Workers at one of the West Coast’s most prominent museums are unionizing.
On Wednesday, more than 100 Seattle Art Museum employees working across more than 20 front- and back-end departments announced their intent to unionize, the latest effort in a growing movement of labor organizing at museums and fine art institutions around the country in the last six years.
Organizers announced their intent to unionize as the Seattle Art Museum Workers United in a letter delivered to the museum Director and CEO Scott Stulen Wednesday morning.
“Our solidarity is a movement to improve working conditions in alignment with SAM’s mission, vision, and core values,” organizers wrote.
“The challenges we face, such as unsustainable wages, subpar health benefits, and siloed, top-down decision-making, are undeniable, systemic, and have persisted across administrations.”
Seattle Art Museum leadership did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday morning.
While the exact size of the bargaining unit will likely be determined in the next months, organizers said all union-eligible employees outside of guards, who previously unionized independently, would be eligible, including people in marketing, operations, visitor experience, curatorial, education, development and other departments, and that they have a supermajority of support among eligible workers.
The museum’s security staff formed a union in May 2022 and, after more than two years of bargaining and a 12-day strike, agreed on a contract in late 2024.
SAMWU organizers said they were inspired by other museum unions and their security peers at SAM who organized “in recognition of the systemic issues within arts and culture institutions.”
Among SAMWU’s top bargaining goals are “sustainable and respectful” wages, establishing just-cause protections, improving healthcare, PTO, retirement benefits and retention incentives, as well as more transparent, collaborative decisionmaking across the museum and, more broadly, creating a “workplace culture of inclusion, trust, and accountability,” according to the letter.
“My motivation for unionizing is the disparity I see between museum’s values (and) the role they claim to want to play in the community, and how they treat staff. This isn’t just a SAM problem, this is across the arts and cultural sector,” said Jenny Woods, an installation design and registration specialist at SAM and organizing committee member with SAMWU.
“I think the public doesn’t realize that some of the staff making it possible for visitors to see the priceless artifacts are dealing with food or housing insecurity,” she said.
“… If unionizing is the thing to force museums to change to better staff pay, benefits and overall treatment, then it’s the right thing to do. I want SAM to be a leader in the field on truly changing its operating model to benefit its workers.”
Organizers said they hope SAM leadership will voluntarily recognize their union — in which a neutral third party arbitrator verifies that at least a simple majority of eligible workers have signed union authorization cards or oversees a secret ballot election — to go straight to bargaining and avoid a lengthier National Labor Relations Board secret ballot process.
The union filed for an election with the NLRB Wednesday morning, according to Drew Davis, an art handler at SAM and an organizing committee member with SAMWU. Organizers said they’d be willing to withdraw that NLRB election petition if the museum grants them recognition before May 27.
As Seattle Art Museum Workers United, the workers are affiliating with the Washington Federation of State Employees/AFSCME Council 28. WFSE also represents workers at the Tacoma Art Museum and other local art and historic institutions; AFSCME, the national union organization, represents art museums, cultural institutions, zoos and libraries across the country.
The announcement follows a flurry of museum organizing in the past six years, including at renowned museums like the Whitney, Guggenheim and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; major fine arts institutions in Boston, Philadelphia and Portland have also unionized.
Closer to home, Frye Art Museum guards, booksellers at Elliott Bay Book Co., staff at literary nonprofit Hugo House and indie film nonprofit SIFF have also unionized, and in August last year, workers at the Nordic museum announced a union push as well. Leadership voluntarily recognized their union in October and contract bargaining is currently in progress.
Meredith Waddell, a SAM art handler who is a member of the SAMWU organizing committee, views unionizing in a bigger pursuit of a more equitable future.
“Where can I start? With my co-workers at my job,” she said in a phone interview last week. “I spend eight hours a day with these people. I spend more time with these people than I do anyone else. And we’re invested in each other. And I think this is a way that we can really solidify the support for each other and fight for better conditions for everybody.”
Material from The Seattle Times archives was used in this report.
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