A Growing Wave of Labor Rights and Union Drives on International Museum Day

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It’s International Museum Day. As mask mandates continue to be lifted across the country, museums and galleries are grappling with how to reopen safely but also how to harness a movement that predated the pandemic: efforts to unionize the art world.

Gains are being made. Almost 200 workers at the Whitney Museum moved to form a union this week, supporting the filing of a petition to vote with the National Labor Relations Board. Seventy workers at Maine’s Portland Museum of Art voted to form a union. And workers at the New Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, moved to unionize in recent years.

But familiar challenges are faced in settings notoriously fraught with interlocking injustices and institutional interests. If you’re among the museum and gallery workers finding ways to advance labor rights during the pandemic, drop a line to recharge@motherjones.com. Let us know what you’re experiencing, how and if you’re able to recharge, and if you want anonymity in sharing your stories.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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