Butting heads: Tacoma Art Museum board and workers differ on who’s eligible to join union
Tensions between Tacoma Art Museum’s board and its employees heated up Friday after the board announced progress in negotiations with an employee union.
That union called the announcement misleading.
In a public statement Friday, the museum’s board said it, “... approved a proposal to voluntarily recognize TAM Workers United (TAMWU) through a private arbitrated election process.” The proposal, a spokesperson for TAM said, came from union leaders.
TAMWU called Thursday’s action disappointing.
Until now, the board has refused to voluntarily recognize the union stating that it was ill-timed due to executive level and curatorial staff vacancies and other issues. In May, TAM announced the hiring of Andrew Maus to become its new executive director.
But TAMWU says the board’s action and public statement released Friday was itself ill-timed.
“Their vote is not an approval of our proposal for voluntary recognition of a wall-to-wall union and we cannot agree this is a positive step forward,” TAMWU responded in a statement to The News Tribune late Friday.
In its statement Friday morning, TAM said the board accepted almost all of the employees which TAMWU proposed to be included in the bargaining unit. It rejected the inclusion of two security control room operators.
“Board members believe the two highly trained security control room operators are essential to allow the museum to remain open and protect museum assets in the event of labor unrest,” TAM said in the statement.
“Cutting our colleagues in Security out of our union is blatant union busting and a denial of our right to unionize together,” TAMWU said. “Their decision to make their statement public without first conferring with us shows a concerning lack of good faith in the process.”
Thursday’s vote was done without alerting employees, said Gillian Fulford, a spokesperson with Washington Federation of State Employees.
“TAMWU has been vocal about wanting a wall-to-wall union that recognizes all workers at TAM, not just workers the board deems eligible,” Fulford said.
This story was originally published June 24, 2023 at 8:44 AM.
