Workers at New York’s Hispanic Museum and Library (also known as the Hispanic Society of America) will go on strike indefinitely beginning Monday, March 27. The union voted yesterday to clear the action by a margin of 78% after rejecting the “last, best final offer.”
The museum, located on West 155th Street in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, houses a collection of Spanish and Portuguese art in a beautiful Beaux-Arts building.
The Hispanic Society’s small staff of about 20 people organized in July 2021 with UAW Local 2110, the wide-reaching union that now represents cultural workers at institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim Museum. Negotiations with the management of the Hispanic Society began in September 2021, but now, nearly a year and a half later, museum employees are still operating without contracts.
Negotiations became tense and the union filed four charges of unfair labor practices against the museum administration last year. Workers cite health care as the biggest hurdle to reaching a deal.
“We accepted lower salaries than we could earn at other institutions because of benefits,” Librarian Javier Milligan said in a statement shared with Hyperallergic. Patrick Lenaghan, curator of prints and photographs who has worked at the institution for 28 years, said Hyperallergic about a long-standing “verbal agreement” in which workers in the Hispanic company accepted below-market wages in exchange for free pensions and health care.
The Hispanic Society did not respond to Hyperallergicrequest for comment.
Workers organized after the administration cut pensions. Now their free health care is also at risk. Throughout contract negotiations, the union lobbied for the museum to continue covering insurance premiums. Workers say the wage increases proposed by executives do not financially offset the new health care costs on the table.
The union also wants increases of five per cent, four per cent and four per cent over the three-year contract. Lenaghan said workers at the Hispanic Society earn around $40,000 to $100,000 a year and haven’t received a raise since negotiations began in 2021 (and he hasn’t received a raise salary since 2018).
The Hispanic Society has been largely closed to the public since 2017 for renovations, though the library has opened intermittently and an exhibit space features temporary exhibitions show. In a February letter to museum administrators, the union lamented that management had “failed to meet deadlines for the reopening of the library” and that “no realistic date exists for the reopening of the museum with its collection. permanent fully installed”. The museum says it will reopen in April, but Lenaghan pointed out that much of its collection is for rent.
“They say that,” Lenaghan said. “But we were told December, we were told so many emotional dates.” He added that with so many of his works on display at other institutions, the reopened Hispanic Society will be “disillusioning” to visitors who were familiar with the collection or remembered how it hung before closing.
Lenaghan called the holdings “the finest collection outside of Spain” and pointed out that the museum’s “skeletal” workforce prevents the institution from performing to its potential and will ultimately only harm the collection.
“If you work in this field, the chance to work with this material is amazing,” he added. He thinks the collection is on par with those of the Morgan Library or the Frick, but “without the infrastructure”.
