Unionised employees on the Philadelphia Museum of Artwork (PMA) are engaged in an ongoing dispute with museum directors concerning longevity pay, regardless of having agreed to a contract that ended an unprecedented 19-day strike again in October 2022. The current disagreement issues the a part of that contract that covers length-of-service pay will increase; both sides has a special interpretation of the wording.
“PMA administration continues to refuse to implement a key settlement that ended our historic strike and are withholding longevity pay contractually assured to employees,” says Amanda Bock, an assistant curator on the museum and vice-president of the AFSCME Native 397 PMA union. “This excludes a lot of staff from receiving pay will increase for his or her years of service, amongst them these with the longest tenures on the museum—pay will increase our members are relying on after years or generally many years of stagnant wages.”
In line with the union’s contract, staff who work 25 or extra hours per week are entitled to longevity rises of $500 for every five-year increment of employment, efficient from 1 July 2023. People who work lower than 25 hours are eligible for $250 rises alongside the identical mannequin. For instance, a full-time worker who has labored on the museum for a decade would obtain a $1,000 rise on their tenth anniversary, an worker of 15 years would earn a $1,500 rise on their fifteenth 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 final yr, tells The Artwork Newspaper that in July of 2023 he met with the museum’s director Sasha Suda, and Al Suh, who on the time was performing common counsel for the museum, concerning the longevity pay situation. In line with Rizzo, Suda “began the assembly by confronting me with printouts of my pro-union tweets”. He provides: “They wouldn’t even clarify to me how they deliberate to implement the longevity clause.”
In an e mail assertion to The Artwork Newspaper, a spokesperson for the museum claims the phrases the union is demanding will not be within the contract that was accredited.
“Longevity pay phrases had been estab-lished in the course of the collective bargaining negotiations, the place each negotiating groups reached settlement on particular contractual language,” the spokesperson writes. “The museum started implementing the longevity phrases on 1 July 2023… The union’s present declare references totally different longevity language proposed early in negotiations however not finalised or ratified as part of the collective bargaining settlement. That language was eliminated, and never reintroduced when finalising negotiations.”
The museum spokesperson provides: “The contract accommodates an agreed-upon grievance course of for resolving such points. The Philadelphia Museum of Artwork has been following this course of and can proceed to work with Native 397 to resolve this situation.”
