Unions as vehicles of care, love, and solidarity

By Representatives of the MASS MoCA Union

CARE SYLLABUS is committed to creating space for the critical perspectives of our community members. In the post below, members of the MASS MOCA Union share about the contexts and caring practices that inform their organizing.

“The process of organizing, on the job and off it, is, after all, a process of connection. The first hesitant hello, the chat in the break room, the careful email from a non-work email address, are all ways of bridging the artificially created gaps between us to articulate a common interest, to gesture toward the power we can have together. A union is only meaningful if the workers in it believe and act like a union, if they are willing to take risks to have one another’s backs, if they believe in the oldest of labor maxims: ‘An injury to one is an injury all.’” 
- Sarah Jaffe, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone (2021)

The MASS MoCA Union is a collective of workers driven by love, care, and solidarity. In our mission statement, we declare our love for MASS MoCA and its legacy within the advocacy for “the creation of an equitable, ethical, and inclusive work environment.” Our relationships with one another make the union possible and will make MASS MoCA a stronger, healthier space.

Practices and demonstrations of care surfaced -- and continue to surface! -- in many ways throughout the organizing process. Concentric circles of care from within MASS MoCA and beyond have emerged as cultural workers have repeatedly shown up, taken risks, and stewarded our union to our successful election.

1) The innermost circle is us: the network of MASS MoCA staff members. 

A union doesn’t work if it’s only about getting people to vote yes. Rather, it’s about authentic relationships built through repeated interactions over time, as labor writer Sarah Jaffee explains above. Organizing conversations held over the course of Summer and Fall 2020 bridged traditional departmental silos in ways that no official work project has ever achieved. We came together through a shared purpose that rose above the traditional competitive dynamics at play in a budget-strapped non-profit and spoke to employees’ sense of dignity, purpose, and basic needs. Organizing has been a process of seeing one another as full people, not just as employees, and certainly not as replaceable or disposable. It flips the traditional employer-employee model on its head: instead of ‘What can you do for me (and how soon can you do it, and how under budget)?’ it’s ‘What can I do for you?’ and, even more radically, ‘What can we do together for and with one another?’

Many of our colleagues mentioned that organizing is what is making it possible to find hope and purpose in a workplace that had, after the COVID-19-related layoffs and subsequent rehirings, left us feeling discarded and disposable. Our years of contributions to the museum (for below-standard rates and above-standard hours) had been rendered meaningless in the face of financial uncertainty. Unionizing has given us faith in an organization in which staff and management work together on equal footing towards a common purpose, supporting the museum’s mission with the dignity and fulfillment that comes from living wages, job security, transparency and accountability, human-centered health benefits, and more.

2) Our next concentric circle of care comes from our Berkshires community. 

After more than a year of pandemic-induced isolation, it might have been expected that the social ties between MASS MoCA workers and our neighbors and colleagues had waned -- but the local reaction to our campaign has been vibrantly positive. The letters and selfies of support from our friends in the greater Berkshires have been a wellspring of hope and connection, strengthening the webs of interdependency that the COVID-19 crisis exposed. Public school teachers who have long had the support of their own unions reached out to offer congratulations and send collective letters of support. People who have been following the Change Berkshire Culture social media campaign, which had exposed some of the harsher realities of the working conditions at MASS MoCA, got in touch to say our union was what made them feel like they could continue their memberships. Colleagues at other cultural institutions in the Berkshires described their relief and excitement at hearing our news, adding that our effort, the first cultural organization to unionize in the county, had begun to change the environments and conversations around systemic burnout and COVID-19 fallouts in their own organizations.

3) The final* concentric circle points to the demonstrations of care from museum workers at large. 

During one of our first press interviews after we filed for our election on March 8, the reporter highlighted the symbolism of filing in the early spring, alongside the advent of vaccinations and the glimmer of a light at the end of the tunnel of this grueling pandemic. No more than 24 hours later, we received a letter of support from the reporter’s cousin, an organizer at the New Museum Union, another Local 2110 shop. This anecdote illustrates the humanity of workers: we are tied to one another, through bonds of family, professions, and friendship, and museum workers across the country are acting in support of these ties. Our fellow museum unions have offered their guidance and expertise during the early days of our own organizing, and then amplified our public efforts through social media. We hope to pay this kind of care and support forward, using our own newly gained organizing experience to help other efforts get off the ground. Museum Workers Speak, a grassroots activist organization that in the wake of the pandemic has raised over $100,000 in mutual aid to support museum workers who have been laid off or furloughed, puts it most succinctly: “It has become clear to us that when our institutions will not stand in solidarity with us, we must stand in solidarity with one another.” Our institutions have not practiced care throughout this year, but the workers within them have. Through unionization, mutual aid, cheering one another on, and amplifying calls for change, museum workers are building a new museum field, one that is based on solidarity, common purpose, and, most fundamentally, on care. 

*We look forward to the circles expanding!

Learn more about the MASS MoCA Union here.