ACWA MAKES
A SPLASH
The brand-new Art & Cultural Workers Alliance (ACWA) looks to coordinate labor organizing at Seattle’s museums, cultural institutions, and beyond.
WRITTEN BY ADAM WILLEMS
ILLUSTRATION BY MERON MENGHISTAB
[FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16] Spanning sectors, union members across the Seattle area have secured major wins over the past few months: hotel workers, teachers, aerospace engineers, and others. Agitating for better conditions and compensation, many cultural workers in the city have recently unionized, too, such as Neumos’s security team earlier this summer, and a subset of staff at the Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI) just last week.
MOHAI and Neumos staff join a growing cadre of unionized workers across Seattle’s museums and cultural institutions. Local organizing in such workplaces is fairly new; to sketch a very rough timeline, it started, arguably, when security staff at the Frye Art Museum formed a union in 2019. According to Josh Davis, a security guard and organizer with the labor union representing Seattle Art Museum’s guards, 65 percent of worker unionizing at nonprofit art museums has happened after 2019, representing a near-tripling over pre-2019 activity.
Now, workers have another tool at their disposal: the Art & Cultural Workers Alliance (ACWA), an umbrella group aiming to bolster coordination efforts among existing unions, assist with nascent organizing work, connect to other social movements, and more.
“It’s important for labor unions and their members in general to get involved in political fights that stretch beyond the limits of the workplace,” Davis said. “Many of the issues our unions call attention to are not unique to our industry, and so growing the ability for workers in our sector to mobilize and organize in concert with other struggles and grassroots organizations who are fighting for change is a concrete contribution we can make to growing a strong progressive movement.”
But cultural workers also face unique challenges, and are attuned to the social impacts of their employers’ programming, staffing, and long-term strategic choices.
“We think the upheaval we're living through has exposed more fully the disconnect between the stated values of our institutions and their actions,” said Suzann Vaughn, a security guard and member of the Art Workers Union at the Frye. “We recognize the substantial cultural power our institutions wield and we don't want to see it squandered.”
ACWA is very new — like, its Instagram account has one post (so far). But its organizers have been working behind the scenes building a coalition, and ACWA’s now ready to make a splash this evening with a fundraiser movie screening of 9 to 5 (the iconic comedy featuring Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton, and Lily Tomlin), with proceeds supporting the Neumos Security Union.
To get a sense of ACWA’s intentions as it gets the ball rolling, CHUM News interviewed Ari Laurel, a writer by trade and an organizer for ACWA. Laurel shared more about ACWA’s origins and goals; the uneasy relationship between nonprofit funding structures and civically minded cultural production; and ACWA’s flexible roadmap as more people and groups come into the fold.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
CHUM News: We’re interested in understanding how this work has come about and what the intentions are behind it. We’d also love to hear how you see ACWA fit with the cultural sector in Seattle, and the labor movement writ large.
ARI LAUREL: There was a slew of unionization efforts among the arts and culture sector in the last few years, and over time we've been talking with a lot of arts and cultural workers. It's a pretty broad sector, but folks have been talking about how they wished that workers were more connected across the sector, and able to compare notes and build community. And so ACWA is trying to lay the foundation for that by working in coalition with nonprofits, nonprofit workers, arts workers, cultural workers, to build power across that sector from a workers’ perspective.
What is missing currently when it comes to that workers’ perspective, and the ability for that perspective to impact things like museums’ policies, let alone the larger institutional landscape?
I can't speak directly to something like museum policy since I'm not a museum worker, but a lot of discussions focus on how there is a pretty big inequality in the art sector, where the keys to legitimacy and funding are through major donors and grants. And in a lot of museums, for example, you’ll see some of the largest donors are, like, Microsoft. What does that tell you about what exhibitions can be chosen, and where there might be conflicts of interest? It doesn't feel like workers are really represented or have a say.
It sounds like the lack of worker participation in how a museum is structured, or how other cultural institutions are structured, impacts the kinds of stuff that gets presented to the public to some extent. Or do you feel like it’s more than that?
That's definitely part of it, but of course, a lot of workers are also fighting for bread-and-butter issues as well, like more equitable treatment and payment. For example, there was a picket for the Seattle Times’s workers very recently, and they mentioned that one in three Seattle Times writers has a second job. We all know the unequal landscape that we're all living in. So it's both representational or symbolic — What is the arts in Seattle and how is it reflected? — as well as, How do we treat our staff, many of whom are in the arts themselves?
“It's taken a lot of pushing to try to get bosses to have something like a safety procedure in case ICE enters the building.”
It's interesting: Journalism and a lot of art spaces — education, too — have this employer ethos of, You’re doing this culturally meaningful work, and that should somehow be a stand-in for material benefits.
There’s this term, “passion tax,” where nonprofit or arts and cultural workers are expected to sometimes take less-than-equitable treatment because they care so much about the work itself.
We've also heard from some workers that it's taken a lot of pushing to try to get their bosses to have something like a safety procedure in case ICE enters the building. So I also know that workers are organizing around social efforts on behalf of other employees who might be working there, or even patrons.
We are still quite new, and there are possibilities that we could change our orientation or shift and be flexible based on the needs in the sector and the needs of the workers. Being worker-led makes it very valuable that way.
What might that kind of shift entail?
We have a mission statement, and part of it talks about how we organize, create, belong, and build the knowledge and experience that we need to win. So, part of it is enabling existing labor work in the sector for folks who want to affiliate and provide resources and be able to mobilize. And I think part of it could be educational: There's a lot of information that can be discussed around contracts, bargaining, as well as things like media relations. We’ve also taught people how to research who’s on your board of directors, and how to do things like power map.
How are you sustaining this work?
It’s all volunteer-based at this point. We’re not getting funding or anything like that.
Second to last question: There’s this ancillary class of contingent and freelance workers who make up a lot of the cultural sector in Seattle. How do you situate them in relation to ACWA’s work?
There is a huge desire among the workers in ACWA to expand and reach out to other workers [who work in] not explicitly museums. That's just where we have started at this point. We take a very broad definition of what arts and culture is.
If readers want to get involved or want to follow ACWA, what does that look like?
For those who want to get in touch, they can email us at artandculturalworkersalliance@gmail.com.
ACWA’s fundraiser screening of 9 to 5 takes place tonight (Friday, October 16) at Seattle Liberation Center (606 Maynard Ave S) from 7pm to 9pm. Proceeds support the Neumos Security Union.
If you can’t make it to tonight’s screening but yearn to be a benefactor of local, arts-focused labor movements, the Seattle Art Museum’s Visitor Service Officers’ Union is hosting its third annual fundraiser on Friday, October 23 at Parnassus (1520 3rd Ave) from 6pm to 9pm.