“The view that unions are a hostile force within a workplace is fundamentally incorrect. Creating a union is an act of love: love for your work, love for your colleagues, and love for the institution that means a great deal to many people.”
This is a view that came to the forefront of my conversation with Analú María López, a staff member at Newberry Library, who believes that a labor union protects the future of the institution. Newberry workers won their union in November 2022, with over 75 percent of the votes cast. Since that time, the union’s organizing committee has been at the bargaining table with management, reaching a tentative agreement in October.
Newberry Workers United is part of the growing wave of workers organizing at cultural institutions in Chicago and beyond over the past two years. The Art Institute of Chicago and School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) was the first notable campaign in the city, filing for their union in the summer of 2021. They met management at the bargaining table in May 2022 and were the first of Chicago’s arts organizations to bring home a tentative union contract in August 2023. The Field Museum joined the fight in October 2022, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in March 2023, and the Museum of Science and Industry in April 2023. Workers at places like Berlin Nightclub, the University of Illinois Chicago, and the University of Chicago are still fighting. Most of these workplaces organized under AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees).
Anders Lindall, the public affairs director for AFSCME Council 31, described this surge as critical to not only the city but to the labor movement as a whole. “When workers see other workers come together, they gain a blueprint for how such organizing can be accomplished,” he said. It is power that has a tangible impact. Just in these past two years, Lindall continued, “Chicago has seen 3,000 new union members in cultural organizations alone.”
Work impacts us all. Most people must work to survive. This is a reality shared between the workers of Starbucks, Amazon, UPS, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), and the recent Jackson Park Hospital nurses union picket line. The shared concerns of paying bills, buying groceries, and having a safe and stable home is why the wave of successful and public-facing unionization efforts in cultural institutions across the city are so important to understand in context. What has happened at these museums, libraries, and clubs transcends their boundaries. Within the last 12 months, a Gallup poll found that 67 percent of Americans approve of labor unions. An April poll conducted by the Pew Research Center found that over half of Americans feel a decline in union membership is bad for working people and bad for the country as a whole. If these statistics are coupled together, they present a window into a society that is populated by working people; workers with a vested interest in job security, safety, and fair pay.
López, librarian and assistant curator of the Newberry Library’s Ayer collection of American Indian and Indigenous studies, and Catherine Gass, a photographer and longtime digital specialist at the library, gave various reasons for the Newberry’s drive for unionization. López cited “equal pay, better pay, greater diversity in the library’s workforce, and greater transparency from the library’s upper administration” and they both agreed that a union would support the library through collective decisions for a better future. While these reasons for a labor union could easily be shared by most workers, they hold a special meaning for arts and cultural institutions that have stripped workers of their protections over the decades. Such strip mining has occurred in the arts because the sector has flourished under years of nonstandard employment practices (freelance work) and zero-hour contracts, where employers are not obligated to provide any hours to a worker.
Courtesy AFSCME Council 31
Freelance or contract work has expanded in the contemporary art world because, under capitalism, artists are likened to entrepreneurs. It’s a relationship that’s been written on at length, often with the intent to prove that artists actively seek out freelance work because of their need for professional flexibility and a shared, somehow inherent panoply of interests and skills. Under such a critical lens, freelance work is usually touted as a good thing, an opportunity for artists. However, as freelance work is the main source of income for many arts workers, it sets the groundwork for dire economic conditions as it allows institutions to pay artists very little with no benefits. Couple freelance’s prevalence in the arts with the appearance of zero-hour contracts and you’ll see a labor market with fault lines ready to crack at the next economic or natural disaster. According to an October report from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, the average weekly earnings for museum-sector employees is still almost 20 percent lower than the average U.S. worker.
The Newberry union’s Instagram account notes that the library’s employment requirements and compensation have become increasingly disparate; the training demanded of archival, library, and cultural work continues to increase as compensation dwindles (last year they found that library assistants, a position that usually requires advanced degrees and training, made just above minimum wage in the city of Chicago). These dips in worker pay stand in stark contrast to the salaries made by those in the library’s president’s office. According to its 2021 tax filing, the former president and VP made over $300,000 and $200,000, respectively.
At the time of this article, Newberry management was readying to push back on the union’s call for better and equal pay, and by extension the terms and conditions of library employment, by calling into question the Newberry’s very status as a cultural institution. It’s a common move by management as it allows them to deny the need for parity with other cultural institutions and allows them to obscure their hiring structures under a veil of opacity. (In a statement, the Newberry Library wrote, “We have negotiated in good faith throughout this process and are pleased to share that we have reached a tentative agreement with Newberry Workers United. We look forward to the ratification process, which is now moving forward.”) Yet, it’s a move that doesn’t faze Gass, who also works as an adjunct assistant professor in SAIC’s photography department. In recollecting a conversation with a colleague at SAIC, Gass told me, “My colleague encouraged me not to think of the union as a challenge but rather as an act of creative world-building, building something better not only for myself but for my colleagues and the library.” López too was driven by the same solidarity and cited her own history with the Newberry’s collection. (She first began work at the library as a student assisting in the digitization of the Indigenous studies collection.) It was then López stated she “witnessed firsthand the collection’s importance to the community.”
Unfortunately such shared importance is regularly turned against an institution’s workers by management. In conversation with a labor organizer, who wished to remain anonymous, the topic of union busting in the arts, specifically in Chicago, came up. They stated, “The rhetoric of cultural institutions frames their relationship to their workers as communities and families; anything but that of bosses to workforce for whom they are responsible.” A representative from Northwestern library’s bargaining committee echoed the organizer’s sentiment via email and added that during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic they “had no say in the furloughs, which were sprung on us with very little notice and ultimately resulted in the departure of many highly-experienced and deeply appreciated staff. . . . Public-facing employees had very little say in what measures would be put in place to protect them from contracting COVID.”
Credit: Patrick Lentz
While the lack of worker protections in the arts is not unique, the cultural sector presents a compelling battleground from which workers have made their voices heard. The same passion that draws workers to the arts provides the foundation for a resilient community.
When speaking of the resiliency of the labor community, it’s important to note the impact the CTU has had on the city’s landscape. The CTU has been around in recognizable form since the 1930s and represents over 25,000 workers in the city. Full-time faculty at the Chicago High School for the Arts (ChiArts) joined the CTU under its charter and contract wing in 2018. The school’s part-time teaching artists (the drivers of the school’s largest source of revenue, many of whom are practicing artists) voted to join the CTU in June 2022 due to “stagnant wages, lack of job security, and no basic rights” throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Patrick Lentz, a photographer and visual arts teacher on the bargaining team for teaching artists at ChiArts, said that because teaching artists are part-time and directly responsible for teaching and growing the school’s highestenrollment draw (their arts programs), they are in a precarious position as workers. They are not as protected as teachers with full-time status: they typically have limited or no benefits plans and little-to-no job security as classes, and thus income, are not guaranteed semester to semester. Teaching artists also have little-to-no voice in the school’s decision-making processes regarding funding, leadership, and other committee-driven decisions. This precarity in turn directly impacts the students and next generation of artists under these teachers’ care and tutelage.
There again is a sharp discrepancy between the wages of ChiArts’ part-time staff and the school’s leadership. ProPublica records show that the school’s former principal earned over $170,000 during fiscal year 2021. Prior to the new union contract, the starting salary for arts teachers was $55 per hour but that only includes hours in the classroom; none of the time spent preparing curriculum or offering help to students is paid. According to the union’s members, this setup usually would average out to arts teachers making minimum wage or less.
The sharp difference between ChiArts worker wages and those of the school’s administration, along with the precarity faced by the institution’s part-time teaching artists, are conditions shared by adjuncts and staff at SAIC. In the final years of her tenure as SAIC president, Elissa Tenny was reported to make almost three-quarters of a million each year, while lecturers (around half of the school’s teaching faculty) were not eligible for employer-sponsored health insurance.
Courtesy AFSCME Council 31
“For the vast majority of visual artists in Chicago, meeting your basic life expenses while also continuing your artist’s practice is close to impossible without an additional job outside of gigs,” Lentz said. “I experience this and also see this with our 85 part-time arts teachers firsthand. Yes, there is a passion/rewarding side of teaching, but there’s also a survival aspect for having consistent income.”
A tentative agreement was made between the CTU and ChiArts administration in early September. This will be the first contract for 85 teaching artists, according to Lentz. The union’s determination throughout 11 months of bargaining paved the way for gains in “protections for part-time teaching artists, restoration of the arts day that management had just cut by 30 percent, and a considerable increase in educator salaries and benefits to buttress the impacts of inflation.” The specifics of these gains are forthcoming in the agreement that CTU is negotiating with the school’s administration.
The structural fissures that the ChiArts faculty union has worked to repair at their school are conditions shared by the majority of working artists throughout the city. Working artists are a highly skilled, specialized workforce in a sector that has thrived on contracting artists in order to avoid the responsibilities of employing them and offering low pay in exchange for cultural and social cachet.
It’s a dynamic that Lentz summed up well. “This is a fight that feels important for what [a] union for part-time teachers could look like, especially for arts workers where living paycheck to paycheck is the reality for most, and institutions take advantage of the vulnerability of workers needing steady income outside of the gig economy,” he said.
How art workers are treated by management, administrators, and bosses is shared with most workers under capitalism (low pay, long hours, unsustainable and many times unsafe working conditions). However, arts and cultural workers’ response to these conditions and to the devious union-busting rhetoric they routinely face, like the bad faith accusation that unions are motivated by self-interest, has given rise to an inspiring sense of solidarity. While the “uniqueness” of this phenomenon in Chicago should not be blown into hyperbole, it is through the act of witnessing workers organize and succeed that other workers can imagine a better life for themselves.
In a system where odds are stacked against the individual, like the loosening of child labor laws in states like Arkansas, national “right-to-work” legislation, and blatant fearmongering by management, we find ourselves in a structure built by and for the rich. Collective action presents the possibility for material and immaterial gains: better pay, better working conditions, and more often than not, hope for the future. Perhaps this is the lesson to take into the future: think of what you owe to those you work with every day.
If it can happen in Chicago, it can happen anywhere.
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