The Art of Working-Class Struggle: Teamsters Refuse to Buckle Under to Sotheby’s Attack

NEW YORK, November 9 — A deafening roar met the wealthy patrons as they stepped out of their limousines this evening and were escorted by nervous security guards into Sotheby’s, the famed art auction house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Forty-three art handlers — the workers who protect and transport paintings and sculptures worth millions of dollars each — have been locked out by the company since July. Sotheby’s, which made a profit of $774 million last year and pays its CEO $70,000 a day, is demanding contract concessions from the workers. It wants to replace full-time workers with part-timers, reduce pensions and eliminate seniority in firing.

The workers are refusing to buckle. Tonight was the first evening auction of the season, with impressionist and modern art paintings on sale. About 150 workers and supporters stood behind metal barricades on each side of the entrance, with two giant inflatable rats nearby. Multiracial groups of Teamsters from several locals attended. They blew whistles and loudly chanted, “What’s disgusting? Union busting!”; “We Are the 99%” and “Shame, Shame!” at the rich collectors and dealers who scurried into Sotheby’s lobby.

Truthfully, none of the prosperous collectors seemed at all ashamed, only taken aback that people who work for a living might treat them so rudely and attempt to interfere with their evening of lavish spending. A wealthy collector paid $40.4 million tonight for a landscape painting by Gustav Klimt — more money than all the handlers together will earn in a lifetime! Sotheby’s receives a hefty commission for each artwork sold.

For hours, the workers continued to whistle and chant, while at least 50 security guards and an equal number of NYPD goons prevented the workers from invading the building, confronting the scabs, and stopping the auction. Five workers did get inside, sat down in front of the escalator, and refused to move until they were dragged out and arrested. Some college students came from Occupy Wall Street to support the workers, who are part of the 99%, and to yell at the 1% (more accurately, the one-tenth of one percent) who crossed the picket lines. A class-conscious artist could have vividly captured this stark class divide on canvas.

As the protesters grew hoarse from chanting and angrier and angrier at the rich bastards who the police escorted into Sotheby’s, it struck us that some day there will be no need for art auction houses, because paintings by Van Gogh and Picasso (who, in his earlier years, would have been on the picket line) should be enjoyed by everyone, not stuck on the wall in a private mansion or fancy townhouse. 

We can look forward to the day when we build a museum to hold the artifacts of capitalism, a record of the sweatshops, exploitation, inequality, racism, sexism and imperialist wars of this era. Our grandchildren will walk through the halls of capitalism past and wonder how humans could have lived this way, with so much injustice and misery. But the biggest room in the museum will be the huge Hall of Revolution that portrays how we swept capitalism, Sotheby’s and their wealthy patrons into the dustbin of history.