Staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan have voted by a 76% margin in a National Labor Relations Board election to unionize with UAW Local 2110. The ballot tally was 542 yes votes for the union with 172 votes against.
The ballots of an additional 100 people remain sealed because they were challenged by the Museum which objected to inclusion of these staff in the union.
The eligibility of staff in these positions will be determined through a mutually agreed upon arbitration process after the union is officially certified by the National Labor Relations Board.
Workers at the Museum had been organizing for over four years before the election, over concerns about job security, pay equity and greater transparency about employment policies.
“I’ve worked at The Met for 31 years and I truly love it but our expertise and our labor have real value deserving of recognition,” said Stephanie Post, a Digital Archivist, “By unionizing, we aren’t just protecting our own jobs — we are building a collective voice to ensure every staff member, now and in the future, gets the respect and protection they deserve.”
“We won because we were able to convince our colleagues that they don’t have to accept whatever is offered to them, that their experience and hard work has earned them a seat at the table,” said Rebecca Capua, a conservator who has worked at the Museum for sixteen years.
The unit is composed of staff across fifty different departments of the Museum and includes curators, conservators, librarians, sales specialists, visitor experience coordinators, development officers, archivists, digital and IT staff, and more.
“Organizing with my Met colleagues was an incredible, galvanizing experience that I will never forget,” said Alison Clark, a Collections Manager in Asian Art who has worked at the Museum for over 20 years. “Unionizing with UAW Local 2110 is only our first step and we look forward to negotiating a fair and equitable contract that reflects staff needs and priorities.”
Thousands of museum workers have organized since the COVID-19 pandemic. Local 2110 UAW already represents workers at multiple art museums and other cultural institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the MFA, Boston, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum, the Jewish Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, the New York Historical Society, the Shed, the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Tenement Museum, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Film at Lincoln Center, Film Forum and Anthology Film Archives.
New York City is currently experiencing the largest nurses strike in City history. Roughly 15,000 nurses went on strike at multiple campuses operated by three private hospital systems on January 12th: NewYork-Presbyterian, Mount Sinai, and Montefiore.
“For months, nurses have been bargaining for fair contracts, but management has refused to settle fair contracts that include enforceable safe staffing ratios, guaranteed healthcare benefits for frontline nurses, and protections from workplace violence,” according to The New York State Nursing Association.
In early March, 2025 the National Labor Relations Board was targeted by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, who with law enforcement escort, accessed the board’s databases for information, including sensitive information on unionizing employees, ongoing legal cases, labor investigations, and corporate secrets.
According to members of the IT staff, they were given little indication of what was happening apart from that DOGE demanded top level IT access to read, write, and copy data unrestricted; before they were told to stay out of DOGE’s way.
DOGE engineers then shortly thereafter installed a ‘container’, which allowed engineers backdoor access and to work invisibly. DOGE then proceeded to attempt to cover their tracks by turning off monitoring tools and deleting records of their access.
Soon after, the Board began detecting suspicious login attempts from Russian IP addresses; twenty attempts using the precise login credentials created by DOGE began within 15 minutes of the accounts being set up.
A whistle blower also revealed that he had received a threatening note, including apparent drone photos of him walking his dog.
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