When workers from the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh kicked off their unionization drive in June 2020, it was already “a bit of an experiment,” says admissions senior representative and bargaining unit secretary Jim Kappas. COVID restrictions compelled the group to organize virtually, and they had to reach more than 500 workers employed across four museums (the Andy Warhol Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and Carnegie Science Center).
Today, after joining up with the United Steelworkers, the United Museum Workers is the largest museum union in the country. In June, they celebrated ratifying their first contract after 18 months of negotiation — a landmark agreement that included raising the Museums’ base hourly wage from $9 to a livable $16, new health and safety protections, additional pay raises, increased sick pay, and floating holidays for both full- and part-time employees.
“It significantly improved people’s lives immediately,” Jenise Brown, co-chair of the union bargaining committee and a museum educator, says.
“This groundwork has been laid,” Kappas tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “We’ve hopefully [made] the museums [a] more sustainable and healthy place to work and to visit for years to come.”
Kappas and the union are also aware they’ve changed the Carnegie Museums’ legacy.
“[Andrew] Carnegie’s museums… were built in no small part off of profits extracted from steelworkers,” Kappas says. “[So] to have the Steelworkers’ name on [them] now … I think is so poignant and meaningful.”
Even as they’ve created a more equitable workplace, Kappas and Brown say the work is ongoing and remains part of a larger labor movement.
“We found, truly, that it wasn’t just our fight,” Brown says. UMW are part of Amalgamated Local 9562 alongside the Persad Center Staff Union and union workers at HCL, a Google contractor. They also continue to stand in solidarity with union workers throughout the region, appearing at actions for Pittsburgh Starbucks Workers United, the Union of Pitt Faculty, and striking Pittsburgh Post-Gazette workers (affiliated with the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh).
To anyone thinking of unionizing or who are part of a unionization effort, “this is not an easy fight. It’s not an easy thing to do,” Kappas says. “But it’s one of the most important things you can do.”
