The Museum of Contemporary Art has agreed to voluntarily recognize its staffers’ union, the museum and the union said Friday.
The new bargaining unit will include about 100 staff members, including curatorial and collections workers, tour guides and building operations, front desk and retail staffers, all of whom are represented by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31.
The MCA union is the newest feather in the cap for AFSCME, which since 2022 has unionized workers at the Art Institute and its affiliated school, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Field Museum, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Lincoln Park and the Newberry Library, a research library on the Near North Side. Non-tenure-track faculty members at the School of the Art Institute have also unionized with AFSCME. Art Institute staffers ratified their first contract in August.
The MCA is the first Chicago museum to offer voluntary recognition to its staff union with AFSCME Council 31, said Anders Lindall, spokesperson for the union.
The museum staff filed a petition for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board and also requested voluntary recognition from museum management, which workers can do when a majority of eligible staffers have signed union cards. In a joint statement March 22, the museum and the union said a neutral third party would verify the signed cards, after which the museum would recognize the union.
Lindall said the third party had verified the signed union cards Friday. Museum spokesperson Abraham Ritchie confirmed the MCA was satisfied the card check process showed majority support for the union and said it would formally recognize the union once the results were certified by the NLRB.
“We respect our employees’ right to organize, and we are encouraged by the collaboration and coordination throughout this process. We look forward to ongoing collaboration with both AFSCME and our MCA employees,” the museum said in a statement.
Lindall said AFSCME submitted 75 union cards, with the neutral third party verifying 61 of them. The union believes the other 14 cards were valid but did not pursue their verification because they would not affect the results, Lindall said.
“Soon we will begin to prepare for bargaining, with employees electing their coworkers to a bargaining committee, filling out a bargaining survey that sets their priorities at the table, and sitting down with management to begin work toward a first contract,” Lindall said.
MCA workers went public with their union campaign in February. In an open letter signed by about a third of the union-eligible museum staff, workers said they were seeking wages that kept up with Chicago’s cost of living, layoff protections and guarantees around sick leave and paid time off.
“While we understand the challenges all museums face, measures to balance the budget while also aiming to return to pre-pandemic attendance numbers have caused a vicious cycle of staff burnout and turnover,” the open letter read. “We are overworked in a number of ways: through near-constant exhibition turnovers, hosting in-person programming on par with a pre-pandemic calendar, tight publication deadlines, and more.”
