Penn Museum workers, whose contract expired in June, have authorized a strike

On Wednesday evening, a horn section serenaded families at Penn Museum’s live music happy hour. Just beyond the gates, roughly three dozen front desk workers at Penn’s museums, libraries, and archives picketed, demanding higher pay and other benefits, as some passersby voiced their support.

The union workers are part of Philadelphia Cultural Workers United, which includes the unions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Penn Museum, the Please Touch Museum, and the Schuylkill Center. They are represented by AFSCME District Council 47.

Penn Museum workers unionized in 2021 and had their last contract with the Ivy League school ratified in 2023. It expired at the end of June.

Among other benefits listed in the last contract was an hourly wage of $17.

“The University of Pennsylvania is a wealthy Ivy League university, but Penn Museum Workers United members are working-class people,” reads a statement posted on DC 47’s social media last week.

At the end of fiscal year 2024, the endowment of the university, which funds the museum, was at $22.3 billion, representing a 7.1% return for the year.

“Like our AFSCME DC33 union siblings … we make an average salary of only $44-45k per year,” the post reads, referring to the municipal workers strike that ended in its eighth day on Tuesday.

“Penn’s current offer of annual raises? 1.5% and 2%, Is this some kind of joke, Penn?”

Last week, Philly CWU members at Penn Museum voted to authorize a strike.

“This strike authorization paves the way for Penn workers to join the 10,000 AFSCME33 workers currently on strike in Philadelphia … The working people of Philadelphia deserve more than the crumbs Mayor Parker and Penn are putting on the table,” reads another statement shared last week on social media.

On Tuesday, union members were back in contract negotiations with Penn management, who refused to “put more than 2.5% raises on the table,” a union statement read.

Bargaining unit chief Halcyone Schiller called Penn’s proposals for a new deal “unserious” thus far.

“We’ve had very unproductive sessions where we sit together for six hours and actually speak face-to-face for, like, 15 minutes,” Schiller, a conservationist at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, said.

The impasse could run long enough to trigger a strike, Schiller said, without specifying a timeline.

At the time of publication, repeated calls and emails to Penn’s communications office went unanswered.

“It’s fair, you know, to protest for fair wages,” said Emile Gunkel, who was attending the summer concert at the museum on Wednesday. He didn’t want to disrespect the workers by buying a ticket.

The Penn Museum demonstrations come on the heels of the DC 33 weeklong strike that disrupted residential trash pickup and prompted headliners LL Cool J and Jazmine Sullivan to drop out of the Wawa Welcome America Fourth of July concert in solidarity.

World Cafe Live front-of-house and food service employees and production staff have also moved to unionize as they strike over what they call “unfair treatment” by the management team of new CEO Joseph Callahan.