Whitney Union Sets Strike Date Days Before Major Roy Lichtenstein Show

Unionized staff at the Whitney Museum of Art will begin striking on Monday, October 5, if they cannot reach a contract agreement with the museum, Local 2110 UAW announced today.

Workers at the Whitney Museum approved strike action earlier this month in a milestone vote held in conjunction with unions at the Brooklyn Museum and American Folk Art Museum. The Whitney union, however, is the first to put a deadline on the calendar—October 5, only three days before member and press previews open for the museum’s major Roy Lichtenstein retrospective (the show opens to the public October 11).

The union’s first contract, ratified in 2023 after 16 months of bargaining, expired in June. The three-and-a-half-year contract covered approximately 200 workers and raised the wage floor significantly across the museum: staff members who made the minimum hourly rate of $17 in 2023 were subsequently paid $22, with a final salary bump to $24 per hour by 2025.

For their second contract, the union is asking museum leadership to guarantee a base salary for full-time employees that meets the minimum income that a single, childless adult in New York needs to afford a basic standard of living: at least $71,000, or $34 per hour, according to the government’s most recent True Cost of Living Measure Annual Report.

“It’s not that we want to strike,” Derrick Charles, a membership associate at the Whitney and the union’s chairperson, said in a statement. “We’d rather be working and doing our jobs, but our wages are untenable for making ends meet in New York City.” Charles has held the position since 2018 and earns $24 an hour. In this round of negotiations, the union is also calling on the museum to ensure that health care costs remain affordable for employees.

“Our health care costs are high, especially when you consider our salary levels,” Micah Musheno, a licensing manager who has worked at the museum for nine years, said in a statement. “Those of us with families pay 15–20% of the premium for coverage. That’s thousands of dollars annually for people who are already struggling.”

A spokesperson for the Whitney Museum told ARTnews at the time of the strike vote that it “continues bargaining in good faith and remains committed to arriving at a fair, reasonable contract that respects the needs of all parties.”