Employees at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) are unionizing, staff announced on Wednesday, October 29. LACMA United will represent over 300 workers across all eligible departments within the museum in a bid for “fairer compensation, expanded benefits, and increased transparency.”
The union was formed through AFSCME Cultural Workers United District Council 36, which has helped organize workers at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures; the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; the La Brea Tar Pits; and other LA institutions. (A 2019 unionization campaign at the Marciano Art Foundation was derailed when the museum abruptly decided to close.)
LACMA United explained their motivations for organizing in a letter to LACMA’s board and leadership on Wednesday.
“Many employees are struggling with wages that have not kept up with the rising cost of living in the sixth-most expensive city in the world,” the union’s letter reads. “At the same time, employees in virtually every department continue to absorb expanded responsibilities and workloads, often without additional compensation, due to high turnover, limited resources, and positions that have been vacated or frozen.”
The union requested that museum executives and board members voluntarily recognize LACMA United by November 5. LACMA Director Michael Govan confirmed that museum leadership received the letter in a statement to Hyperallergic.
“We are reviewing it carefully and very much look forward to continuing to support our amazing staff,” Govan said.
Jayne Manuel, a program administrator for Collections Management at LACMA who has worked full-time at the museum since 2016, spoke firsthand of the growing financial challenges of living in LA. Through conversations with co-workers, “it was very clear that my colleagues across multiple departments were sharing similar struggles,” she told Hyperallergic.
Manuel also noted that these issues are affecting workers throughout the industry, citing a recently released survey of 3,000 museum employees by Museums Moving Forward (MMF), which concluded that although 2025 data shows improvements over the last two years, issues surrounding compensation and opportunities for advancement remain ubiquitous. (MMF, co-founded by curator Mia Locks, has several top museum leaders on its board of stakeholders, including LACMA Vice President of Education and Public Programs Naima Keith.)
The union announcement comes amid an ambitious and controversial $720 million redevelopment of LACMA, the largest museum in the Western United States. Much of its campus has been demolished and replaced by a single concrete building designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, which is set to open next April. The new building, dubbed the David Geffen Galleries, also represents a challenge to traditional exhibition modes, juxtaposing works from throughout the museum’s diverse collections on a sprawling single level.
The union letter was sent just days before LACMA’s 14th annual Art+Film Gala on November 1, a major fundraising event for the institution that brought in $6.4 million last year.
“We celebrate LACMA’s reimagining of the encyclopedic museum, presenting a more interconnected and inclusive narrative of artistic expression,” the letter states. “As the museum evolves, we believe that this vision should extend beyond rethinking hierarchies of display to include prioritizing the people who bring its mission to life.”
