Amid plans to move forward with mass layoffs at the Brooklyn Museum, members of the institution’s two unions rallied outside the main entrance on Eastern Parkway on Tuesday (25 February) to protest the plan to terminate 47 employees by 10 March. Members of United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2110 and Local 1502 of District Council 37—a division of the DC 37 union that represents art handlers, curatorial assistants and maintenance workers—gathered to make their concerns known to the public and to museum leadership. Workers represented by the unions range from clerical workers, assistants, educators, curators, conservators, guards and retail workers to technicians.
Chants of “What’s disgusting? Union busting!” could be heard all along Eastern Parkway. People from other institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, were present to support their colleagues. Passersby joined in by honking and shouting: “Brooklyn is a union town!” Within half an hour, the crowd grew to at least 100 as people stepped up to the bullhorn to give speeches.
According to Wilson Souffrant, the president of Local 1502, the rally was planned for the evening of the Chairman’s Dinner—an event for major donors and trustees—to put pressure on the institution, which is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year. Guest speakers at the rally included Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso, alongside New York City council members Crystal Hudson and Justin Brannan.
“The 200th-anniversary event that it's celebrating would not be possible without the very same staff that the museum wants to lay off,” Maida Rosenstein, director of organising for UAW Local 2110, tells The Art Newspaper.
Leadership has cited an increasing budget deficit of nearly $10m as the reason for cutting essential staff, programming and scaling back exhibitions. On 7 February, Anne Pasternak, the museum’s director, posted a statement saying, in part: “Our research and planning work explored all avenues for financial relief before turning to the elimination of positions.” Both unions say that they were not consulted prior to the layoff announcement—and that the plan violates union contracts.
While speaking at the rally, Reynoso called on New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, and the local government to cover the deficit. Hudson agreed that “$10m is a drop in the bucket” for the city to help balance out and spoke about how cultural workers cannot continue to beg for funding year after year. Brannan similarly shared that he and his colleagues did not fight so hard to reverse budget cuts to cultural institutions last year just to make way for staff reductions. “We need to see if we can find some savings in other places. Laying off workers should never be on the table,” Brannan said.
Brooklyn’s borough president, Antonio Reynoso, speaks at the protest Photo: Elly Belle
Of the nearly 50 employees set to be cut, 19 are members of Local 1502 and 21 are members of UAW Local 2110. The remaining employees are non-union and occupy managerial roles. Since receiving the news, union leadership has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the museum to stop the layoffs, and the unions have attempted to bargain with management. The rally is the latest stopgap in attempting to leverage the court of public opinion, to reason with museum leadership and to demand the institution explore alternative options to layoffs.
“Our purpose is to let all those donors and trustees coming in know that the museum is not doing what they think they are,” Souffrant says. “They’re talking about equity and diversity, but at the end of the day, they were spending lavishly, knowing that there's going to be a time where there's going to be a layoff.”
Souffrant emphasises that DC 37 successfully negotiated a furlough instead of layoffs back in 2016, and that it would be possible to stave off layoffs again, if museum leadership were bargaining in good faith—which union members say is not the case. This all comes at a time when the National Labor Relations Board has effectively been shut down by the Trump administration, and there is little to no oversight on wrongful labour practices.
Pasternak has defended the layoffs by noting that salaries make up 70% of the museum's operational budget, which stands at $64m for the 2025 fiscal year. More than $1m went to Pasternak’s salary in 2023, according to publicly available filings. According to her letter, leaders at the museum plan to take pay cuts of up to 20%. The institution also plans to decrease the number of exhibitions per year from around 12 to an average of nine, reduce weeknight events and increase weekend events. It has also suspended its trademark First Saturdays programming. Rosenstein and Souffrant are concerned that extra work produced by any staff shortage will fall on the shoulders of remaining employees.
The institution has come under public pressure recently. In 2024, pro-Palestinian protests targeted the museum, demanding that leadership disclose any investments related to Israel, then divest. In June of that year, protestors hung a banner calling Pasternak a “white-supremacist Zionist” at the entrance to her apartment building, smeared red paint on the door and similarly targeted the homes of two other museum leaders. (Three people were subsequently charged with hate crimes for the act.)
In response to a request for comment on the rally, a Brooklyn Museum spokesperson said: “We respect the rights of our union-represented employees to organise and rally. We remain in active negotiation with union leadership, in accordance with our contracts, and are committed to working with the members of UAW Local 2110 and DC 37 Local 1502 during this period.”
The Committee on Civil Service and Labor will host a hearing examining the layoffs on Friday (28 February) at 10am. Museum workers plan to speak there, and the hearing is open to the public. Union members encourage the public to contact Pasternak and demand the layoffs be cancelled.
“This is about standing in solidarity to fight these layoffs,” says Liz St George, one of the affected workers and the union chair for Local 2110. “The museum is going to have to get the money from somewhere else, not from its workers, who are the heart and soul of this institution.”
