Letter to Museum Director Timothy Rub

Mr. Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer

Philadelphia Museum of Art

P.O. Box 7646

Philadelphia, PA 19101-7646

May 22, 2020

Dear Mr. Rub,

We, the staff of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, are deeply committed to our museum and to our community. We, like you, believe it should be “Philadelphia’s art museum.” For this to be true, the museum must emerge from the COVID-19 crisis as a safe, accessible, and equitable institution. After nearly a year of organizing, we are notifying you today of our decision to unionize. With extremely strong support across the museum, we request your voluntary recognition of our union. 

We have collected signed authorization cards from a supermajority of union-eligible staff across all museum departments, well exceeding the 30% required to petition for a union election and the 50% required to win that election. We are prepared to demonstrate our supermajority support through a mutually agreed-to third party verification process. The new PMA Union will be affiliated with District Council 47 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME DC47), which represents workers at several Philadelphia cultural organizations, including the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Zoo, as well as about 6,000 other professional workers in the city’s public and private sectors.

By choosing to voluntarily recognize our union, you will demonstrate your commitment to prioritizing the safety of visitors and staff when the museum eventually reopens to the public. You will show that the financial impacts of the museum’s closure will not further entrench existing inequities in the museum sector. You will also honor your commitment to transparency in the wake of the multiple disclosures of manager wrongdoing earlier in 2020. No single act could do more to demonstrate good faith, repair past breaches of trust, and pave the way for a productive, collaborative partnership between PMA management and PMA staff.  

We are facing challenges that our institution has never faced before. We know that whatever the future holds, we will be better able to face it with an empowered workforce that can bring all our passion and creativity to bear in service to our community and collection. We are eager to take on these challenges in solidarity with one another and in cooperation with management, executive leadership, and the Board of Trustees. We are hopeful that you will see the value of moving forward together in partnership.

We expect that you will respect our unionization, as you have in working with the unions representing our security and part of our facilities staff. Unions have a long history of representing a broad range of workers both here in Philadelphia, and in art museums nationally. Voluntary recognition of staff unions has been granted recently at other cultural organizations, including the LA Museum of Contemporary Art and The Shed. In unionizing, we will be also following colleagues at the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New Children’s Museum of San Diego, and the Frye Art Museum, among many others. In affiliating with AFSCME, we will be joining the union representing the most museum and cultural organization workers in the country. AFSCME represents staff at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, American Museum of Natural History, Milwaukee Public Museum, LA Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Tolerance. 

We appreciate your consideration and await your prompt reply. We hope that your decision to recognize our union will allow us to move forward expeditiously and collaboratively into bargaining—and into a new, stronger, more resilient era of the museum.

Sincerely,

The Philadelphia Museum of Art Union

AFSCME District Council 47