The Buffalo AKG Art Museum, formerly the Albright – Knox Art Gallery, was examined after the institution had dismissed 13 employees and organized the staff to effectively remove the trade union positions.
Buffalo AKG Workers UnitedThe trade union that represents employees in the visitor experience (VEX), facility management and food services, departments, claims That the Western New York Art Museum takes revenge on organizing efforts by eliminating employees of the largest organized department for hiring more non-union roles.
The museum has not yet responded Hyperallergicthe immediate request for comment.
The personnel changes follow more than a year of trade union efforts at the AKG, resulting in his first contract in December. Planned to come into effect at the beginning of April, the reductions will influence three full-time and 10 part-time vex employees, said Casey Moore, organizing director of employees who united Upstate NY, in an e-mail to Hyperallergic.
As a result of the cuts, the VEX department, Those representatives of the reception, gallery visitors and daily operational volunteers will be reduced by more than half of the SICNE staff who started organizing, said Moore, and noted that these fires follow an earlier round of reductions that influenced 15 VEX staff employees.
Eleven days ago, the museum posted New vacancies For 11 conservation and safety staff, a non-trade union guard position.
“At a time when the rights of employees are attacked nationally, it is terrible to see that AKG takes a page from the Playbook of Elon Musk it undermines his own employees and our heavily fought rights,” said Moore, who further describes the reductions as “a” thin veiled attempt to hide … trade union. “
Andrea Harden, director of the Museum of Talent and Culture, said Buffalo News Reporters in a statement that the changes to the staff are based on the past 20 months of operational experience, since the AKG has been reopened after one $ 230 million expansion and renovationWho saw the institution double his exhibition space.
“We concluded that the role of the visitor experience employee did not function as we expected,” said Harden.
“As a result of this planned operational change, the preservation and safety staff, which has always protected the assets and facilities of the AKG, will no longer be the parts of that task with visitor experience employees and return to full responsibility for their original and essential service,” said Harden Buffalo News.
Today, March 7, museum employees and members of the Buffalo community gathered outside the museum First Friday programming With an inflatable scab and signs that the director of Janne Sirén from the museum calls to stop the dismissals. Another sign Accused AKG officials of the benefit of the recent department of the Department of Government, guided by the Elon Musk Staff are cut at the National Labor Relations Board.
Employees in the Brooklyn Museum of New York City have expressed a similar criticism of the institution’s decision to dismiss 47 employees in the light of a budget lack of $ 10 million. During a meeting yesterday, Brandon Mancilla, a regional director for UAW, one of the two trade unions that represents employees in the museum, derived what he called an ‘austerity culture’. Last week the Guggenheim Museum also announced dismissed, with 20 employees immediately without salary reductions for senior staff.
Tayia Woolford, an employee of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum since the end of 2023, regretted the loss of her role in the VEX department in a statement Hyperallergic.
“The museum told me we were a family,” said Woolford. “Now I have been left in the dust in the middle of a home crisis.”
