“SOMEBODY TO TALK TO”: HUMANIZING FRONLINE LABOR AT THE NATIONAL BUILDING MUSEUM

Abstract

The museum labor movement has grown significantly in the last ten years, with museum workers increasingly agitating around issues of inadequate pay, discrimination, job precarity, unsafe working conditions, and more. Unionization and other organized responses to these injustices have dominated discourses about this movement. Frontline workers, or museum workers that deal directly with the public, hold the least structural power and are most vulnerable to exploitation, particularly given the dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, narratives among museum workers and scholars often paint frontline workers as unhappy, burnt-out victims, or overlook them entirely. This dissertation ethnographically explores the experiences of frontline workers at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC and seeks a holistic, nuanced understanding of frontline workers in a museum without a union. In addition to examining challenges frontline workers face, it examines how workers create and derive joy from their work and each other, and how they come together in solidarity outside of organized labor agitation. Physical and social space are explored as key components in understanding frontline workers’ experiences. This dissertation argues that despite a challenging labor environment and a disconnection from the organized museum labor movement, frontline workers at the National Building Museum leveraged joy, solidarity, and space to create a workplace that worked for them. In doing so, this work resists labor narratives victimizing frontline workers, highlights how workers support each other informally, and uplifts frontline workers as multidimensional people enjoy and care deeply for each other and their work.