Portside

Workers at the Denver Art Museum (DAM) last week voted 120 to 59 in favor of unionizing under the auspices of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Cultural Workers United Council 18. The vote came less than two months after the employees announced their intention to organize and resulted in the first art museum union in the state of Colorado. At the time of writing, the museum had not yet formally recognized the Denver Art Museum Workers United (DAMWU), but it had earlier said that it would “work within that system” should a union be established.

Of the 435 workers at the museum—299 full-time, the rest part-time or temporary—about 250, from across all departments, are eligible to join DAMWU. Among the issues members will seek to address in hammering out their first contract are “adequate staffing, career advancement, a fair disciplinary process and wages that account for experience, tenure and continuing inflation,” according to an AFSCME press release. Also subject to discussion at the bargaining table will be inadequate bereavement benefits, murkily defined job responsibilities, and a lack of employee parking.

The road to unionization, though comparatively short, was a rocky one, with AFSCME claiming to have filed more than a dozen unfair labor practice charges in the weeks following the announcement of the drive to organize, owing to what it characterized as “an intense anti-union campaign carried out by upper management,” according to local news platform Denverite. DAM spokesperson Andy Sinclair told the outlet, “We can assure you that the museum respects the legal right of employees to unionize and would not interfere with that right, or violate the law, in any way.” Sinclair further affirmed that the museum planned to respond to the filing and to perform any subsequent actions required by the National Labor Relations Board.