Guggenheim Museum employees ratify the Union Contract
The Guggenheim Museum announced Tuesday that after more than two years of negotiations, it had reached an agreement with its union and that nearly 150 curators, conservators and other employees affiliated with Local 2110 of the United Auto Workers had ratified their first contract.
The contract is effective immediately and provides an average salary increase of 11 percent over the term of the two-and-a-half-year contract, which runs through December 31, 2025. The contract provides enhanced health and retirement benefits and includes a grievance procedure with arbitration and the require managers to have a good reason to fire an employee.
The museum said in a statement from communications director Sara Fox that it is “pleased to announce that we have reached an agreement.”
The demands for unionization coincided with some of the greatest challenges Guggenheim leaders had faced in the museum’s eighty years. Employees organized in 2021 during the pandemic, when workers felt great uncertainty about layoffs. The organization also underwent a moment of deep reflection on race, with its chief curator, Nancy Spector, leaving her job.
Two years earlier, art handlers and maintenance workers had voted to join Local 30 of the International Union of Operating Engineers. The museum’s then-director, Richard Armstrong, emailed employees saying he believed a union would sow division at the institution “on a daily basis.” (Armstrong retired this year and no new director has been appointed yet.)
“It feels great to have a contract that is the culmination of all our organizing efforts,” said Julie K. Smitka, associate producer at the museum, in a statement. “It’s transformative for our workplace. Not only are there increases greater than what the Guggenheim has historically awarded, but we now have rights to the work that are legally enforceable.”
The Guggenheim said that while there had been other pay increases, they had not been locked in for years.
Local 2110 organizer Maida Rosenstein said in an interview that the terms of the contract were roughly similar to those in other contracts the union has signed with institutions such as the Whitney Museum and the New museum. But the contract has a term that is considerably shorter than that in other agreements: half the standard term of five years.
“For an initial contract, a shorter contract is better because it serves as a foundation on which we can build in future negotiations,” Alan Seise, public programs manager and member of the negotiating committee, said in a telephone interview. “The Guggenheim is in a moment of change, and I think the unionization efforts are part of that.”