Museum attendant and North Adams resident Mike Boucher has worked at MASS MoCA for six years. Speaking to WAMC on the picket line along Marshall Street, he said the stakes of the work stoppage couldn’t be higher.
“People's lives," said Boucher. "People can't pay the rents. They’re really high around North Adams and elsewhere in the Berkshires, and we're just trying to get a fair wage so people can eat and people can afford their rents.”
The move to strike came six months after negotiations between the 120 UAW 2110 workers and museum management began.
“I think it comes down to the fact that North Adams is rapidly gentrifying. We're seeing a lot of people move out of the cities after COVID, a lot of people are buying property in town and turning it into Airbnbs, rent is continuously going up- This is a very desirable place to be and that's awesome, we love contributing to that, but the byproduct of that is that there's a lot of displacement happening to our workers," MASS MoCA worker Joey Rainone told WAMC. “It's really becoming an ethical issue of sustainability. If people in the town are working here, boosting the town begins at home- And MASS MoCA needs to do that within the gates of the company.”
Rainone is the museum’s production master electrician, tasked with lighting live events like Wilco’s Solid Sound festival that bring thousands onto the MASS MoCA campus.
“So, your Solid Sounds, your FreshGrasses, your galas- I mean, we're looking at 17-hour days," he said. "My first Solid Sound, I worked a 90-hour work week and then drove a 50-foot boom lift that I had 10 minutes of training on. We are run ragged for these festivals. We are terribly, terribly understaffed for them. We have an issue with our overhire being paid on time, which we rely on to be able to run these festivals. It is this cyclical issue where we cannot maintain labor because people are either not being paid well or paid on time, so then the onus goes on to the main crew, which is me and my guys. And then we're here all day. I got guys pushing boxes at 8am, putting up stages in the sun, and then breaking them down. These long festivals, it's not just the three days of Solid Sound, it's the week before, it's the week after, it's the entire time we're here. You get like an eight-hour, maybe an eight-hour shift in between to go home and sleep- And God forbid you live outside of town. Then you’ve got to drive all the way back to Pittsfield.”
Rainone says much of the union’s frustration with management comes from how the museum has chosen to approach their contract demands.
“A lot of our grievances are being denied at the first step," he explained. "We have to move to the second step or the third step. There just seems to be this mentality from management that the top is more important than the bottom, and there's this onus on the bottom to make up a financial deficit that has existed for years in their paychecks. So, our main issue, percentage wise, is that if we aren't moving forward with inflation, we are moving backwards. Our paychecks are moving backwards into the early 2000s, so that's why a lot of us are out here.”
A week into the strike, Boucher says the North Adams community has rallied around the workers, many of whom live in the city.
“This is actually a union town," he told WAMC. "So, they've been really supportive of, with us. You hear all the tooting going by- The fire department, police department. We have some unions, other reps here from other places, which really support us, big time.”
“Basically, our motto at the ALF is ‘solidarity works,’" Jeff Jones told WAMC. "And I don't have to know the particulars- All I have to know is that these folks ask for support from fellow labor union members, and we're here to support. That's what we do.”
Jones of UFCW Local 1459 is the Vice President of the Massachusetts ALF-CIO and President of the Western Massachusetts Area Labor Federation. He says strikes remain a valuable tool for organized labor.
“The history of the past five to 10 years has shown that it works," he said. "You see the school teacher strikes going on in the state of Massachusetts, you saw the stuff going on in 2018 with school teachers throughout the country. The UAW just finished a big strike campaign, the UPS threatened to go and almost went and were practicing going and got a good contract out of that.”
Jones brought along Scabby the Rat, the inflatable vermin effigy towering above the picket line.
“Basically, we're talking about employers who are treating their employees like dirt," he told WAMC. "It's about employers not bargaining in good faith, not providing for the workers in good faith.”
In a statement, the museum says it “continues to bargain in good faith and [is] hopeful to be able to return to the bargaining table in the near future. MASS MoCA remains proud to have a fair offer on the table that is also the largest in our wage history.”
MASS MoCA says it has brought in outside security to “maintain a calm campus environment.”
