PMA Union staff visited the expanded galleries earlier this month
One year ago this week, staff at the Philadelphia Museum of Art launched a labour campaign that resulted a few months later in the first-ever wall-to-wall labour union in a major US museum, a move that has since been taken up by workers at several otherinstitutions, including most recently the Whitney Museum in New York. From its inception, the PMA Union has aimed to represent employees across all departments, from visitor services and retail to conservation and curatorial. That remains among its hardest-won accomplishments.
“The biggest success has been just developing our membership in the union, and creating really good communication channels. It has not been easy we are like a lot of larger museums, pretty siloed into departments and divisions and subdivisions and subdepartments,” says Nicole Cook, a programme manager for graduate academic partnerships at the museum. This was further comp