Right now, our country is experiencing a historic resurgence in union organizing. For example between October 2021 and September 2022, there was a 53% increase in union election petitions filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Meanwhile, according to the Economic Policy Institute, an estimated 60 million nonunion American workers were interested in unionizing in 2022.

One arena in which union organizing has been especially energetic is the arts and culture sector, with over 60,000 cultural workers joining unions across museums, aquariums, performing arts venues, zoos, and libraries in 2022 alone. And perhaps nowhere is this trend more present than in Philadelphia, which has become a hotbed of cultural institution union organizing. Since 2020, workers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, and the Please Touch Museum, as well as the singers of the Philadelphia Orchestra, have all successfully unionized. Through this unionization process, and subsequent collective bargaining agreements that address workplace policies in arts and culture institutions, interesting new trends and issues have emerged, especially given that labor law was largely developed for industrial workplaces.