum’s affiliated school, who voted overwhelmingly to join the labor organization last winter. Art Institute faculty have said they were spurred to organize over what they described as low pay and a two-tier system of wages and benefits they say created a “permanent underclass” of contingent faculty compared with tenured instructors at the school.
The faculty are in the process of bargaining for their first contract with school management, Lindall said.
