“But the pay was horrible:” Advancing equity in the museum and the fight for a living wage

This paper analyzes how contemporary art museum workers in the U.S. are advancing intersectional social justice through their labor organizing and demands for a living wage. The mixed-methods study uses social reproduction theory to situate museum work as exploited labor and to examine how this contemporary unionization wave is fighting for a reconfigured museum field that is simultaneously pro-worker, anti-racist, and feminist. The analysis focuses on considerations of pay equity, as a site of convergence for the movement’s transformational aims and material achievements.