"We Are Workers in a Workplace Who Have Rights": Unionization, COVID-19, and the Place of Labor at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum

In April 2019, workers at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum voted seventy-two to three to join United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2110, a union representing employees at arts, cultural, and educational institutions in New York City. Following the union's recognition, a collective bargaining committee representing eighty-nine union-eligible workers was formed and in August 2019 began contract negotiations with representatives of the Tenement Museum's senior management and legal counsel. Negotiations proceeded slowly, with both workers and management easing into the new dynamic, but the overall mood was optimistic.

On Friday, March 13, 2020, the situation changed suddenly. In response to the COVID-19 outbreak in New York City, the Tenement Museum closed its historic buildings to visitors and suspended all in-person programming. The first weekend it was closed, the museum laid off thirteen full-time employees and furloughed seventy part-time and thirty full-time employees without pay. On July 22, the museum announced that an additional seventy-six workers, previously furloughed, would now be laid off as well. During the late spring and summer, bargaining ground to a near halt. Union members interpreted management's decision to put off negotiations and its refusal to establish a rehiring plan for workers who had been let go as delaying tactics that were part of a larger strategy aimed at nullifying the union's recognition. In response, on July 24, 2020, union members and UAW Local 2110 filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), charging the Tenement Museum with exploiting COVID-19 to engage in unfair labor practices and for failing to "bargain in good faith with our union for our right to return to our positions when they are restored."¹ Union members focused on setting up a mutual aid fund, which raised just shy of $35,000, with most of the disbursed money going to laid-off workers finding it difficult to make rent.² The mutual aid fund also served as a rebuke to management's priorities. As workers noted, when management began its own aggressive and well-publicized campaign to "help the Tenement Museum survive," its appeals for donations made no mention of the plight of furloughed and laid off workers struggling to stay afloat.

After the July 2020 layoffs, the union's bargaining unit was reduced to only twelve members. In August, when I conducted my interviews, there was real anxiety that the union was going to be busted. Then, in December 2020, the union announced that a contract had been reached.

The details of that contract, and how it came to be, have not been made public. The Tenement Museum appointed Annie Polland as its new president in December, which may have been one key factor in its success.³ The four interviewees whom I spoke with over the summer were not involved in the final stages of bargaining since they had been laid off, or, in Jackie Wait's case, had left on her own volition, and therefore no longer felt qualified to discuss museum or union issues. Maida Rosenstein, the president of UAW Local 2110, and Megan Grann from the local, whom I was also referred to, ignored multiple emails I sent to them asking for comment. Even though it is standard practice for labor unions to post collective bargaining agreements online, and UAW Local 2110 has done this with the other workplaces it represents, the Tenement Museum has been omitted.⁴ When I finally did hear back from an email account affiliated with the Tenement Museum union, the message I received stated that the union was "scaling back our activity in preparation for another round of negotiations beginning this autumn," and that members of the union were no longer available to talk. Signed as the "Bargaining Committee," the email also contained a prepared statement noting:

The Tenement Museum Union is pleased to announce that after a 16-month bargaining process we have obtained a...