PHILADELPHIA – Members of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Union and management at the famed cultural institution have settled a contract dispute over awarding veteran employees longevity pay.
Philly Cultural Workers United said in an Instagram post about the PMAU win, “Every member owed longevity pay will receive bonuses equivalent to the amount they are owed, issued as two timely payments in May and July of 2024.” (Read our previous coverage of the dispute here).
The settlement is yet another victory for PMAU, who first won their contract after going on strike for nearly three weeks in 2022. Since then, the longevity pay issue has stood out as the most prominent example of management obstructionism.
As per the contract, employees should receive longevity pay every five years, up to 20 years of service. The problem arose when management said it would issue longevity payments only to workers whose five-year anniversaries fall during the years when the contract is in effect. This would have meant that employees with decades of experience would have been denied longevity pay just because their work anniversaries failed to line up with the contract years.
PMAU members snapped into action when this issue arose back in June of 2023. The union immediately filed a class action grievance against the museum. When they received no response from management, they followed it up with months of actions, including a petition to museum CEO Sasha Suda last summer and an action at an all-staff meeting this spring where workers confronted museum executives with yellow signs reading “Pay Up PMA.”
Ultimately, their activism paid off and this May, the museum relented and agreed to pay bonuses of $500 for each of the five-year-increment anniversaries workers completed by July 1, 2023 and July 1, 2024.
Halcyone Schiller, president of AFSCME Local 397, said this was a win for collective action. “This is something the membership has fought really hard for,” she said. “It’s definitely been a large effort on everybody’s part.”
Now, PMAU looks towards continuing to defend their members and contract through representation and will prepare for contract negotiations next year when their first contract expires.
PMAU is a part of AFSCME Cultural Workers United, a national movement of cultural workers at libraries, museums and zoos joining together to negotiate for better pay, working conditions, demand equity and fight for transparency in our workplaces. AFSCME represents more cultural workers than any other union, including 10,000 museum workers at 91 cultural institutions in the public and private sectors, and more than 25,000 library workers at 275 public and private libraries.