Anatomies of Protraction
Ian Epps, co-founder, Art Handlers Alliance + Arts & Labor
If a museum acts in stewardship of culture and considers itself a value to the community, why are they hostile to the workers and the communities that surround them?
If the museum wants to survive it needs a reckoning.
Their past and future course are far from dissimilar and with the widening gap of inequity, their caustic assembly of board trustees will continue to instigate provocations from the broader public.
Expect it! We are in a new realm of criticality.
Decades long wars, war profiteering, environmental decimation, rising rents (domestically and internationally), and a record level refugee crisis. 89.3 million people forcibly displaced, and families destroyed by conflict. This is the frontier of profit for the rentier robber barons like the Rockefellers, Warren Kanders, Leon Black, Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis, Jerry Speyer, and the rest of the makeup of museum boards. We’ve been living under 40-50 years of record level productivity and stagnant wages. The worker is awakening.
And under these conditions, the worker needs to know as well, particularly the white worker, is that the current state of capitalism or neo-feudalism if you prefer, has reached farther on its course of violence, through slavery and systemic white supremacy and is now also displacing the white lower and middle classes. This was always true, but with the amount of privilege afforded you might not have felt its hand until now. Abolitionists and Civil Rights leaders have organized around these systems collectively for more than 200 years, calling for the unification and restoration of dignity through shared action.
“We are not free until all are free” - This is the foundation of abolitionist thought. And in that same necessary extant thought, if there is power in a UNION why has the UNION fallen short and not sought the inclusion of all workers? A UNION is only strong if it is listening to the fullness of workers’ grievances. If the most marginalized voices are not at the front of our demands, inevitably new stratas form within the pyramid of inequity, as a benefit to the siphon of labor capital.
We need wall-to-wall unions! To achieve an equitable museum this means engaging in conversation with Gallery Guides, Maintenance and Facilities workers, Visitor Services, temporary employees, Guards, Art Handlers and Registrars. Every single one of your coworkers are a part of the working class.
The construction of blackness isn’t an end game to capitalism. The stigmatization and isolation of the working poor, houseless and the middle class are also aligned within- These structures are used to eliminate or delegitimize groups within the scope of how capitalism serves. It reduces its attention in its preference for extraction. The proof is in statistics.
Since the 1990’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics has removed unemployed workers, unable to find employment over an extended period, from annual unemployment statistics. This practice has only escalated during the pandemic. The real unemployment average during the height of the American lockdown in April 2020 was 33%. These numbers were underreported as 14.7% because they didn’t report contract migrant farm labor. This reduction of figures would have pointed to a much greater system of exploitation by corporate leadership that utilizes immigrant and undocumented workers. It’s important to point this out, because migrant workers are independent contract workers, and many museum and gallery workers are also illegally classified as contract workers. By 2028, more than 50% of the workforce will be freelance contractors. This means your employer is attempting to remove themselves from any and all responsibilities in being an ethical employer. Employers don’t pay payroll taxes on independent contractor labor, only for W-2 waged employees, which means they are not paying workman’s compensation or unemployment insurance and subsequently these programs are being underfunded. The reduction of employees in preference for freelancers is also an attempt to delegitimize and devalue labor. This information is shared among employers as a means of ultra-high net worth class solidarity in tax avoidance. They leave you to foot the tax bill for them.
2/3rd’s of arts workers in NYC lost their jobs during the pandemic while mega galleries, board members and auction houses made record profits. The majority of those workers were freelancers.
In another example, the Partnership for New York City, an oppositional economic think tank (founded by David Rockefeller in 1979) comprised of 300 CEOs from the biggest corporations and investment firms in America, created a national pandemic narrative to their own benefit, that claimed 3.57 million people fled New York City and never came back. They created this deceptive data set to argue against tax increases for corporations and threatened that corporations would leave the state if higher taxes were imposed on them. State politicians proposed these higher tax rates due to the underfunding of NY state’s tax system. This became apparent when state and federal politicians realized freelance workers, considered “nonemployees” under state and federal labor policy, were excluded from unemployment benefits. The Federal CARES act made special emergency funding available through state unemployment systems as a temporary measure. The CARES act has now expired, and no amendments have been made nationwide to include freelancers in future unemployment policy. The NY Times and various other agencies have parroted the Partnership for NYC talking points over the past two years in countless articles with little regard to their truthfulness. This narrative is still being used and it is a lie. We knew as early as the fall of 2020 this was false, based on anonymized cell phone data collected by Unacast and reported by Reuters in December 2020.
“About 3.57 million people left New York City this year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7, according to Unacast, which analyzed anonymized cell phone location data. Some 3.5 million people earning lower average incomes moved into the city during that same period, the report showed.” … “The exodus isn’t as big as people have been talking about,” said Thomas Walle, chief executive, and co-founder of Unacast. “Maybe the greater impact is how the population is changing and how the demographics are changing.” … “The dual hit to population and income across the city can have lasting consequences for New York City as it recovers from the economic crisis caused by the pandemic, Walle said. “The big question is, ‘How does real estate and retail in particular adapt to that?’” he said. In the longer run, the changing demographics could lead to more affordable brands taking the place of higher-end stores, the researchers noted. At the same time, real estate developers may need to offer more lower-priced housing options, Walle said.”
Reuters, December 15, 2020 https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-economy-nyc/fleeing-new-yorkers-resulted-in-an-estimated-34-billion-in-lostincome-study-idUSKBN28P1Q8
The real data shows that when 3.57 million wealthier New Yorkers left NYC, 3.5 million lower income workers took advantage of dropping rental prices and moved in. This information was buried or completely ignored because it would have required us to have a real talk about the rising issues surrounding unaffordable rent and the rentier class. This falsified data was used again by Jerry Speyer and the rest of the Real Estate Board of NYC (REBNY) to argue that small “mom and pop” landlords were struggling with the rise of inflation and needed to increase rent stabilized rents. This was also a lie. 89% of units across New York in buildings registered with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development are owned by corporate landlords. This deception resulted in an increase of 3.25% for one-year leases and 5% for two-year leases. The largest increases in a decade. Henry R. Kravis was the former co-chair and is an executive member of the Partnership for NYC alongside Jerry Speyer (Tishman Speyer, REBNY, trustee of MoMA PS1 and MoMA). Henry is the spouse of Marie-Josée Kravis, chair of MoMA and vice-chair of the Hudson Institute, a conservative economic think tank founded by Herman Kahn. Marie-Josée Kravis is an emeritus board member of the Robin Hood Foundation, a NYC private anti-poverty charity, whose board members are primarily active in hedge funds. These very real exploitations contradict the philanthropies they establish to “eradicate poverty” and their fractional giving is meager compared to the violence of their profit. The museum trustees take more from you than they give back.
It is in your best interest to join your local tenant’s union!
As I write this on November 9, 2022, Christie’s has just held a record auction sale of a single estate collection. In the first evening of a 2-day auction of the Paul G. Allen Collection, Christie’s broke an auction record of $1.6 billion dollars. 100% of the 60 auction lots sold. The biggest art sale in history. NYC is home to more billionaires than any other city in the world. They sit on these museum boards and own sometimes 3,4,5 or 6 homes around the world. Let’s ask why they aren’t acknowledging the housing struggle they created and why museums don’t pay a living wage?
Let’s connect the dots from the past.
San Juan Hill -the birthplace of Bebop, the Charleston and home to jazz legend Thelonious Monk as well as Arturo Schomburg, founder of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
In the late 1950’s, 17,000 predominantly black and latin residents were displaced from this community through eminent domain by Robert Moses to build the Lincoln Center (funded by John Rockefeller), the Met Opera, the New York Philharmonic and Julliard School of Music. Robert Moses envisioned this plaza as a combatant to “white flight”.
The Lincoln Center recently commissioned work by jazz musician Etienne Charles for the reopening of what was once the Avery Fisher Hall and has now been renamed the David Geffen Hall. San Juan Hill: A New York Story opened on October 8, 2022.
What happened to San Juan Hill is considered one of the earliest examples of modern-day urban gentrification. 17,000 lives were altered forever.
The Lincoln Center wrote this on their website.
“San Juan Hill: A New York Story combines the past with the present, laying the foundation for our community to build a new future for Lincoln Center. In the leadup to the premiere, Charles, Lincoln Center, and the New York Philharmonic are partnering for a series of conversations and workshops that will explore the preservation and transformation of culture, gentrification, community activism, as well as resilience in resistance to adversity, in collaboration with Weeksville Heritage Center, National Jazz Museum in Harlem, and others.”
The Fisher family received $15 million dollars in 2014 for permission to remove their name. Those 17,000 residents might wonder where their compensation is. Should we believe the Lincoln Center is addressing their past if their board members are engaged in the same type of exploitations?
This behavior is not unique.
When the New Museum moved from their smaller location on Broadway in soho, they instigated a large-scale displacement of the most disadvantaged people in our communities living on the Bowery. The Bowery was home to many flophouses, a last resort for those who were destitute. The neighborhood was even home to artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. To honor the neighborhood and the past the New Museum held a cute show about the Bowery and those who used to live in the very place they dismantled.
Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery, 1969–1989, 2012 They even created a Bowery Artist Tribute website, out of respect. The website is no longer maintained and does not work. http://boweryartisttribute.org/
Seems fitting.
Thankfully the Bowery Mission is still serving the community.
In the New Museum’s pursuit of becoming a member of the bowery community, they’ve also managed to deepen rifts between their staff and leadership as well.
“The museum has had four chief financial officers in ten years and four exhibition directors in 12 years. One executive, Timothy Walker, sent his resignation letter to every printer in the building in an effort to make clear how he, and other staff members, had been treated. “I have been forced to take this action as a result of the hostile work environment and culture of abusive behavior that pervades the museum, the lack of resources and authority provided to meet established goals,” Mr. Walker, who moved from Miami to become the director of development, wrote in 2016. “The situation I have described to you is intolerable.”Many former employees say they would have been happy to build careers there, had the conditions been different.”
The New Museum Is World Class, but Many Find It a Tough Place to Work, October 5, 2020, NY Times
Due to onerous and unsafe work conditions and exhibition timelines the New Museum workers unionized in January 2019, though not fully. It’s a feat of collective action to be proud of, but we all still have a long way to go. The contract covers the rights of workers employed as Art Handlers, Registrars, Teaching Artists, non-exempt Visitor Services and Bookstore employees. There is no mention of the security guards or maintenance/facilities workers or the numerous misclassified freelance art handlers. I do hope they will be included in future discussions surrounding workplace conditions and pay equity.
Museums can get even more violent than this if you let them.
In order to position themselves close to individuals of ultra-high net worth, the Guggenheim Museum leadership have continued a satellite expansion of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi under gross human rights abuses. In 2011 over 1,800 international artists demanded an end to the construction of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and Louvre Abu Dhabi citing abuse of foreign construction workers. In 2013, The Observer reported these conditions amounted to “modern day slavery.” In 2022, these conditions continue to be extremely dire. Foreign workers are housed in substandard labor camps, they have had their passports confiscated from them, their wages withheld for more than a year, they endure extremely dangerous working conditions under sweltering heat and even result in death or suicide. As many as 10,000 migrant workers from south and south-east Asian countries die every year in the United Arab Emirates due to these human rights abuses. The museum claims to have fixed these issues, they hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to audit construction, but Human Rights Watch documents that these conditions still exist.
The museum opens in 2025.
Gulf Labor action at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, March 29, 2014. Image courtesy Global Ultra Luxury Faction/Gulf Labor. [A photo looking down from the top of the Guggenheim Museum’s atrium,showing people crowded around an unfurling banner.]
If we pretend that board members are generous philanthropists, why is it that most artists aren’t even paid for their participation in museum exhibitions? Is it in fact a museum? What has it done for you lately?
Hans Haacke
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 1974
Courtesy MoMA collection
Credit: Partial gift of the Daled Collection and partial purchase through the generosity of Maja Oeri and Hans Bodenmann, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, Agnes Gund, Marlene Hess and James D. Zirin, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, and Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley
And since the boardroom and leadership pretend we are not talking to them, here are a set of resources to help you understand your rights as a worker and utilize them to your advantage for the collective good.
NYC Salary Transparency Law – Starting November 1, 2022, employers with four or more employees or one or more domestic workers are now required to list the minimum and maximum pay range on all job listings. This legislation was passed to narrow the pay equity gap. - https://www.nyc.gov/site/cchr/media/pay-transparency.page
NYS Salary History Ban - As of January 6, 2020, Labor Law Section 194-a prohibits an employer from asking about your salary history. This includes current employees. This however does not protect an independent contractor/freelancer. https://www.ny.gov/salary-history-ban/salary-history-ban-what-you-need-know
Right to discuss wages - It is Illegal for your employer to bar you from discussing your pay with co workers, as per the National Labor Relations Board. This is a fineable offense - https://www.nlrb.gov/ about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-rights/your-rights-to-discuss-wages
Organize your workplace. When two or more employees convene to discuss better work conditions and pay, their employer cannot retaliate. These protections are afforded under the National Labor Rela tions Act as written by the NLRB - https://aflcio.org/formaunion/rights-unionize
If you are organizing, make sure to build a good mutual aid network. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lucy-e-parsons-the-principles-of-anarchism.pdf
Freelance Misclassification ABC Test. Freelancers are considered “non-employees” under federal and state labor law. Even though this is true, you may have been intentionally misclassified by your employer. If you are told when to show up (A), given the tools to perform the job (B) and told what to do (C) you are an employee. Non-employees cannot receive protections from unsafe work conditions under the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). If you are injured or would like to re port unsafe work conditions and believe you are misclassified, you may still receive workman’s comp or unemployment benefits. Report this to NYS Department of Labor.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/flsa/misclassification
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTUkKFYBdrU
NY State guidance- https://dol.ny.gov/independent-contractors
Labor audits – If you feel you are a misclassified worker and you are laid off, you should first contact the Dept. of Labor to report your misclassification and then file for unemployment. Since Non-employ ees are ineligible for unemployment benefits, this process will initiate a department of labor audit of the museum and institution you are working for.
Join a tenants’ union. Organize with your neighbors. If you’re not sure where to start, start here - www.metcouncilonhousing.org/
Freelance Isn’t Free Act. The NYC Freelance isn’t Free Act is partly a resource for sample contracts and a set of laws. Your employer is required to pay you within 30 days of all labor performed. If they do not pay on time, you can file a complaint with the Office of Labor Policy and Standards. They will initiate legal pro ceedings on your behalf, free of charge. - https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/about/freelance-isnt-free-act. page
Take the time to lookup museum tax filings. If you are organizing your workplace or have been told that giving you a raise is impossible right now, you can look up your museum’s tax records through Guidestar and get a better sense of the lie. - https://www.guidestar.org/
Help to make your workplace resemble the communities we live in. If you are aware of a job listing, tell your friends who are not white. Museums and institutions are made up of people from our communities and they have done a completely inadequate job in acknowledging what their communities look like and in that same respect how their hiring practices need to change. A diverse workplace is a start in active acknowledgement that we need to create a more equitable society. In doing our part, Art Handlers Alliance worked in cohort with activists and advocacy groups to draft a set of labor equity demands for the City of NY through the People’s Cultural Plan. In this document we called for the city to defund any and all museums if they do not meet equitable hiring practices and are located on city owned land. The Department of Cultural Affairs enacted this policy in November 2021. We will continue to see how and when this is implemented. https://www.peoplesculturalplan.org/
