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Metropolitan Museum Completes Round of Layoffs
By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: June 22, 2009
The Metropolitan Museum of Art said on Monday that it had completed a significant round of layoffs and voluntary retirements that it had warned in March would probably be necessary to contend with deep losses in its endowment.
Over the last few weeks, the museum laid off 74 employees and gave retirement packages to 95 others who chose to accept them, it said. Though the museum declined to identify or describe the specific roles of employees who have left, it said those departing included some members of the curatorial staff.
The museum earlier closed 15 of its satellite retail shops around the country and laid off 127 merchandising employees. The rest of the staff reduction was accomplished through attrition, with a hiring freeze over the last six months and many part-time contracts not being renewed.
The overall cuts leave the museum staff 14 percent smaller, with about 2,200 full-time and part-time employees. The goal of the cuts had been a 10 percent reduction, but the number of employees who took voluntary retirement was much higher than the museum had expected.
“This realignment is a painful but unavoidable consequence of the global financial crisis,” James R. Houghton, the museum’s chairman, said in a written statement, adding that he believed the cuts “placed the institution on a sure footing to manage its resources over the next 12 months” without any serious cuts to programming.
From last summer through Jan. 1, the most recent date for which figures are available, the museum’s endowment — one of the largest in the country for an art institution — lost an estimated $800 million, or 28 percent of its value, down from a high of $2.9 billion. The endowment pays for about a third of the museum’s operating budget, which was also dented by lower operating assistance from the city during the 2009 fiscal year.
Mr. Houghton said the savings from the layoffs and retirements — about $10 million — would not completely fill the hole in the 2010 operating budget but would come close enough so that the public would probably “discern no difference at all in the visitor experience it has been our privilege to offer to them here.” Harold Holzer, a Met spokesman, said that program cuts might mean fewer concerts and lectures but that the museum’s hours would remain the same, as would the number of galleries open.
The museum joins many others across the country that are retrenching in similar or more extreme ways, cutting budgets, staff and the kinds of expansion plans that seemed ubiquitous only a couple of years ago. Among those that have imposed layoffs are the Cincinnati Art Museum, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The Guggenheim Museum announced last week that it would reduce its full-time staff by 8 percent through layoffs and positions left vacant.
The Metropolitan’s staff cuts are the first time since the fiscal crisis in the 1970s that the museum has resorted to layoffs.
By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: June 22, 2009
The Metropolitan Museum of Art said on Monday that it had completed a significant round of layoffs and voluntary retirements that it had warned in March would probably be necessary to contend with deep losses in its endowment.
Over the last few weeks, the museum laid off 74 employees and gave retirement packages to 95 others who chose to accept them, it said. Though the museum declined to identify or describe the specific roles of employees who have left, it said those departing included some members of the curatorial staff.
The museum earlier closed 15 of its satellite retail shops around the country and laid off 127 merchandising employees. The rest of the staff reduction was accomplished through attrition, with a hiring freeze over the last six months and many part-time contracts not being renewed.
The overall cuts leave the museum staff 14 percent smaller, with about 2,200 full-time and part-time employees. The goal of the cuts had been a 10 percent reduction, but the number of employees who took voluntary retirement was much higher than the museum had expected.
“This realignment is a painful but unavoidable consequence of the global financial crisis,” James R. Houghton, the museum’s chairman, said in a written statement, adding that he believed the cuts “placed the institution on a sure footing to manage its resources over the next 12 months” without any serious cuts to programming.
From last summer through Jan. 1, the most recent date for which figures are available, the museum’s endowment — one of the largest in the country for an art institution — lost an estimated $800 million, or 28 percent of its value, down from a high of $2.9 billion. The endowment pays for about a third of the museum’s operating budget, which was also dented by lower operating assistance from the city during the 2009 fiscal year.
Mr. Houghton said the savings from the layoffs and retirements — about $10 million — would not completely fill the hole in the 2010 operating budget but would come close enough so that the public would probably “discern no difference at all in the visitor experience it has been our privilege to offer to them here.” Harold Holzer, a Met spokesman, said that program cuts might mean fewer concerts and lectures but that the museum’s hours would remain the same, as would the number of galleries open.
The museum joins many others across the country that are retrenching in similar or more extreme ways, cutting budgets, staff and the kinds of expansion plans that seemed ubiquitous only a couple of years ago. Among those that have imposed layoffs are the Cincinnati Art Museum, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The Guggenheim Museum announced last week that it would reduce its full-time staff by 8 percent through layoffs and positions left vacant.
The Metropolitan’s staff cuts are the first time since the fiscal crisis in the 1970s that the museum has resorted to layoffs.
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