Last week, unionised workers at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York voted overwhelmingly in favour of authorising a strike should current negotiations with museum administrators drag on. Of the affected workers represented by Local 2110 of the United Auto Workers (UAW), 93% voted to authorise a strike. Negotiations over a new contract have been ongoing since December 2025; the union’s previous collective bargaining agreement expired at the end of that month.
The negotiations are unfolding in the aftermath of significant staff changes at the Guggenheim that include layoffs of 20 employees (or around 7% of the museum’s total workforce) in February 2025, and this spring’s hiring of longtime Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden leader Melissa Chiu to be the Guggenheim’s new director.
“The layoffs last year were implemented chaotically. Laid off staff were told to leave the museum with no advance notice and no union representation. The cuts to staff created hardships for those of us remaining because we were forced to pick up a lot of extra work,” Drew Reynolds, an educator at the Guggenheim and the union chair, said in a statement. “Workers took the brunt of the cuts while museum leadership did not give up a penny in their salaries.”
According to the union, the current salary for entry-level staff at the Guggenheim is $49,920 annually, and around half of the staff at the museum earns less than $71,000, which according to New York’s municipal government is the level needed for a single adult to be able to afford living in the city. The union has proposed reducing healthcare costs for workers making less than $75,000 annually, and a three-year contract with a 5% increase in salaries in its first year and 4.25% in subsequent years. The museum is reportedly proposing a four-year contract that includes a 3% salary increase retroactively applied to all of 2026, followed by 2.75% increases in the following three years. In May, the inflation rate in New York City was 5.1% year over year, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“We are currently at the bargaining table to negotiate in good faith towards a renewal of the contract with UAW Local 2110,” a spokesperson for the Guggenheim said in a statement shared with The Art Newspaper. “Our priority remains reaching a fair and economically sustainable agreement for employees and the Guggenheim. Our bargaining team reached agreement with the union on a number of issues and remains ready to continue discussions at any time. We value our employees and the important work they do every day to support our visitors, collections, exhibitions and mission. We are hopeful for a positive outcome on both sides soon.”
Guggenheim employees including curators, conservators, part-time educators, digital marketing workers and visitor services representatives voted to form a union with UAW Local 2110 in 2021, and approved their first collective bargaining agreement in 2023. That contract, which spanned 1 July 2023 to 31 December 2025, stipulated a minimum pay increase of 9% over the term of the contract. (In 2019, a different group of Guggenheim workers including installers, art handlers and facilities engineers voted to form a union with a different labour organisation, the International Union of Operating Engineers.)
“Management is pushing for a contract that does little to address our job security or the financial hardship of frontline staff,” Anton Sherin, an archivist at the Guggenheim, said in a statement. “We are deeply committed to our work for the museum but we need management to understand that what they are offering is unsustainable.”
While members of the Guggenheim’s UAW Local 2110 union have voted to authorise a strike, a union representative says there is no specific deadline set yet to actually stop work in the event of a breakdown in negotiations. Workers at institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have all staged strikes (some single-day actions, some indefinite) in recent years when contract negotiations have reached an impasse.
