The sell-out of the Art Gallery of Ontario strike and the subordination of art to the financial oligarchy

The planned $100 million expansion of the new wing of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto will be named after Dani Reiss, CEO of luxury clothing brand Canada Goose. Reiss has provided $35 million in funding, while the Canadian government is contributing $25 million through the Green and Inclusive Community Buildings Program. The remaining $40 million will come from private donations.

The planned expansion highlights the extent to which the arts are subject to the whims of the financial aristocracy, which is especially evident when you compare the wealth at the top with the starvation wages that employees at one of North America's largest art museums must grudgingly shell out.

Strikers at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Photo: OPSEU) [Photo: OPSEU]

The recent month-long strike at the AGO is an example of the extent to which the ruling elite is willing to subordinate the existence of workers and all aspects of social life, including culture, to the needs of the profit system.

From March 26 to April 25, 400 AGO workers were on strike. The workers, who are members of Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) Local 535, include curators, archivists, food and hospitality workers, researchers, trainers, carpenters, electricians and visitor services staff.

They voted to strike by 58 percent in March after working without a contract since 2022, citing disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak and the ruling class's disastrous “profits before lives” strategy, among other reasons. The immediate grievances that led to the strike revolved around cost-of-living adjustments in the face of rising inflation, improved working hours and concerns about outsourcing work.

According to a press release from OPSEU Local 535, 85 percent voted in late April to ratify the collective agreement between the union and the AGO. Figures released by the union indicate that 281 of the 400, or about 70 percent of striking workers, voted for the agreement – not a strong vote of confidence.

The new collective agreement applies retroactively for the period from December 1, 2022 to November 30, 2025. Unsurprisingly, the union celebrated the end of the strike with a bombastic tweet and declared exaggeratedly: “The first strike at AGO was a historic demonstration of collective action – solidarity forever!”

They celebrated a wage increase of just 11.4 percent for part-time and full-time workers as “historic.” In practice, that equates to an increase of 3.8 percent per year. That barely keeps up with inflation and is not enough to cover the cost of rent in Toronto, the most expensive city in Canada and one of the most expensive in the world.

The average cost of a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto is nearly $2,500 a month. According to Statistics Canada's latest consumer price index, rents in Canada have risen an average of 8.5 percent year-on-year. But for AGO executives, who earn six-figure salaries, these developments are no cause for concern.

Management also agreed to form a “joint committee” supposedly to regulate the outsourcing of labor. Such a committee would only serve to further tie the union bureaucracy into a corporatist pact with management.

The AGO was founded in 1900 by a group of private individuals as the Art Museum of Toronto. It has been renamed twice, first to the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1919 and then to the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1966. The gallery currently has 90,000 works in its collection, of which 4,000 are on public display. These works include an extensive Canadian collection, including major works by Group of Seven icons such as Lauren Harris, Tom Thompson, Emily Carr and local artists, as well as European masterpieces, including works by Rubens, Gainsborough, van Dyck, the French Impressionists, Picasso and others. It also houses the largest public collection of sculpture by Henry Moore, as well as extensive exhibitions of contemporary artists.

But the struggle to provide access to culture to the masses of the population runs up against the profit motive at every turn. The AGO receives 33 percent of its income from government subsidies, 28 percent from ticket sales and 27 percent from the private sector. The remaining 12 percent is covered by the amortization of deferred capital contributions, according to an annual report published by the AGO on its website.

The same document reports that the gallery has a $3.9 million deficit, which it will ultimately cover by charging workers in the form of further wage concessions, contract awards and, ultimately, layoffs. Given that the collective bargaining agreement reached at the end of the recent strike expires in 2025, this is not a distant prospect.

There is considerable resistance among the gallery's workers to the poverty wages and the management's blatant disregard for them.

Recent reviews on the job site Indeed.com give an idea of the extent of the dissatisfaction. One reviewer currently employed at the gallery wrote: “An extremely toxic place where all employees are expendable. Management only cares about the look, the aesthetics of the building and changes their logo every year. I have not seen a single raise in all the years I have worked there, yet they are building an addition for the art while the employees toil in the windowless basement. Stay away.”

Art Gallery of Ontario, 2023 [Photo by Canmenwalker / CC BY 4.0]

Others commented on the “toxic” work culture. One reviewer wrote, “What's worse than awful? Morale here was terrible. Upper management was the worst, they only care about pointless expenses, not their front line employees.” A review from a security guard mentioned the “discrepancy between the management” and the rest of the staff. Complaints about work hours and too little time are also common.

During the strike, workers expressed anger over the forced departure of Wanda Nanibush, a curator of Indigenous art at the gallery, in November 2023. Nanibush was known for her vocal opposition to Israel's barbaric treatment of Palestinians, which she compared to Canadian imperialism's genocide against the country's Indigenous population.

Like most cultural sector workers, most AGO employees are part-time. At least 60 percent work for a meager part-time wage, earning just $34,380 a year. In the Greater Toronto Area, the minimum wage is $45,951 a year. A recent report from the Ontario Living Wage Network in November last year found that hourly wages would need to be $25.05 to keep pace with the rising cost of living.

The starvation wages paid to workers are all the more glaring when one considers the exponential growth of salaries at the highest levels of management in the gallery.

Stephane Jost, the museum's CEO, earns over $406,000 a year. He received over $391,940 in “consulting fees” from the AGO Foundation in 2020-2021 alone. Jost's salary doubled between 2016 and 2017, the first year of his tenure at the AGO.

According to the Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act (PSSDA), commonly known as the Sunshine List, Michael Mahoney, Executive Director, Corporate Special Projects and Operations, received compensation of $340,243 in 2023. In 2022, his annual salary was reportedly $313,966, up nearly 60 percent from the previous year. The PSSDA lists dozens of AGO executives making well over $200,000.

The situation at the AGO is quite normal for the lucrative salaries of executives in the “non-profit” sector. Jost, for example, was recruited by Phillips and Oppenheim, a recruiting firm that prides itself on being a fashionable promoter of “diversity, equity and inclusion.” The same firm was instrumental in bringing Matthew Teitelbaum, the AGO’s CEO before Jost, to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Even the Toronto Starwho sang Jost's praises in an otherwise glowing article in 2016, was forced to comment on the “almost incestuous aspect of the deal.”

Before his retirement in 2015, Teitelbaum had seen his salary increase 206.4 percent between 2008 and 2009, at the height of the Great Recession, from $308,547 in 2008 to a whopping $945,498. His current position as CEO of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston paid him $1,036,592 in 2022, according to MassNonprofit News, an independent organization that covers nonprofits in Massachusetts.

But the excessive compensation at the top is only part of the story. Jost and others are merely the less than humble functionaries of a system that perpetuates inequality. How art is to be funded, who funds it, and who owns it is tied to the increasing importance of wealthy donors while government subsidies dry up.

The AGO's funding, like that of most arts organizations in Canada, is a confusing patchwork of grants from all levels of government, ticket sales, and private donations.

On the one hand, large government grants were provided during the economic boom after the Second World War, and on the other hand, through initiatives such as the Royal Commission on Arts and Letters.

The commission, commonly known as the Massey Commission after Governor General Vincent Massey, who chaired it, advocated increased funding for the arts and the creation of the Canadian Council of the Arts. A key reason for this proposal was the political goal of creating a unique “Canadian national identity” through the arts to counter the dominance of foreign cultural imports, particularly from the United States. But the days of significant government funding are long gone. The end of the Cold War – which culminated in the Stalinist dissolution of the USSR in 1991 – coincided with cuts in arts funding.

In this context, Kenneth Thompson funded an earlier expansion of the AGO. The late Thompson was the son of billionaire media mogul Roy Thompson. Thompson donated $300 million to the gallery's 2002 expansion, designed by Frank Gehry. Part of Thompson's private collection found its way into the gallery.

In addition to an extensive Canadian collection, he also donated Rubens' Massacre of the Innocents to the gallery. He acquired the painting in a bidding war at a Sotheby's auction in 2002 for $117 million, the highest price for a painting to date. Lauren Harris' Baffin Islandanother of Thompson's acquisitions in a bidding war, was purchased around the same time for $5.1 million, making it the most expensive Canadian painting to date.

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