Unionised staff at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) are engaged in an ongoing dispute with museum administrators regarding longevity pay, despite having agreed to a contract that ended an unprecedented 19-day strike back in October 2022. The present disagreement concerns the part of that contract that covers length-of-service pay increases; each side has a different interpretation of the wording.
“PMA management continues to refuse to implement a key agreement that ended our historic strike and are withholding longevity pay contractually guaranteed to staff,” says Amanda Bock, an assistant curator at the museum and vice-president of the AFSCME Local 397 PMA union. “This excludes a large number of employees from receiving pay increases for their years of service, among them those with the longest tenures at the museum—pay increases our members are depending on after years or sometimes decades of stagnant wages.”
According to the union’s contract, employees who work 25 or more hours per week are entitled to longevity rises of $500 for each five-year increment of employment, effective from 1 July 2023. Individuals who work less than 25 hours are eligible for $250 rises along the same model. For example, a full-time employee who has worked at the museum for a decade would receive a $1,000 rise on their tenth anniversary, an employee of 15 years would earn a $1,500 rise on their 15th anniversary.
In 2022, the contract was ratified, with 99% of union members voting in favour. Former union president and museum educator Adam Rizzo, who left the museum last year, tells The Art Newspaper that in July of 2023 he met with the museum’s director Sasha Suda, and Al Suh, who at the time was acting general counsel for the museum, about the longevity pay issue. According to Rizzo, Suda “started the meeting by confronting me with printouts of my pro-union tweets”. He adds: “They wouldn’t even explain to me how they planned to implement the longevity clause.”
In an email statement to The Art Newspaper, a spokesperson for the museum claims the terms the union is demanding are not in the contract that was approved.
“Longevity pay terms were estab-lished during the collective bargaining negotiations, where both negotiating teams reached agreement on specific contractual language,” the spokesperson writes. “The museum began implementing the longevity terms on 1 July 2023… The union’s current claim references different longevity language proposed early in negotiations but not finalised or ratified as a part of the collective bargaining agreement. That language was removed, and not reintroduced when finalising negotiations.”
The museum spokesperson adds: “The contract contains an agreed-upon grievance process for resolving such issues. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has been following this process and will continue to work with Local 397 to resolve this issue.”
