George Eastman Museum workers seek union, file for NLRB election

Friday afternoon, a letter arrived at the office of George Eastman Museum director Bruce Barnes and its board of trustees. It didn’t have far to travel. The union behind it, Workers United, keeps its offices on East Avenue, just a few hundred feet down the road from the museum’s own gates at 900 East Ave.

The letter announced the workers’ intent to unionize with Workers United. The union says employees had been organizing quietly for several weeks before going public.

On Monday, saying they have the support of a majority of museum employees, the workers went further: They filed a petition for an election with the National Labor Relations Board. The union did not disclose how many workers have signed authorization cards, saying only that a majority is on board.

The museum employs roughly 100 people, according to the organizing group, which calls itself George Eastman Museum Workers United. The proposed bargaining unit would include workers across the museum’s departments, except security employees, GEMWU says. The unit would bring together workers with vastly different jobs under one roof—projectionists who screen films from the museum’s collection, photograph and film conservators, restaurant staff, curators, and administrators.

Three workers were quoted by name in the union’s announcement: Emily Phoenix, a conservator; Andrea Edwards, a preparator; and Vivian Rivers, the museum’s community and volunteer liaison.

Phoenix says many employees have felt they either have to accept problems in the workplace or eventually leave. As a conservator, she says, her instinct when she encounters a damaged photograph is to repair it rather than ignore it or throw it away. She sees a union as a similar tool for addressing problems at the museum.

Edwards describes the museum job as a dream she’d held for years, one she can’t picture giving up for anything else. That’s precisely why she’s organizing—she wants a workplace that lives up to what she sees as the museum’s stature as a genuine landmark.

Rivers connects the effort to the institution’s own mission. If the Eastman Museum is serious about serving Rochester’s communities inclusively, she says, that has to start inside its own walls—with more of its workers, at every level, having a hand in the decisions that shape the place.

In its letter, the group laid out the concerns driving the campaign: greater transparency and consultation between leadership and staff before policy changes are made; workloads proportional to staffing levels, with adequate paid time off and room to grow professionally; salaries that keep pace with the cost of living; continued progress on diversity, equity, accessibility and inclusion; workplace health and safety; freedom from harassment; and protection against termination without just cause. The letter also asked the museum to voluntarily recognize the union rather than go through an NLRB election. As of Monday, the group said, it had not heard back.

“We were just notified of some of our employees’ intent to unionize on Friday,” says Bruce Barnes, director of the George Eastman Museum. “We are currently consulting with attorneys and considering how to proceed appropriately.”

Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, became one of the most visible labor organizations in the country through a different campaign. In December 2021, workers at a Starbucks on Buffalo’s Elmwood Avenue organized with Workers United and voted to unionize—the first Starbucks store in the country to do so. Within a year, more than 270 Starbucks locations in 36 states had followed, and by 2024 the campaign had crossed the 500-store mark. Nearly five years later, not one of the unionized Starbucks stores has a ratified contract with Starbucks, though the two sides resumed bargaining this spring after a monthslong strike.

In the upstate region, Workers United represents staff at the Sciencenter in Ithaca and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. The Rochester campaign would add another cultural institution to Workers United’s growing presence in the museum and nonprofit sectors.

The Eastman Museum campaign arrives amid a broader wave of organizing at cultural institutions. Labor researchers Liz Levine and Amanda Tobin Ripley, who track union campaigns at private, nonprofit art museums through their Art Museum Unions Index, found a 221 percent increase in organizing at those museums since 2019. Workers at institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art have organized during that period.

Last week, workers at the Chicago History Museum ratified their first union contract. The pressure isn’t limited to new organizing drives, either. At the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, whose staff has been unionized with UAW Local 2110 since 2021, workers voted 93 percent in favor of authorizing a strike in June after contract talks stalled over health care costs and wages that haven’t kept pace with inflation.

In Rochester, workers at the Strong National Museum of Play organized with CSEA in early 2025, a drive that drew attention after two Woodbury School preschool teachers were fired the day after workers sought voluntary recognition, a move CSEA called union-busting. The museum said the firings were unrelated to the union campaign. The vote to organize failed, 53–63.

GEMWU’s logo draws on the broader history of labor and documentary photography. The union has been building its public profile on Instagram ahead of Monday’s announcement. The image behind the name— explained in a recent post—was illustrated by Edwards herself, and it isn’t invented. It’s drawn from a photograph already sitting in the museum’s own collection: Lewis Hine’s 1920 image “Powerhouse Mechanic,” sometimes called “Mechanic and Steam Pump.”

The museum’s Hine collection dates to 1951, when the photographer’s full archive—roughly 7,000 prints, 4,000 negatives and assorted papers—was transferred to George Eastman House following his death through the Photo League Lewis Hine Memorial Committee. Hine’s photographs became important documents of the social reform and child-labor movements of the early 20th century. “Powerhouse Mechanic” itself has traveled widely since Hine made it—it appeared in Taschen’s “Photography from 1839 to Today,” a published survey of the Eastman collection, and, according to GEMWU, was cast in metal as the William P. Hite Standard for Excellence Award, a sculpture commissioned by the Pipe Fitters Local 597 union in Chicago.

For GEMWU, the image connects the workers’ campaign to a photograph already embedded in the museum’s own history—one associated with labor, industrial work, and social reform, more than a century before it became a union’s logo.

The union has not said when it expects the NLRB to schedule the election.

Will Cleveland is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. 

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