By Zachary Houle
A labor dispute at the National Art Gallery could keep an anticipated Picasso exhibition under wraps should union members strike or be locked out.
The Gallery’s union, part of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), voted for a strike mandate last week after being in a contract dispute with Gallery management since April. Details of the vote aren’t being released.
Both parties are at loggerheads over the issue of a seven-year benefits and wages freeze. The union also fears that unionized jobs could be contracted out.
“In the past four or five years, 50 jobs have been lost and that’s (likely) going up,” said union local president Bonnie Bates. “We’re concerned we’ll have staff members or departments being cut right off from the Gallery.”
Bates warns that if there’s a strike or a lock-out, it will likely mar the exhibition of works by Pablo Picasso, scheduled to run from April 3 to July 12. The Picasso showing, expected to rival last year’s Renoir exhibition which drew almost 340,000 to the Gallery, might have to be shortened or cancelled.
“We’re certainly not looking forward to that, but it’s a possibility,” said Bates. “For us to be locked out or on strike (that long) would have a fairly large impact. The only people who would be left in the building would be the manager and the curators.”
She added that even if a strike or lock-out doesn’t last until April, advance publicity work now underway for the showing could be hindered.
But Ursula Thiboutot, manager of communications at the Gallery, says a strike or lock-out wouldn’t hurt pre-exhibition efforts.
“We’ve been marketing the show for over a year, so everything’s in place,” she said.
According to Bates, the union fears privatization on the scale of what has already occurred at Hull’s Museum of Civilization is a model of things to come in Ottawa.
Thiboutot, on the other hand, suggested that Gallery management isn’t even looking at privatization.
“We certainly haven’t been actively abolishing jobs to contract out,” she said.
At the Museum of Civilization, five unionized part-time jobs were lost last month when its in-house ticket agency contracted them out to TicketMaster, says Chris Kirby, the PSAC local president at the museum. At least another dozen unionized jobs at the museum gift shop are also at the mercy of management, thanks to the Treasury Board cuts.
“They’ve forgotten the real reason we’re here,” said Kirby of the Treasury Board, “and that’s to present culture to Canadians. That doesn’t net you a whole lot of money.”
The strike or lock-out, if it happens, could have not only a negative economic effect on the Gallery itself, but on the capital region as well.
According to a Gallery press release, Ottawa/Hull’s retail sector saw profits rise by $1.6 million in 1997 as a direct result of the Renoir exhibition.
If there’s a strike or lock-out affiliate union members from the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography will join workers on the line.