By Christopher Marcisz
NORTH ADAMS — On the picket line outside the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art on the morning of Wednesday, March 6, Nancy Giorgi reflected on a work life that has mirrored the changes in the town she’s called home for decades.
Giorgi worked for 22 years at a factory that made electric components, a subsidiary of the once dominant Sprague Electric company that lingered until the early 1990s. Then she worked at the local hospital until it closed in 2014, though it is set for a limited reopening later this month.
When the idea of turning the enormous main Sprague Electric complex into an art museum came along in the 1980s, she was skeptical, but happy to see the empty space put to use. Even as the museum, known as MASS MoCA, built a global reputation, she had only visited a few times for concerts before she took a job as a museum attendant last year.
As a member of UAW Local 2110, which has represented the museum’s workers since 2021, Giorgi says she’s happy to fight for the job she has come to love. “I feel we have to do what we have to do,” she said.
The MASS MoCA Union’s decision to launch an indefinite strike, which began on March 6, came as the union said wages have failed to keep up with inflation and the cost of living in Berkshire County’s northwest corner. The union represents outreach and education specialists, box-office and retail workers, custodians and facilities staff, curators, and art preparators. (It does not include management and security guards.) Union members are currently asking for a base wage of $18.25 an hour, but the museum has held firm on $17.25, according to the union. The union says the difference would amount to only $150,000 this year. Currently 58% of the union’s 120 employees make only $16.25 and the average pay for full-time employees is only $43,600, the union said — less than the cost of living for a single adult in Berkshire County, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
For many of the workers who have been on strike since March 7, MASS MoCA is more than the cultural attraction that put this small city on the map. It is a workplace where it is increasingly hard to make a living as wages haven’t kept up with costs. And it is also an idea that offered a different future for the region as it climbed out of the darkness of deindustrialization. It became a place where empty, unwanted space transformed into a hub for art and community. And now that it has proved it works, it faces deep questions about who gets to share the benefits.
Meg Labbee is the museum’s artist services director who handles travel and accommodation arrangements for the museum’s steady stream of visiting guests. It is one of many roles she’s worked at the museum since 1999, and she is also on the bargaining committee for UAW Local 2110. She has noted the growing estrangement between workers and management.
“The vision is the same, our mission is the same,” she said. “There is just the difference of where that line is for workers.”
“The wages here are so low and folks really struggle with full-time work here,” said Chelsea Farrell, an organizer with UAW Local 2110. “These increases may not seem like a lot of money for MASS MoCA, but they would be for a lot of the people that earn it.”
Museum management said it is bargaining in good faith and that their most recent proposal from late February marks the largest in their history.
“What so many people make beautifully possible here — year in and year out — is the beating heart of why we exist as an arts organization,” museum Director Kristy Edmunds said in a statement. “In the span of three years, we have implemented equity increases at every level, continued to stay ahead of the Commonwealth’s minimum wage, ensured no disruption in health and retirement benefits, and funded a variety of innovative employee support programs that include urgent needs, student loan assistance, elder and childcare offsets.”
Edmunds said that the museum’s position is about securing its future.
“At this post-pandemic juncture, we are building a future of financial resilience — including significant investments in all our people,” she said.
The museum is remaining open with management filling in, while the union has set up picket lines. The union is not picketing several businesses and restaurants that are on the sprawling site. The museum also says that the strike has not affected long-term plans for a massive installation in the museum’s signature Building 5 space, nor upcoming summer festivals.
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The story of MASS MoCA is a true underdog tale, intricately bound up with the story of North Adams. The museum’s 16-acre campus in the center of town was mostly built in the 1870s for textile printing, and from the 1940s was home to Sprague Electric, which made high-quality capacitors for the new electronics industry. At its peak, it employed over 4,000 people making the tiny components used for the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, or for the Apollo program to travel to the moon.
The work was not well paid, and the company took advantage of a largely captive workforce in its remote location. Labor relations began to sour in the late 1960s and culminated in an acrimonious 10-week strike in early 1970, as described in a 2014 paper by MCLA sociologist Maynard Seider. Company owner R.C. Sprague seemed personally offended by the ungratefulness of “his” employees, and four times a day would push through the picket lines near where museum workers are marching today.
While the company was happy to blame labor unrest, it was the company’s failure to transition into the emerging tech sector as well as competition from cheaper manufacturing overseas that eroded the business through the 1970s and 80s. When it closed shop in 1985, the city’s unemployment rate reached 14% and the campus was left abandoned.
In 1987, Thomas Krens, then the director of the Williams College Museum of Art in nearby Williamstown, proposed a new arts complex for the empty space. It took a major effort to get the people of North Adams on board, and considerable political willpower from then Mayor John Barrett III and Governor Michael Dukakis to get the project moving. In 1988, the project secured $35 million in taxpayer dollars to get started, despite a chorus of doubters from every corner of the state.
And that was just the beginning of the effort to get the museum running. When Krens left to pursue his museum-building career at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, he left his young protégé Joseph Thompson in charge. All through the 1990s, the idea struggled forward while constantly proving itself, including a fundraising drive in the community that raised $1 million.
It didn’t get much easier once the museum opened on Memorial Day weekend in 1999. For years, budgets ran month to month, and there was a deep sense of communal effort uniting workers and management, according to Labbee. Over the years, the museum found its footing, entering long-term partnerships to bring works by Sol LeWitt and Anselm Kiefer, expanding its performing arts calendar, and hosting major events like the FreshGrass Festival every fall and the Solid Sound festival curated by the band Wilco every other summer.
MASS MoCA expanded to fill into its campus and reached a major milestone in 2017 with the completion of Building 6, when the museum added 130,000 additional square feet of gallery space and an even bigger cultural impact.
“We really thrived at that moment,” Labbee said. “We were so proud of that building, we decided this is the next phase of MASS MoCA and we’re making it happen.”
As someone who had worked there since 1999, she recalled the spirit of those early days — of helping bands load-in for shows and making sure all the lights and equipment were ready before a big exhibit opened. Building 6 “was that moment for the next generation,” she said.
But that positive spirit didn’t survive the pandemic, according to several members of the union. With a heavy reliance on ticket sales and admissions, and a very small endowment to fall back on, the museum was one of the first to announce sweeping cuts in March 2020 — laying off 122 of 165 workers. When relief came through the federal Paycheck Protection Program a few months later, workers had to reapply for their jobs.
Amanda Tobin Ripley worked at the museum for eight years in its education department, and helped to organize the union there. She has since left to pursue graduate work at the Ohio State University, where she is studying the museum unionization movement.
Ripley said she is grateful to MASS MoCA for helping build her career.
“It takes chances on people and allows them a lot of creativity,” she said. “That’s why a lot of people are drawn there and believe in it.”
But that sense of mission and purpose often obscured that culture work is still work and has been routinely exploited by management across the art world, she said. In a paper published last autumn, Ripley notes that many have noted that “museum workers, like nonprofit workers writ large, have absorbed the social truism that a low salary is the price paid to do what you love.”
There was some museum organizing in the 1970s, but along narrow lines that maintained the divide between “blue collar” jobs like custodians and art handlers, and “white collar” ones like curators and education specialists, Ripley wrote.
But in the wake of the pandemic, a host of factors have broken down those lines — from a rise in burnout and dissatisfaction, to the precarity of the new gig economy, to the student debt crisis, and to wages simply not keeping up with inflation.
“[The divide] is starting to diminish,” she said. “Almost all the new unions are wall-to-wall, they include facilities staff, educators, custodians, curators.”
The result, she wrote last year, is that “unionizing museum employees are embracing the collective identity of ‘museum worker’ toward an understanding of creative labor that is at once intellectual and manual, white collar and blue collar, ‘special’ and drudgery, passion-driven and alienating.”
In April 2021, MASS MoCA workers organized with UAW Local 2110, a part of the powerful United Auto Workers union. This local represents workers at a handful of museums in the northeast, including the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
It wasn’t until late 2022 that the union and management agreed on their first three-year contract, and that only happened after a one-day strike in August 2022. Because the museum and union couldn’t agree on yearly increases, the contract allows them to reopen bargaining on wages. Talks began last October on that increase, and after months of deadlock the workers voted on March 1 to set a strike deadline on March 6.
All this has happened against the backdrop of what the union describes as a significant shift in management culture at the museum. Labbee remembered how in those early days leaders like Thompson, who moved on in late 2020, seemed to know everyone’s name and made sure everyone felt like part of a shared project.
“Now it feels like a very big divide,” she said.
Farrell said it is part of the museum having to realize it is not the same place it was.
“They are not the same scrappy institution they used to be,” she said, and that is reflected in growth of high-level management positions and the shift of power that represents.
“When there is this change, where are your priorities?” she said. “They’re only looking at the top, not at the members who actually make this happen.”
MASS MoCA Director of Communications Jennifer Falk disputed these claims. She noted that between 2022 and 2024, staff grew from 138 to 179 total employees, and union-represented positions grew from 94 to 127. On the management side, she said, “We have hired three new positions directly tied to revenue generation including museum admissions, fundraising and a new role that enables us to grow our commitment to North Adams through long-term engagement with local and state government.”
Ripley said that based on her research, it will be interesting to see how the field develops as a new generation rises through this new labor paradigm, and that institutions and their supporters also have an important role in changing how things are done.
“MASS MoCA is at the forefront of so many things in the art world,” she said. “It could forge a different path for how management interacts with unions, but it seems to be reacting with fear and antagonism instead.”
Christopher Marcisz is an independent journalist based in the Berkshires who has written for the Berkshire Eagle, Popula, and Hyperallergic, among others. He can be reached at cwmarc@gmail.com, and found @cwmarc on twitter, Bluesky, and Instagram.
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