[From the New School to museums and book publishers, we’re
witnessing the black-turtleneck-worker uprising. ]
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THE CULTURE WORKERS GO ON STRIKE  
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Alissa Quart
November 29, 2022
The New Republic
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_ From the New School to museums and book publishers, we’re
witnessing the black-turtleneck-worker uprising. _

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images Part-time faculty members,
accompanied by students, walk a picket line during a strike at the New
School in New York City after union contract negotiations failed to
increase adjunct pay. , Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images

 

Earlier this month, I spent a morning with Rachel Urkowitz on the
picket lines in front of Parsons School of Design and the New School,
which is part of the latter. Rachel is my closest friend, an artist
who has taught at Parsons for nearly 20 years, instructing a
generation of students about color, light, and the history of visual
culture. At all the schools under the New School umbrella, 87 percent
of instructional staff
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are adjuncts like Rachel. Yet although they make up the vast majority
of professors, the pay gap between them and, say, administrators is
enormous: The adjuncts’ salaries comprise only 8.5 percent
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of the overall budget, with some instructors saying that they make
only $4,000
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per class. It is impossible to live on such low salaries, especially
in places with high housing costs such as New York City.

The mood on the lines was aggrieved but also joyous with burgeoning
solidarity. One adjunct tap danced; another blew a shofar; a third had
a union sign pinned to their baby’s pram. “Where’s Our Social
Justice,” a sign read, perhaps referring to a director of brand
strategy for the college who told a student reporter
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that “social justice plays a role in the New School’s
branding”—or more elliptically to the fact that the college was
founded [[link removed]] over 100 years ago
by progressive intellectuals. Tenured professors came to show support,
while truck and ambulette drivers honked in appreciation as they
passed. It was, for a moment, a version of New York City where those
who show students how to write and those who drive groceries
cross-country see common cause, their struggles creating mutual
recognition, a kind of democratic kismet.

This season culture workers are organizing against their own
exploitation. Professors of art, workers at museums, and assistants at
a publishing house have all gone on strike or staged public protests
during contract negotiations. Call this a black-turtleneck-worker
uprising rather than a white-collar one. “Wages are stagnant and we
earn far lower salaries than our peers elsewhere,” the union
representing employees at the Brooklyn Museum recently tweeted
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They’ve been busy protesting
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outside their work site. During one action, workers held up signs
decrying the vacuity of the VIP opening for the museum’s haute
couture fashion exhibit: One read, “You can’t eat prestige
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(The union is calling
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for a 7 percent salary increase this year and raises of 4 percent per
year for each of the two years following.) Unions are currently on
strike at the publisher HarperCollins
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and at the University of California system
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where 48,000 academic workers are sitting out their underpaid teaching
gigs.

In Beacon, New York, and other sites around the country, the staff at
the Dia Art Foundation
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have voted to form a union. Ohio museum workers
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known as Columbus Museum of Art Workers United, recently voted nearly
unanimously in favor of unionizing with Afscme Ohio Council 8
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urged their CEO
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to recognize their union, and in Philadelphia, after a 19-day strike,
museum workers were recently able
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to get their employer to agree to wage increases totaling 14 percent
across the life of the contract until July 2025. It’s such a
phenomenon that cultural strikes have even led to that ultimate
proof-of-trend, their own podcast
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These uprisings reveal just how much brain work has become gig work.
According to the advocacy group the New Faculty Majority
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percent of college faculty work outside tenure-track positions. While
that leaves their careers far more tenuous than in previous
generations, it does carry one positive side effect: Working for
multiple institutions to survive means workers cross-pollinate more
than they used to. Interacting with other cultural and academic
institutions means that they share their new intelligence about
employment and contracts with their brethren and unionization thus
catches on more rapidly.

This group is part of what I have called Middle Precariat
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or the precarious middle class. It’s a group I got to know well
while working on my last book, _Squeezed_
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I focused on adjuncts who lived on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance
Program support and schoolteachers whose salaries were so low in
expensive cities that they had to moonlight as Uber drivers,
literalizing “the Uberification” of education. I argued that we
need to see
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these workers in a continuum with other contingent workers
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Part of why this reckoning is happening now is that inflation has made
their already challenging livelihoods even more impossible to subsist
on. The Great Resignation and the unionization in other sectors have
also helped spur on these actions. They were inspired by new
organizing and unionization drives, like those at Starbucks
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or REI
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companies that had a progressive lacquer that didn’t always match
their work conditions (much like the New School). Several of these
striking culture workers also pointed to how they were now too a part
of a gig-based economy, much like Amazon workers
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subsisting in underpaid but also fractured workplaces. Lee-Sean Huang,
a part-time assistant professor at Parsons, who is now also
representing the part-time faculty at the New School, said that before
the strike, he was so caught up in teaching and various other work
that it was hard to see the bigger picture of the institution. Another
Parsons adjunct, Molly Ragan, had, before the strike, felt isolated
while teaching and that her work as contingent faculty took place in
“silos that were built by design, to keep us from sharing our
frustrations but also our joys.”

Ragan, 28, teaches two classes a semester, earning roughly $10,000.
The inadequacy of this pay is why she also works full time for the
United Auto Workers [[link removed]], the
union that now houses the professors’ union, as well as those of the
Brooklyn Museum workers and the striking editorial assistants in
midtown. Ragan for one feels newly connected not only to her
colleagues but to what she describes as “the beautiful world of
organizing.” In the past, some of these culture workers weren’t
particularly aware of how unions functioned. This isn’t entirely
surprising, as individualism was often baked into museums and
academia, fields where participants were encouraged to venerate
singular creation. But some of these _auteurist_ fixations are also
dissipating.

The culture strikes also point not just to new waves in labor rights
but equity successes _within_ arts institutions. Having achieved some
level of diversity means that there are now art workers who are not
heirs and there are a growing number of them. According to the Bureau
of Labor Statistics
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there were 33,600 such jobs in 2021 and these jobs are estimated to
grow at 12 percent between 2021 and 2031, a faster pace than jobs
overall.

In addition, some of these workers are now attending workshops about
equity yet still can’t pay for their rent, and the hypocrisy is hard
to miss, as Laura Raicovich, former director of the Queens Museum and
author of the book _Culture Strike
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explains to me. The lip service toward social justice inevitably
provokes a question: If these academic and cultural institutions
can’t pay their workers fairly, how can they claim to be inclusive
in their marketing literature? The gap in pay between CEOs and regular
workers has grown dramatically: That is true in the academy and
museums as well. But this rise in income inequality has been
accompanied by recognitions—rhetorically, personally, and
politically—of the _problems_ of inequity.

Ragan believes that this awareness has only intensified over the last
few years. “There’s a whole new class of precarious workers out
there who’ve been radicalized throughout the pandemic,” Ragan
said. “We’re using those containers—structures that already
exist, like the UAW, to help us finally build strong unions.”

The culture worker strikes also betoken something of a return to an
earlier time of unionism. While some conservative politicians bemoan
such a revisitation of 1970s America—as Aaron Timms put it
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“nostophobia”—the cultural and academic workers would seem to
benefit from disruptions of business, including the formation of new
unions and strikes by existing ones.

By the end of last week, bargaining was stalling and the adjuncts I
spoke with didn’t have high hopes for a satisfying resolution. On
Monday, the New School union put out a press release vowing to
continue the strike for a second week through the Thanksgiving
holiday. “The New School’s reputation rests on its progressive
history and professed values,” the union said in the release. “Its
treatment of the faculty fails to meet those values.”

“The final deal will be some kind of compromise,” Huang mused to
me, suggesting that any agreement will be one that both sides will not
be fully at peace with. But for him and others, there was a
realization that striking itself was not separate from teaching but
rather “a continuation of being an educator, only this time the
lesson is about organized labor.”

Alissa Quart [[link removed]] @lisquart
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Alissa Quart is the author of five books of nonfiction, including
_Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America._ She is the
executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the
co-producer of the radio show and podcast _Going for Broke_ from PRX,
which explores American labor.

* New Unions; Culture Workers Organizing; Adjunct Organizing;
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