Striking workers at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art voted on Tuesday night to end their 21-day strike and accept a wage agreement with management that satisfies many of their demands. Workers went back to work on Wednesday.
The strike brought picket lines to a major cultural and tourism attraction in North Adams for the second time in three years. Workers from the UAW Local 2110 had reopened wage negotiations for their 120 members last October and chose to strike March 6 after talks reached an impasse. At three weeks, this was one of the longer strikes at an American museum in recent years, securing a contract for at least the next two years.
The terms will increase the minimum pay to $18/hour from $16.25, which the union said will increase pay for 58 percent of their unit (negotiations had stalled when the museum refused to offer more than $17.25, a dollar less than the union was asking for). Full-time staff will receive a 3.5 percent across-the-board increase retroactive to the beginning of the year, time and a half rate applied to all hours past 10 hours a day (not just 40 hours a week, a key point for staffing during events), as well as additional holiday pay.
The union had argued that wage rates at the museum were not keeping up with the inflation nor the increasing cost of living in the Berkshires. They estimated the cost of the increases would amount to $150,000 in the first year.
“The bargaining committee is pleased and proud of what they accomplished,” said Chelsea Farrell, an organizer with UAW Local 2110. “We achieved much of what we strived for.”
The museum had argued that as a museum with a negligible endowment and heavily dependent on ticket sales was not able to support its current level of staffing and programming at this higher rate.
In a statement, Museum Director Kristy Edmunds said the agreement showed “our goal was shared, but our constraints and communication efforts for getting there differed.”
“Equity and wage increases for MASS MoCA’s staff have never been a matter of if, but a matter of how fast,” she said.
The strike does not appear to have significantly impacted future programming, except for a sold-out two-night performance by the Magnetic Fields that was moved from March 22 and 23 to May 3 and 4. The museum also said it would temporarily reduce its schedule from six days a week to five days until May 1 (except for April school vacation week).
The strike began on March 6, and little progress was made through the first two weeks. On March 20, the union emphatically rejected a “last, best, and final” offer from the museum for one-time bonus payments. “It was a clear demonstration the union was still — if not more — unified,” Farrell said.
Progress toward a deal came quickly over last weekend, beginning on Sunday, when Edmunds in her statement said “there was authentic, productive cooperation and clarity, which enabled all parties to agree.”
Workers went back to work on Wednesday. “I think everyone was happy to get back to work and to the jobs they love,” Farrell said.
The wage increase will remain in place for the remainder of the three-year contract that was agreed upon in fall 2022, after a one-day strike that August. Farrell said she is “really hopeful we can start afresh our relationship between union and management” when talks on the next contract begin next year.
The MASS MoCA workers – which include outreach and education specialists, box office and retail workers, custodians and facilities staff, curators, and art preparators — organized with the United Auto Workers in the wake of the pandemic four years ago. Most staff were laid off in the first days of the quarantine, and later had to reapply for their jobs.
Other museums have organized and staged work stoppages, including fellow UAW Local 2110 members at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library in New York, who held a two-month strike last year.
Perhaps the most similar labor action in recent years was a 19-day strike at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in fall 2022. The 180 striking workers secured nearly all their demands, including 14 percent raises over three years, parental leave, and an increase in minimum pay to $16.75/hour. But while the strike ended, there has been lingering acrimony between workers and management over the museum’s refusal to honor a longevity pay increase.
Unlike other cultural institutions, MASS MoCA was proposed and pitched as an economic development model for the struggling town dealing with the loss of its industrial base. It was launched with considerable support from state taxpayers in the 1980s, and with fundraising from the community in the 1990s.
Perhaps for this reason, strikers enjoyed widespread support from the community throughout the three weeks of the strike, measured by supportive honks from passing cars on their picket lines and the long list of local businesses and community organizations the union thanked on social media for supporting them throughout.
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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