SF Museum Workers Push Back Against Proposals to Slash Staff

San Francisco art museums may lay off staff and reduce operating hours to meet the city’s budget reduction proposal as workers elsewhere fear a wave of cost-cutting measures impacting cultural institutions, including the Brooklyn Museum and the Guggenheim in New York.

The Asian Art Museum (AAM) and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), which comprises the de Young and the Legion of Honor museums, proposed the staff cuts last month for the city’s 2026 fiscal year budget, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Submitted to the office of the city’s newly elected Mayor Daniel Lurie, the measures respond to former Mayor London Breed’s mandate for all city departments to plan for a 15% general expense reduction in order to address a projected budget shortfall of $876 million over the next two years.

In order to meet this target, FAMSF is being asked to cut $3.3 million from its general city fund budget, which accounts for about 20% of the institution’s total budget and primarily supports building maintenance and security staffing. The other 80% is provided by the Corporation of the Fine Arts Museums (COFAM), a private nonprofit that oversees non-City employees at the de Young and Legion of Honor.

In its proposal, FAMSF said the budget reduction would require eliminating 23 of 99 city-funded staff positions across its two museums. The layoffs would mostly affect full-time security personnel, as approximately 20 positions in that department would be eliminated under the plan, in addition to roles in human resources, registration, and mechanical engineering.

“The layoffs would have a disproportionate effect on employees who identify as [People Of Color] due to the high concentration of POC amongst our security team,” FAMSF’s budget reduction plan for 2025 through 2027 noted.

The plan also said that both the de Young and Legion of Honor museums would reduce weekly public operating hours by closing on Tuesdays. This scheduling change, which adds to the museums’ preexisting Monday closures, would decrease its annual visitors by 150,000, leading to a loss in admissions revenue generated from tourism, local community visits, and student trips, the proposal warned.

While COFAM reported a deficit of more than $3.8 million in its 2023 tax records, Helena Nordstrom, FAMSF’s director of communications, told Hyperallergic in a statement that the organization’s finances “remain stable,” citing more than 1.1 million visitors to the de Young and Legion of Honor museums in 2024.

“While no final decision on the City budget has been made, it is our understanding that the Mayor’s Budget Office does not want to reduce operating hours at the de Young or Legion of Honor,” Nordstrom said, adding that the institution is continuing to work with the Mayor’s office on exploring other expense-saving options.

The budget reduction plan submitted by the Asian Art Museum last month similarly involves downsizing full-time staff in order to trim $1.7 million off its operating expenses, cutting 11 to 13 full-time employees.

“Our security team, already lean and reduced, would absorb the brunt of such a reduction,” the plan read, noting that this reduction would cut the number of security guards scheduled to oversee the museum when it’s open to the public by almost half. Currently, AAM operates with 13 to 15 security guards during visiting hours.

“In our experience, it would be unsafe to operate the museum with this level of security coverage. Therefore, we would have to either limit visitor access to a small section of the museum or close the museum altogether,” the plan warned. 

FAMSF and AAM have not yet responded to Hyperallergic’s request for comment.

Unionized workers at the museums have pushed back against these budget plans, arguing that the city’s projected deficit should not be used as a reason for staff cuts and reduced operating hours. They maintain that the budget forecast historically does not reflect the reality of San Francisco’s operating expenses.

“We believe that it would be ill-advised and detrimental to the museums, the workers, arts patrons, students, tourists, and the City itself to lay off workers and reduce operating hours based on a projection that not only has not happened yet (and where there are still multiple other options for City savings and revenue collection) and that historically has not happened,” said Jennie Smith-Camejo, a spokesperson for the SEIU 1021 union, in an email to Hyperallergic. 

SEIU 1021 represents security guards, registrar workers, and admission attendants at the de Young, Legion of Honor, AAM, and other cultural institutions in the Bay Area. 

In February, SEIU 1021 members who work at the AAM, FAMSF, and other nearby institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Oakland Museum of California rallied outside the California Association of Museums Conference to demand fair contracts, better wages, and more transparency in leadership decision-making. 

FAMSF museum guard Raina Johnson, who has worked at the de Young and Legion of Honor since 2005, told Hyperallergic that workers are concerned about the stability of their employment as well as the potential effects on the institutional operations. 

“ We already deal with a lot of challenges daily, and when you start talking about reducing staff, what kind of impact is that going to have on the officers?” Johnson said, adding that in recent years the union has already been struggling to prevent staff cuts that put the museum and its operations at risk. “As soon as any emergency happens, the first thing they need to do is call us.”

Johnson noted that unionized workers have been concerned by museum leaders’ lack of collaboration with staffers in drafting the budget reduction plans. There are currently at least five museum guards who only began working at the FAMSF about a year ago.

“In dealing with this budget challenge, we want to make sure that museum leadership and San Francisco leadership are valuing their own assets by valuing the workers that are there to keep the place safe,” Johnson said.

The Mayors’ Office has not yet responded to Hyperallergic’s request for comment.

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