Collective bargaining during a pandemic: observations from the Tenement Museum Union

04 February 2021 – Andy Urban

Editors’ Note: For more on labor relations at the Tenement Museum, check out the forthcoming May 2021 issue of The Public Historian.

In recent years, the number of unionized workers within the nonprofit sector of the U.S. economy has grown steadily. At cultural institutions that have remained open during Covid-19, the pandemic has given urgency to workers’ calls for collective bargaining rights. While the American Alliance of Museums recommends in its November 2020 guidelines that employers “update your workplace policies and support your staff,” frontline workers have reason to be skeptical about entrusting their health to management. As any union organizer would gladly explain, “support” on safety issues should take the form of contractual guarantees rather than suggestions.

The Tenement Museum Union’s Twitter icon, designed by Faith Bennett, makes clever use of clotheslines, which were once a ubiquitous feature of immigrant and working-class neighborhoods like New York City’s Lower East Side.

Public historians often gloss over labor relations at museums and historic sites. After all, public history is not about generating surplus revenue that capitalist investors and executives can claim as profit—at least in theory. Still, even without a formal embrace of capitalist principles, public history institutions have treated their workforces as expendable. Top-down power structures at museums at historic sites have also spurred unionization, with workers seeking to win greater control over the means of production. In public history, this entails controlling how representative and critical interpretations of the past are communicated to audiences.

At the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, union eligible workers voted 72 to 3 in April 2019 to join United Auto Worker (UAW) Local 2110. In March 2020, the union’s bargaining team was still negotiating their first contract when Covid-19 forced the museum to shut down. Workers were furloughed initially. But in July 2020, 76 part-time employees, mainly educators who led tours, were laid off. Because the museum’s two historic tenement buildings, 97 Orchard Street and 103 Orchard Street, feature crowded dwellings that once housed immigrants and their extended families, tours have yet to resume. Presently, the Tenement Museum’s programming is limited to virtual guided tours, school programs, and private events, as well as in-person neighborhood walking tours on Saturdays.

In August 2020, I conducted interviews with R.E. Fulton, Erin Reid, Jackie Wait, and Daniel Walber. Except for Wait, who would leave her position at the museum for another job shortly after we spoke, all had been let go by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum a month earlier. Fulton, Wait, and Walber had been closely involved with the campaign to unionize workers at the museum. Reid had been a co-facilitator of the museum’s People of Color Caucus, a collective that advocated internally for more racially inclusive hiring practices and representative tour materials that addressed New York’s and the Lower East Side’s diverse histories.

My longer interviews with Fulton, Reid, Wait, and Walber will appear in The Public Historian in May. Before then, I plan to conduct follow-up conversations to track what has proven to be a fluid story. This summer, one of the main concerns that workers had was that management at the museum would use the pandemic layoffs as a pretense to bust the union. This proved not to be the case. On December 22, the union’s Twitter account posted that a contract had been reached and that it included recall rights for workers who lost their jobs when the museum closed.

Regardless of what comes next, unionization at the museum has already provided a platform from which labor can challenge popular misunderstandings about working at an organization with a social justice mission. When I asked Fulton and Walber whether they thought that the Tenement Museum’s embrace of labor history—in tours that highlight, for instance, the role of garment workers’ unions in combatting Lower East Side sweatshops—they were keen to redirect the focus away from what they view as a symbolic contradiction. As Walber put it, “I think previous efforts to unionize [at the museum] maybe took too much for granted that people would think, ‘Oh, well we talk about labor history so creating a union is going to be a walk in the park.’” Fulton was even blunter. They mentioned that extending museum workers’ hours on Saturdays, without any input from the staff affected, and long days spent leading tours through a boiling, unairconditioned tenement, are issues that relate, first and foremost, to “a workplace under capitalism.”

From a pedagogical standpoint, I wonder whether an emphasis on the intellectual and creative aspects of curatorial, educational, and interpretive work has overshadowed important lessons about labor relations, institutional power dynamics, and what it means to commit to social justice in practice. As someone who trains students for careers in public history and the public humanities, I do think that there is a need for robust discussions about what democratization in the workplace might look like in our field, and about why non-profit institutions have been seduced by corporate strategies obsessed with generating more revenue.

My interview with Reid focused on intersections between unionization and the campaigns for racial justice at the museum that she had helped lead. She explained that worker empowerment had a direct impact on programming as well. Reid pointed out that on the “Irish Outsiders” tour, which looks at the Moores, an Irish immigrant family that lived in 97 Orchard Street in the 1860s, management had questioned whether educators ought to bring up topics such as slavery and the Civil War Draft Riots as central frameworks for understanding this family’s history. This was despite the fact, Reid noted, “We have this city directory that we use with Joseph Moore and in it and there’s a Black Joseph Moore who’s listed as ‘colored.’ We can’t just show that record and not talk about that history and how whiteness was constructed with blackness.” As Reid added, “There are a lot of interactions with predominantly Black and brown students from New York City school groups who are coming to the museum, where educators are the ones doing this really creative restructuring of the tour. A lot of kids who came on my tour would ask, ‘Why does this matter to me?’”

When I was an educator at the Tenement Museum in the early 2000s, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s 1998 book, The Presence of the Past, dominated training sessions. Educators were instructed to internalize Rosenzweig and Thelen’s point that every person can find in the past the precedents to their own personal struggles and aspirations. A student whose family arrived in New York from the Dominican Republic in the late twentieth century, for instance, could be guided to hear echoes of their family’s plight in that of Italian and Jewish immigrants who landed a century earlier.

In graduate school, I was able to appreciate that Rosenzweig and Thelen’s argument was more complex. They specifically highlighted how white Americans were more likely to form individualized connections to the past, whereas Americans who identified as Black, Native American, Latinx, and Asian often interpreted history through a lens shaped by processes of collective racialization. As Reid observes, diverse, present-day visitors are best served when tours take on subjects like the Draft Riots—events that speak to collective rather than individual experiences—even if these events’ impact on the residents of the museum’s historic buildings went unrecorded.

I am excited to see what post-pandemic union contracts bring in respect to formalizing management’s recognition of educators’ collective role in providing a critical, intellectual experience. This is long overdue, and a crucial step toward acknowledging that the Tenement Museum works as well as it does because its labor force is simultaneously learning while teaching—and not simply because of decisions made in managerial suites.

~Andy Urban is an associate professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His current book project focuses on Seabrook Farms, a frozen-foods agribusiness that contracted incarcerated Japanese Americans, guestworkers from the Caribbean, and European Displaced Persons during the 1940s, and is also the subject of an online New Jersey Digital Highway exhibition.