Accord­ing to the Team­sters, the key stick­ing point in nego­ti­a­tions has been job secu­ri­ty. Tysh was part of a ​“New Direc­tions” slate that oust­ed the past lead­ers of Team­sters Local 814 in the union’s 2009 elec­tions. Tysh, now a mem­ber of the local’s bar­gain­ing com­mit­tee, says they inher­it­ed an oth­er­wise strong con­tract marred by a cru­cial weak­ness: lan­guage allow­ing some work to be done by tem­po­rary work­ers rather than union mem­bers. Tysh says that in the past, man­age­ment hon­ored a ​“ver­bal com­mit­ment” that the size of the union work­force would stay above 50 peo­ple. When man­age­ment stopped hon­or­ing that com­mit­ment, bring­ing in more tem­po­rary work­ers as the num­ber of union mem­bers declined, the con­tract offered lit­tle recourse.

Tysh and 41 of his co-work­ers have been locked out since August 1, a month before Occu­py Wall Street first occu­pied Zuc­cot­ti Park. Among labor stug­gles, the lock­out has drawn some of the ear­li­est, and longest-run­ning, Occu­py sup­port. Occu­py’s involve­ment has inspired work­ers, upped the pres­sure on Sotheby’s, and ampli­fied media atten­tion – though it hasn’t yet yield­ed a victory.

​“Tonight, the irony per­sists,” said Sotheby’s work­er Julian Tysh. ​“Sotheby’s is sell­ing a copy of the scream – an art­ful inter­pre­ta­tion of human anguish and suf­fer­ing – and they’re going to prof­it tremen­dous­ly tonight, while at the same time they con­tin­ue to cre­ate anguish and suf­fer­ing among their own workforce.”

Sotheby’s New York auc­tion house made inter­na­tion­al head­lines last week, sell­ing Edvard Much’s paint­ing ​“The Scream” for a record $119.9 mil­lion. But few sto­ries men­tioned what was hap­pen­ing out­side the auc­tion: pick­et­ing by 150 artists, activists, and locked-out art handlers.

Sothe­by’s did not respond to a request for com­ment, but a com­pa­ny spokesper­son told Bloomberg in Decem­ber that the lock­out was ​“the last thing we wanted.”

While both the union mem­bers and the temp work­ers are pre­dom­i­nate­ly black or Lati­no, the temps are much younger than the union mem­bers. Their wages and ben­e­fits are much worse. Tysh charges that Sotheby’s has been exploit­ing the con­trac­t’s weak­ness to replace union art han­dlers with a cheap, con­stant­ly inse­cure work­force: ​“The new­er gen­er­a­tion, because of this revolv­ing door, has only seen six months of a job and then they’ve been back on the street.”

In nego­ti­a­tions, the Team­sters pro­posed to restrict Sotheby’s abil­i­ty to replace them with temps. Sotheby’s pro­posed to expand it. ​“This is not about eco­nom­ics,” says Tysh, ​“because this is a very prof­itable com­pa­ny. If they want­ed to bar­gain for eco­nom­ic con­ces­sions, they would have.” Rather, he charges, Sotheby’s mount­ed ​“a strong-arm attack from the very begin­ning: that the union had to accept these terms that would crip­ple the union’s pow­er on the job, or else we’d have to suffer.”

Bloomberg report­ed that a Sothe­by’s fil­ing showed that the com­pa­ny issued its chief exec­u­tive $4.25 mil­lion in 2011 in ​“per­for­mance share units,” which vest over four years if he meets ​“per­for­mance goals.”

As Mike Elk has report­ed, in recent years employ­ers have increas­ing­ly turned to lock­outs: refus­ing to let union mem­bers work until they accept con­tract con­ces­sions or dis­solve their union. For Sotheby’s work­ers, Tysh says that’s meant ​“tremen­dous eco­nom­ic hard­ship,” espe­cial­ly since the ter­mi­na­tion of their health insur­ance Jan­u­ary 1. Accord­ing to Tysh, one of his co-work­ers had a wife on life sup­port when Sothe­by’s cut off their insurance.

Tysh says the lock­out also takes an emo­tion­al toll: ​“You get a lot of your sense of iden­ti­ty, and your sense of pride as a human being, from the work you do, and it’s hard to call your­self an art han­dler if you haven’t han­dled any art in nine months.”

Labor and Occu­py push back

Pick­ets like Wednesday’s have become a com­mon sight, sup­ple­ment­ed with more dis­rup­tive tac­tics. Some invit­ed guests at a Feb­ru­ary 29 recep­tion for the Whit­ney Bien­ni­al — of which Sothe­by’s is a major spon­sor — brought Team­sters and oth­er activists along as their guests. Once inside, in the mid­dle of the event, work­ers and occu­piers dropped ban­ners (includ­ing ​“Quit Sothe­by’s”) and began a ​“Mic chec,” with a crowd repeat­ing speech­es con­demn­ing Sothe­by’s. Dur­ing a Novem­ber auc­tion, Occu­py activists and mem­bers of oth­er unions – but not Sothe­by’s employ­ees – sat down and were arrest­ed for refus­ing to leave the building.

Those arrests illus­trate one of the dynam­ics in play: As amend­ed by Taft-Hart­ley and inter­pret­ed by courts, fed­er­al labor law sig­nif­i­cant­ly restricts the abil­i­ty of work­ers to demon­strate en masse or dis­rupt pro­duc­tion with­out risk­ing crip­pling fees or injunc­tions against their union. Occu­py activists don’t face the same restrictions.

Tysh says the occu­piers have ​“on their own, tak­en the ini­tia­tive to engage in a wide range of tactics…we thank them tremen­dous­ly for that.”

Speak­ing for him­self, Aaron Gem­mill, an activist with Occu­py Wall Street’s Arts & Labor group (tech­ni­cal­ly a sub-group of the Arts & Cul­ture Work­ing Group), said there’s room to take that free­dom fur­ther: ​“We have some flex­i­bil­i­ty as non-orga­nized peo­ple to act out­side of that legal frame­work, but I’d like to see it get pushed a little…I would like to see us doing more bold intervention.”

Tysh says union mem­bers are also tak­ing ​“the type of mil­i­tant action that you haven’t seen in the labor move­ment in a long time…We haven’t asked our mem­bers to will­ful­ly break any laws, so what we’ve done has been with­in the con­fines of what we can do, but at the same time it has been push­ing the envelope.”

The Team­sters and their allies have also tar­get­ed Sotheby’s on oth­er fronts. The union, and the Change to Win fed­er­a­tion (with which it’s affil­i­at­ed), have raised ques­tions about Sotheby’s gov­er­nance, most recent­ly in a let­ter to share­hold­ers from the CTW Invest­ment Group. The let­ter charges that since Sotheby’s went pub­lic, there’s been lit­tle change in the com­po­si­tion of its Board, which remains stacked with allies of its pres­i­dent. Gem­mill cred­its union scruti­ny with forc­ing the res­ig­na­tion of Rupert Murdoch’s son, James Mur­doch, from the Board.

Sothe­by’s annu­al meet­ing will be held tomor­row. CTW Invest­ment Group is urg­ing investors to vote against the re-elec­tion of three board mem­bers, includ­ing Diana Tay­lor. Tay­lor is the girl­friend of New York City May­or Michael Bloomberg and also a board mem­ber of Brook­field Prop­er­ties, which owns Zuc­cot­ti Park, from which Occu­py was evict­ed in Novem­ber. In a Decem­ber con­fronta­tion with Occu­py activists and Team­sters, Tay­lor threat­ened to quit Sothe­by’s board if its CEO ​“accedes to any of your demands.”

In Feb­ru­ary, stu­dents and work­ers protest­ed a meet­ing of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ver­mon­t’s Board of Trustees, which includes Sothe­by’s Chief Exec­u­tive William Ruprecht. The same month, anony­mous activists cre­at­ed a prank web­site claim­ing that the Whit­ney Bien­ni­al was cut­ting ties to Sothe­by’s. In April, union activists in Cam­bo­dia held a press con­fer­ence tying the lock­out to Sothe­by’s refusal to return an alleged­ly loot­ed 10th-cen­tu­ry Cam­bo­di­an stat­ue. On May 1, the edi­tors of two art blogs and a group of artists (includ­ing ​“Hope” artist Shep­ard Fairey) launched a peti­tion to Sotheby’s that has drawn inter­na­tion­al art world support.

Whith­er art industry?

Gem­mill says Arts & Labor activists have con­nect­ed with the Sothe­by’s strug­gle in par­tic­u­lar because ​“rather than kind of abstract argu­ments for eco­nom­ic jus­tice, it is real­ly is spe­cif­ic to an indus­try that we all work in and under­stand, and feel poten­tial­ly affect­ed by in a direct way.”

He says it’s helped to shape Occupy’s rela­tion­ship with labor: ​“There is ten­sion between orga­nized labor and the Occu­py move­ment, and I think the spe­cif­ic sit­u­a­tion being so out­ra­geous and so egre­gious and also so time­ly has been a lever that has helped to cre­ate dia­logue between labor and the Occu­py movement.”

The res­o­lu­tion of the fight will also shape the direc­tion of a divid­ed indus­try. Tysh notes that while art han­dling for major facil­i­ties is most­ly union, the rest of the art trans­port indus­try is most­ly unorganized.

An art han­dler for Phillips de Pury & Com­pa­ny, a nonunion auc­tion com­pa­ny, says he and his co-work­ers face errat­ic sched­ul­ing, insuf­fi­cient staffing and unad­dressed safe­ty issues (Phillips’ Chair­man Simon de Pury stars as men­tor to con­tes­tants in the real­i­ty TV show Work of Art). This employ­ee — who request­ed, and was grant­ed, anonymi­ty based on fear of retal­i­a­tion — says dur­ing years of work­ing at Phillips he’s request­ed a raise ​“sev­er­al times” but nev­er received one.

​“It’s a lit­tle bit of a dead-end indus­try, if you can’t find a place that will allow some sort of upward mobil­i­ty. You could do the same thing for years and maybe not get a raise for it.” He says Phillips keeps work­ers below full-time hours when­ev­er pos­si­ble to save mon­ey. He and his co-work­ers string togeth­er work at at sev­er­al places in the indus­try, some­times work­ing close to 24 hours in con­sec­u­tive shifts. He has no health insur­ance. Some of his co-work­ers at Phillips have crossed the Sothe­by’s pick­et line to work as replace­ment work­ers for extra cash.

Nine months into the strug­gle, Gem­mill says ​“it’s not clear real­ly that we are clos­er to victory.”

​“We’re going to keep up our fight,” says Tysh. ​“We’re going to keep up our cor­po­rate cam­paign, and we’re going to keep our cam­paign in the art world…it’s going to con­tin­ue to have some seri­ous con­se­quences for the com­pa­ny.” How long will it take? ​“I real­ly can’t tell you. I wish I could.”