Seattle Art Museum staff submitted their unionization letter on May 13, 2025. Over a hundred workers signed it. They cited unsustainable wages and subpar benefits. What the letter did not say — what no museum union letter ever says — is that those two things are the same mechanism that removes disabled workers before they get hired, or after six months, or after the first serious flare.
The museum talks about equity. The workers talk about wages. Nobody is talking about who is not in the building.
I worked a six-month contract at a municipal museum in 2019. The pay was listed as competitive. It was eighteen dollars an hour. No health insurance until month four. Sick leave accrued at half a day per month. I calculated it on the train ride home after the interview: if I got the flu in month two, I would come to work sick or lose the job. I took the job anyway because museum jobs do not come up often and you take them when they do.
Three months in, I needed a dentist. An infected molar. The museum health plan had a six-week waiting period after enrollment, which had just opened in month four. I went to a walk-in clinic, paid cash, got antibiotics. The tooth waited. I had a performance review in month five. My supervisor said I seemed less engaged recently. I said I was fine. The tooth was pulled in month seven, after the contract ended and I was back on my parent’s insurance. That same month, I finally wrote the wall text I’d been mentally drafting since the infection started — about medieval manuscripts and the marginalia where monks complained about their own tooth pain. The museum never saw it.
The union letter from Seattle asks for better healthcare. It does not say: without healthcare, disabled people do not stay. It does not say: eighteen dollars an hour is a filtration system. But it is.
Museum work pays low because museums have argued for a century that the work itself is the compensation. You get to be near art. You get to be part of something important. I know curators who sleep in their cars between their museum job and their retail shift. I know educators who ration their medications to make it to the next paycheck. We still apply for these jobs. The Tacoma Art Museum workers won union recognition in 2023 and successfully negotiated a contract. They were told in bargaining that the work itself was the reward. One manager said it in a staff meeting, recorded in meeting notes I obtained through a public records request: “We offer an experience most people would pay to have.”
That sentence separates people who can afford to work for experience from people who need to work for rent. We need more to survive — medical costs, transportation that accommodates, food that meets dietary needs, and rent in places with access all add up. None of that is optional. All of it costs.
When the wage is set below survival, the museum has pre-selected who can work there. Not by policy. By math.
The Seattle letter also asks for just-cause employment protections to replace at-will status. At-will employment means the employer can fire you anytime without explanation. Just-cause means they have to name what you did wrong. At-will employment is where ableism perfects its invisibility.
You ask for a schedule adjustment so you can attend physical therapy. Three weeks later, your contract is not renewed. No reason given. You miss a day because of a flare. Two months later, you are let go in a restructure. No connection stated. At-will means the museum never has to say the word disability. It just has to wait.
Just-cause does not fix that. But it does force the museum to write the reason down. And once it is written, it can be challenged. The lack of just-cause protections is not neutral, it is strategic. It protects the institution’s ability to remove people it does not want to accommodate without ever having to admit that is what it did.
The Seattle security guards who struck in 2024 won a contract. It included healthcare from day one and a significant wage increase. Security is contracted out. The guards are not museum employees. They are employed by a private security firm. That firm hired them. That firm bargained. That firm signed the contract.
The museum workers now organizing are direct employees. They work in curatorial, education, visitor services, collections. These are the jobs people mean when they say museum jobs. And these jobs pay worse than the security jobs. A security guard at SAM makes twenty-two dollars an hour after the new contract. A visitor services associate makes eighteen. The guard gets healthcare immediately. The associate waits ninety days.
That is not an accident. Museums keep two categories of worker. The ones they employ directly, who work for meaning. And the ones they contract, who work for wages. The people who clean the floors and guard the doors get healthcare. The people who write the wall text do not.
Disabled people end up in the first category or they leave. Because you cannot work for meaning when you are rationing insulin.
I have sat in a museum staff meeting where the director said the institution needed to reflect the community. The meeting was about a new gallery plan. Someone asked if there was money in the budget for accessible seating in the new layout. The director said: we will look into it. That gallery opened fourteen months later. I attended the opening. There were benches, but they were sculptural and had no back support. I stood for forty minutes and then left.
The same director, in the same meeting, had said the museum was committed to equity. I believed him. I think he believed him. But equity without wages is aspiration. And aspiration does not pay for the grab rail in your bathroom or the mobility aid you need to get to work or the insurance that covers your prescriptions.
Museums are very good at saying the right things. They write land acknowledgments. They hang shows about social justice. They host panels on inclusion. And then they pay seventeen dollars an hour and call it an opportunity.
The union is not asking for anything radical. They are asking for a wage that does not require a second job. They are asking for healthcare that starts when the job starts. They are asking for the museum to stop firing people without cause. These are the things every worker needs. But they are also the things that decide whether disabled people can work there at all.
When the Seattle workers win — and they will, because every museum union so far has won something — they will not write disability into the contract. They will write wages and healthcare and just-cause. And disabled workers will stay longer. Not because the union thought about access. Because the union thought about survival, and survival is access.
The museum will not say that out loud.
This article was prompted by Seattle Art Museum Workers Move to Unionize from Hyperallergic.