Guggenheim and Brooklyn Museum Unions Ratify New Contracts, Averting Strikes

Unionized staff at four of New York’s prominent cultural institutions—the Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim Museum, the Jewish Museum, and the American Folk Art Museum, and (AFAM)—have ratified new contracts, UAW Local 2110 announced today. The Brooklyn Museum and AFAM finalized four-year contracts this week, while the Guggenheim and Jewish Museum unions ratified their agreements in September.

ARTnews has contacted the museums for comment.

The Brooklyn Museum’s second contract guarantees annual raises and increases the minimum salaries for full-time positions to between $63,585 and $129,854, depending on position level. The increases take effect retroactively to July 1, and these minimums will rise another 10.34 percent by the end of the contract. Meanwhile, front-facing visitor services and retail associates will earn between $28.69 and $32 per hour by the end of the contract.

“We are pleased to have negotiated a second contract that preserves the quality of our health care and provides significant wage increases,” Elizabeth St. George, an assistant curator at the Brooklyn Museum, said in a statement. “It was important to us to maintain affordable health care, including keeping an out of network option.”

At the Brooklyn Museum, the new agreement follows a period of tension over layoffs and the museum’s finances. In early 2025, museum leadership announced plans to cut more than 10 percent of its staff while contending with a $10 million operating deficit. The decision prompted backlash from the two unions representing museum workers, DC 37 Local 1502 and UAW Local 2110, whose representatives said they had not been consulted.

The cuts, however, never materialized. Union members rallied outside the museum for weeks in protest, eventually drawing the attention of the New York City Council, which responded with a $2.5 million grant to help offset the museum’s financial shortfall.

The AFAM union has ratified its inaugural contract after nearly two years of bargaining. The new contract guarantees annual wage increases totaling 13.6 percent over four years for all staff. Entry-level employees in the museum store and security and facilities associates will receive raises of between 8 and 22 percent, retroactive to July 1. The contract also establishes a binding grievance procedure and additional pay for employees who take on extra duties or are required to work on-site during an emergency. It limits the museum’s use of temporary employees and subcontractors in place of regular staff and ensures health-care coverage without employee premium contributions.

Richard Ho, director of information technologies at AFAM, who has worked at the museum for 25 years, said in a statement: “AFAM staff voted unanimously to unionize to address pressing concerns about our workplace. I’m happy that we were able to reach an agreement that will make the Museum a more sustainable place to work for all of us. I’m proud that our entire staff stayed involved and supported each other throughout this process.”

Earlier this year, the AFAM union picketed the museum’s annual fundraising gala to draw attention to stalled negotiations and denounce the museum’s initial offer to raise the minimum wage for front-facing staff from $19 to $21.50 an hour without guaranteeing existing benefits.

The recent agreements bring a tense chapter of labor negotiations to a close. In late September, unionized staff at the Brooklyn Museum held a strike-authorization vote alongside unionized workers at the Whitney Museum and AFAM. The unions cited concerns including job security, affordable health care, and wages that meet New York City’s inflated cost of living.

The Guggenheim Museum union, which organized in 2021 and includes approximately 150 curators, conservators, educators, and public programmers, ratified its first contract in 2023, a two-and-a-half-year agreement. In February 2025, the museum announced that it was laying off 20 employees—7 percent of its workforce—as Mariët Westermann, the museum’s director and chief executive since 2024, cited a “financial picture” that had deteriorated over the previous decade.

Negotiations for a new contract began in December 2025, with Guggenheim’s bargaining unit seeking “strengthened job security provisions, including advance notice of layoffs, and improved severance pay,” according to a statement released during negotiations. Union chair Drew Reynolds separately described the February layoffs as having been “implemented chaotically.”

In March, the Guggenheim union picketed the museum’s opening reception for its high-profile Carol Bove survey, protesting what union members said were repeated rejections of their demands by Guggenheim leadership.

According to UAW Local 2110, the Jewish Museum union also ratified its second contract in September.

The Whitney Museum union, meanwhile, remains at the bargaining table, with a strike date looming on October 5—three days before member previews begin for the museum’s major Roy Lichtenstein retrospective. Roughly 200 Whitney employees unionized in 2021, following two rounds of layoffs that reduced the workforce by 20 percent.

Local 2110, which represents museum workers across the country, said in a statement that it is currently negotiating new contracts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the South Street Seaport Museum, and the Noguchi Museum.