LRI Ink: UAW's Latest Strike Target + Your Rapid Response Team

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Subject: LRI Ink: UAW's Latest Strike Target + Your Rapid Response Team

September 24, 2026

To visit the blog post, click on the link below the article.

A shorter newsletter this week since several members of our team are out of the office attending meetings and legal conferences. We'll be back with our normal full coverage next week.

Is The UAW Plotting A Coordinated Museum Workers Strike? Sure Looks Like It

by Kimberly Ricci

There are few things that United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain loves more than launching profane rants that are documented by the union’s federal monitor. One of those things would be voluminous picket lines.

Fain is rubbing his hands together like a cartoon villain over his 2028 general strike plans. He relished the UAW’s so-called "Stand-Up Strike" against the Big Three automakers in 2023. That event peaked with around 40,000 participating workers, and the union later put about 48,000 University of California workers on strike.

Could Fain be hoping for the same with museum workers? He won’t reach the above numbers, but his union is aiming for art-world disruption.

From Petitions To Picket Lines

When the NLRB reopened late last year, museum worker petitions stood out among the initial flood. The wave continued through this summer, so this is not a passing trend, although it remains absurd that 900+ workers at NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (“The Met”) believe that the UAW is somehow equipped to represent them.

By the way, bargaining sessions at The Met haven’t led to a contract yet.

The UAW has been aggressive in its efforts to unionize museum guest service workers, educators, technologists, curators, librarians, volunteer coordinators, and other roles. The union recently won in its own backyard at the Michigan Science Center in Detroit, and in NYC, museum workers are increasingly greenlighting UAW strikes.

On Sept. 17, over 300 UAW-represented workers from three NYC museums–the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the American Folk Art Museum–voted to authorize a strike. No strike date has been pinpointed yet, but these greenlights happened on the same day, and the union pointed out that“ each museum has a major exhibition opening in early October.” And back in June, UAW members at NYC’s Guggenheim Museum also authorized a strike after contract negotiations stalled, although that strike hasn’t happened yet.

Granted, the UAW is not the only union that’s organizing museum workers lately. AFSCME has claimed success in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Denver. In Rochester, NY, George Eastman Museum staffers filed a petition for a Workers United election. The UAW isn’t the sole union authorizing strikes, either. In Sausalito, CA, Bay Area Discovery Museum SEIU members greenlit a strike over their frustrations with contract discussions.

For Now, Watching And Waiting

In Shawn Fain’s eyes, there ain’t no strike like a UAW strike, and although these four UAW museum-strike authorizations don’t add up to Big Three or University of California volume, this is still something that employers shouldn’t ignore. If union members at The Met also give the greenlight, over a thousand museum workers could walk out of their jobs, which would cause massive headaches for the Big Apple’s art world.

What we know is this: the UAW has been collecting museum workers over the past year, and the union is not being subtle about mentioning that those October exhibition openings are coming. Fain loves to coordinate strikes, and this could give him media coverage for something other than that grand jury subpoena.

For employers in any industry, this is a reminder that although workers might feel passionate about their fields, that passion has limits. If pay rates and job security start to feel shaky, and an organization's public-facing values don’t match its internal practices, workers are more likely to listen when union organizers roll around. Museums are learning that now, and the same goes for universities, hospitals, and just about every other field these days. Leaders who maintain direct relationships with their workers, on the other hand, will be much more prepared to avoid the bargaining table.

Blog Post

Build Your Rapid Response Team Before You Need It

by Michael VanDervort

A member-led empowER™ discussion with Kelsie Beckfield of Medtronic and Eric Vanetti of LRI, October 7 at 1 pm ET.

Most employers learn how ready their response team is the day an organizing campaign surfaces, with no time left to train anyone. Supervisors field questions they have never practiced answering, and HR spends the first 48 hours sorting out who makes which call.

The employers who handle that first week well did the work months earlier. They chose the right people, trained them in a way that stuck, and kept the team active between activations so the skills didn't fade.

On October 7, Kelsie Beckfield of Medtronic and Eric Vanetti of LRI Consulting Services (LRI) will lead a member-led discussion in the empowER™ community, hosted by HR Acuity, on how to build that kind of team. The conversation will cover:

Who belongs on a rapid response team, and who does not
How to structure training people retain
Keeping the team sharp during long quiet stretches
What has worked, and what has fallen apart, once activity starts

Bring your questions, the problems your team has run into, and the practices that have held up for you. You will leave with a clearer picture of how other organizations stay prepared.

Building and Training Rapid Response Teams
Wednesday, October 7, 2026
1:00 to 1:45 PM EDT (12:00 to 12:45 PM CDT)

empowER™ membership is required, and joining is free.

Join empowER™ and register to attend

Friday Five: Doctors On Strike, Dues Shenanigans, And A Supreme Court Pass

by Kimberly Ricci

150 doctors went on strike at Allina Health:

Nurse strikes constantly make news due to their plentiful nature, but doctor strikes remain rare. On that note, the American College of Physicians Ethics Manual states, “Physicians should not engage in strikes, work stoppages, slowdowns, boycotts [that could] limit or deny services to patients that would otherwise be available.”

That ethical tenet didn’t stop a 2023 resident strike in New York, nor did it halt this week’s walkout in Minnesota, where 150 Allina Health doctors went on strike at Mercy Hospital for four days, a year after holding informational pickets between appointments.

In 2024, these doctors unionized with Doctors Council-SEIU while expressing concerns about post-COVID staffing and other stressors. They’re also concerned about Allina’s upcoming merger with Sutter Health. However, Allina has stressed that no cancellations on appointments occurred, and only around 10% of Mercy physicians are unionized with Doctor’s Council-SEIU.

More at Allina: This month 60 hospice nurses went on strike for seven days over wages.

Gallup poll: more bipartisan support for unions?

A new Gallup poll suggests that “a majority of Republicans” (that would be 52%) who responded believe that unions should have more influence. That number compares to 70% of Independents and 89% of Democrats, and that latter figure is no shock, since progressive politicians generally hold a more favorable view towards Big Labor.

Does this point toward a trend? Not really, because 52% is barely a majority, but as Gallup points out, this is only the second time that the number has been that high in a quarter of a century. At the same time, the U.S. is also seeing a bipartisan group of lawmakers pushing the Teamsters-promoted Faster Labor Contracts Act, which will be bad for workers and employers by forcing first contracts despite their complexity.

Let’s just say that the above percentages aren’t anything to write home about, but as with lawmakers, party lines don’t always dictate who’s susceptible to union messaging.

The National Right to Work (NRTW) Foundation takes on dues shenanigans:

When a handful of workers recently resigned their membership with two unions, they were dismayed to find that the unions kept deducting dues from their paychecks. The NRTW Foundation is now providing legal support to those employees, located in Louisiana and Washington, in their push to overturn the 1979 NLRB decision that makes it possible for union officials to keep raking in dues on an expired contract, even if a current contract isn’t in sight.

The Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART) and United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) were relying upon the Board’s Frito-Lay, Inc. decision, which allows unions to deny workers the ability to revoke dues authorization outside a narrow “window period” within the union’s discretion. The plaintiffs who are being represented by the NRTW Foundation now want Frito-Lay, Inc. reevaluated.

It’s an interesting case for several reasons, including how unions have less incentive to bargain in good faith for new contracts if they know that they won’t lose dues money when they stall. We’ll be watching for further developments.

The Supreme Court denied a pause on Thryv remedies again:

The Supreme Court has denied multiple employers seeking injunctive relief from the Abruzzo Board’s Thryv make-whole remedies. This week brought a similar result.

In Vermont Information Processing LLC v. NLRB, a software company asked the Supreme Court to freeze the Board’s Thryv order, which had been affirmed by the D.C. Circuit, but that request was denied. This follows the high court denying certiorari in Macy's Inc. v. NLRB, so the Ninth Circuit's enforcement of make-whole remedies remains intact. That also leaves a circuit split on Thryv unresolved.

Meanwhile, NLRB General Counsel Crystal Carey has put Thryv on her list of decisions that she’d like to see overturned, so hopefully, those remedies will one day be a thing of the past.

A UAW strike at Bradford White:

In Michigan, workers at water heater manufacturer Bradford White Corporation have been working under an expired UAW contract since Sept. 1, and this week, 1,200 workers went on strike. Local 1002 President Jessica Vazquez declared, “We’ll be out here as long as we need to,” and the union seeks higher wages and better retirement benefits.

This is the first strike at Bradford White since 1978, and Shawn Fain visited the picket line. He’s also up for reelection and under grand jury scrutiny. What a busy guy!

Blog Post

About Labor Relations INK

Labor Relations INK is published weekly and is edited by LRI Consulting Services, Inc. Feel free to pass this newsletter on to anyone you think might enjoy it. New subscribers can sign up by visiting here.

If you use content from this newsletter, please attribute it to LRI Consulting Services, Inc. and include our website: http://www.LRIonline.com

Contributing editors for this issue: Greg Kittinger, Michael VanDervort, and Kimberly Ricci.

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About LRI Consulting Services, Inc.

LRI Consulting Services, Inc. exists to help our clients thrive and become extraordinary workplaces. We improve the lives of working people by strengthening relationships with their leaders and each other. For over 40 years, LRI Consulting Services, Inc. has led the labor and employee relations industry, driven by our core values and our proven process, the LRI Way.

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