Redundancies, protests and strikes: Inside the fight at London's museums

Drums, whistles and cries of outrage from staff aren’t what Tate visitors are accustomed to. But for weeks now the art institution’s tranquil London sites have been hit by shockwaves being felt across the museum and galleries sector. The announcement of 313 redundancies in Tate’s commercial enterprises has become a lightning rod for long-simmering resentment.

A year of plummeting visitor footfall and savage cuts accompanied the Covid-19 pandemic — and junior employees have been hit the hardest. Protests have spilt out from Tate sites to Parliament Square. Waves of fury and discontent are being felt across the capital’s art sector with accusations that government subsidies have been used to keep paying industry fat cats while low-paid staff in catering and junior jobs have been let go, with diverse workers particularly affected. On the other hand, the arts sector is facing an unprecedented collapse in revenue. As more restrictions were announced this week, tension is only set to increase.

The Tate galleries especially find themselves at the vanguard of a furious fightback. Director Maria Balshaw, who has come under considerable fire, said in August: “It is with great sadness that we have had to lose many of our colleagues in Tate Enterprises.” She blamed “the loss of revenue during lockdown and the dramatic drop in footfall in our galleries since reopening”.

A sense of injustice was palpable, and quickly turned personal. One Instagram account seized on beachside photos of Balshaw’s family which her son, aged 23, had posted on his personal account, asking: “Why is she on holiday at a time like this?”

How did we get here? The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport announced a £1.57 billion rescue fund for stricken institutions just a fortnight after the Tate announced job losses in July — with £7 million earmarked for the Tate due to its size — but it was made clear that the money would be ring-fenced to help the business stay afloat rather than protect jobs.

“It’s just not fair that the price for the pandemic should be paid by the workers who are on the lowest salaries, the most precarious, and from the most diverse teams at Tate,” says one striker. Concerned about their possible redundancy packages, the protesters who spoke to me requested anonymity. But the fallout is universal. Politicians and unions have warned of a “tsunami” of job losses in the arts.

The Southbank Centre’s senior management has announced plans to make two-thirds of its staff redundant, resulting in the possible loss of 400 jobs. The Royal Academy, which receives no public subsidies, is so cash-strapped that it is reported to be considering selling off a masterpiece by Michelangelo, Taddei Tondo, to avoid losing 150 jobs. “We are in the most challenging economic and cultural situation that any of us have been in,” Balshaw told me yesterday on the phone. “No one ever wants to make anyone redundant. But the economic challenge that the arts face, not just Tate, but organisations across the UK, is terrifying.”

Across the sector, senior museum staff are unsurprisingly anguished. Most feel stuck between a rock and a hard place, and are alarmed by the online discourse. Much of this is playing out on social media with a “digital strike” calling for a U-turn. “The pandemic has exposed and accelerated the deeply ingrained and systemic inequalities long-present in the arts and cultural sector,” says a curator. “Those are inequalities rooted in racism, ableism, classism and sexism. With cuts and redundancies disproportionately impacting those of us otherwise under-represented across the sector, we are deeply concerned for the cultural landscape that will emerge post-pandemic.”

The museums sector is predicting a drop in footfall of between 50 and 75 per cent, with no recovery in sight until next summer at the earliest. At Tate, the axe has fallen hardest on Tate Enterprises, the institution’s commercial arm; 313 publishing, retail and catering staff were told that they would be made redundant. Union members at the Tate argue that alternative means of raising the £1 million needed to save salaried jobs at Tate Enterprises have not been entertained, from reopening Covid-secure gift shops to redirecting advance money from exhibition ticket sales. But Balshaw says: “It simply isn’t accurate to say these job losses are targeted at the lowest paid. They are necessary job losses because we currently have 20 per cent of normal visitor numbers, and we have no prospect for that changing.”

A manager at another gallery says: “Ultimately if we’re looking at six months to a year of less consumer confidence, we’re going to lose money. You can’t pretend gift and coffee shops are a core activity.” The DCMS bailout, many observe, is money that’s been given out for income loss accrued so far, not to patch up income they’re not going to earn in the future. Do strikers want galleries and museums to consider selling artworks? “No, but we expect creative solutions from creative institutions,” says the union.

Unrest on the ground first spiked in late July, but numbers at weekend protests have swelled this month: dozens of staff with union groups Tate United branch of PCS (the Public and Commercial Services Union) shouted “Shame on Tate” and held signs bearing slogans such as “Coronavirus No Excuse to Fire Us,” and “Tate eats diverse arts, spits out diverse staff” outside Tate Modern. Their demands include no redundancies while anyone at Tate is paid more than £100,000, and that 10 per cent of the Government’s £7 million earmarked for Tate be invested to save jobs.

“Everyone is rattled by the online stuff,” says a senior museum executive. “We’re all terrified of being cancelled. The artists are all going to take their sides, and that is going to be difficult for us. They tend to all put the really tricky stuff in their Instagram Stories so it disappears. But I don’t think that’s acceptable. I’ve heard that colleagues have had really personal attacks. It gives a personal edge to it. I don’t think that existed before.”

The bailout’s conditions felt like “a kick in the teeth” says a protester. It’s not a two-way street, a union representative points out. “We had thought that might be good news, that this might all be over, maybe we can’t save all 313 jobs, but maybe we can at least save 100. Then we were quickly told none of that money would be used to save our jobs.”

The process has been “bungled”, a union member tells me; tin-eared, disengaged. People who have worked at Tate for 30 years are losing jobs. The union further alleges that Tate has outsourced several visitor experience assistant roles to external contractor Securitas at a time when they say it could instead be redeploying the Tate Enterprise workers who are at risk of redundancy. “An ad was posted earlier in the summer by Securitas which wrongly stated that it was advertising for jobs at Tate,” says a Tate spokesperson. “In fact they were recruiting for their pool of workers, not specifically for Tate roles. This ad was therefore removed. When Securitas were recruiting for new staff of their own, they offered preferential treatment to Tate Enterprises staff who are leaving.”

Fears have also been raised that the job losses could disproportionately affect black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) staff. In a staff email, Balshaw and chief operating officer Vicky Cheetham wrote: “First of all it is important to say that we do not yet know the outcome until selection processes are completed. However, it is likely that the proportion of BAME colleagues across Tate Enterprises will remain broadly the same at the end.” They also said that Tate had given Tate Enterprises £5 million from its reserves to cover losses.

Online, activism is much more direct, wider reaching and — frankly — forthright. The White Pube, an Instagram account with 64.7k followers — and the account that singled out Balshaw’s holiday — has tirelessly posted about issues of perceived inequality and injustice for months (“f*** Tate” is a recurring call-to-arms). “You’ve got to use your visibility to have a yell,” says The White Pube’s Zarina Muhammad, full-time art critic, part-time activist. “It doesn’t set a good tone for the rest of the industry at large which is already pretty inhospitable to working class, black and brown, POC workers and disabled workers that end up working as front of house entry level super underpaid jobs in the first place.”

“[They] have made the campaign very personal in ways that are just not helpful,” says Balshaw, who calls it “ridiculous, the idea that I was living large, sitting on a rather cold English beach”, which turned out to be Dungeness. “Calling out directors for being on holiday in the middle of August when they’ve worked solidly for five months is out of order.”

The Department of Accountability, an account that appeared this month, has also been posting to illustrate the yawning difference in salaries between those being laid off and those in senior management retaining their jobs at institutions around the UK. “We hope that by making this salary data visible, we will shame institutions and funders into conducting themselves more ethically,” a representative says, again under condition of anonymity. None of these issues are new, they point out.

The sense of a cultural reckoning is, unsurprisingly, keenly felt. “The already narrowed opportunities for breaking into the sector are almost non-existent, especially for careers such as curating, which rely upon years of experience and higher education, often costing would-be-curators several thousand pounds of tuition,” says Elise Bell, a freelance arts writer and communications officer at The Barbican. “What this leaves us with is a culture that pays even the most competitive positions with wages that most working-class applicants can’t afford to live on, not just in London. As calls for a more diverse workforce echo around the culture industry, the worry is that the economic impact of Covid effectively wipes out any meaningful potential for change.”

“Senior management are not engaging,” sighs one union member. “It just makes you wonder what you’re even worth.”