The Brooklyn Museum is pausing the planned layoffs of nearly 50 workers after the City of New York confirmed an additional $100,000 in funding for the 2025 fiscal year and 27 staff members accepted voluntary separation packages.
“However, we continue to await confirmation of the promised additional funding for next fiscal year,” Director Anne Pasternak said in an email to staff today, March 24, reviewed by Hyperallergic. If that money does not materialize, Pasternak warned, the museum “will unfortunately need to move ahead with the previously planned reductions by June 30, 2025.”
In response to Hyperallergic‘s request for comment, a Brooklyn Museum spokesperson said “museum leadership is continuing its productive conversations with the City regarding funding.”
Unions, workers, and supporters fought for weeks against the institution’s highly criticized plan to lay off 47 employees, more than 10% of its workforce, in the face of a $10 million budget deficit. After a series of rallies outside the museum and a special oversight hearing at City Hall, leadership agreed to voluntary separation packages and retirement incentives — alternatives to staff cuts that District Council 37 Local 1502 and UAW Local 2110, the museum’s two unions, had long advocated for.
“There is no reason why 47 people should be losing their jobs until we exhaust everything possible,” DC 37 Executive Director Henry A. Garrido said at the City Council hearing on February 28, recalling that the museum offered furloughs to workers during a similar period of financial turmoil in 2016.
Pasternak shared a plan to implement what she described as “difficult cuts and strategic investments” during an all-staff meeting on February 7. In addition to layoffs, she said the museum would cut back programming, freeze hiring for positions that are not “critical for financial growth,” and reduce senior staff salaries by 10% to 20%. The museum’s popular First Saturdays event was paused for two months as part of the cost-saving plan.
Throughout six weeks of protests and negotiations, union leaders stressed their view that workers should not be taking the fall for the institution’s economic troubles. “They created a deficit and they want to balance that deficit on the back of our unions,” Local 1502 President Wilson Souffrant said at a March 6 rally.
The news of the Brooklyn Museum’s tentative pause on layoffs comes as cultural workers across the country brace for instability and cuts amid rising expenses, unpredictable federal funding, and loosening labor protections. On February 28, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City laid off 20 workers effective immediately, without salary cuts for senior staffers. This month, unions representing workers at the Asian Art Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco pushed back against possible layoffs in light of a city budget reduction proposal.
