The Guggenheim Foundation ought to cut its losses and pull out of its Abu Dhabi misadventure.
There’s no point in trying to analyze the salvos in the latest hostilities and breakdown of talks between the Guggenheim and the Gulf Labor Coalition (GLC). In a statement on its website yesterday, the foundation blasted GLC for “shift[ing] its demands on the Guggenheim beyond the reach of our influence as an arts institution, while spreading mistruths about the project and our role in it.”
Photo source: Gulf Labor Coalition’s website
GLC shot back that “the Guggenheim seems to be pursuing a self-destructive path, putting institutional hubris…before migrant labor rights.” Its statement contained a thinly veiled threat of renewed protest actions at the museum:
The GLC negotiation team regrets that Guggenheim has broken off negotiations in a hostile manner. Despite our show of good faith by maintaining a moratorium on protests for a year, and despite Guggenheim’s own public statements about constructive dialogue, the museum has rescinded and closed the path to working with rights organizations.
For the exasperated Guggenheim, this has been a protracted, no-win war. The operating framework for its Abu Dhabi project was announced more than eight years ago. As of December 2014, when my Apollo magazine opinion piece appeared, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s projected opening date had been pushed back to 2017 from the original target of 2012. But now, as far as I can see, there’s no projected opening date on the Guggenheim’s or the Abu Dhabi’s Tourism Development & Investment Company’s (TDIC’s) informational websites for this project.
It seems highly unlikely that the elaborate, monumental Frank Gehry-designed museum could open next year as hoped, given the Guggenheim’s recent admission that “there are currently no workers on the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and there is no construction on the site because a contractor has yet to be selected.”
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
The delays and the seemingly intractable workers’ rights issues that have bedeviled this and other Abu Dhabi projects have meant huge losses in time, energy, and money spent on planning and design, with little to show for it other than a collection acquired for the planned museum. The stalled initiative has caused the Guggenheim reputational harm that will only worsen if GLC resumes its on-site protest demonstrations in New York, tempting the Guggenheim to take forceful action to stop them.
More reputational harm was done yesterday by a misleading NY Times report by Colin Moynihan, who parroted the protesters’ claim that “most work” on Saadiyat Island (where the planned Guggenheim project is located) is “done by foreign migrants, who are required to pay large recruitment and transit fees [emphasis added].” A more knowledgeable, balanced report would have noted that TDIC’s revised Employment Practices Policy, issued last August (see pp. 12-14), includes strengthened provisions against contractors’ charging recruitment fees (sizable amounts charged to workers by agents recruiting a project’s migrant workers). While such fees may persist, they are legally forbidden.
As I wrote here, although independent monitor PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) had, in its latest report (issued in January) “found instances of workers paying recruitment fees in their home countries, ….TDIC took firm measures against violators, including the imposition of financial penalties and the obligation of those contractors to reimburse the affected workers….Nevertheless, the [PwC] report noted once again that the full resolution of the recruitment and relocation cost issue is beyond TDIC’s direct influence and requires collaboration between relevant entities [emphasis added].”
As the Guggenheim’s director, Richard Armstrong, has repeatedly said, the issue of recruitment fees charged to migrant workers is “a very complex foreign policy question between governments….To the degree that we can influence that positively, we are trying on a daily basis.”
I don’t doubt the sincerity of those efforts. But they have gone on long enough. It’s time for the Guggenheim’s leadership to face reality and withdraw from a losing battle: Their best efforts may have mitigated but have not overcome exploitative labor practices that would not be countenanced in the U.S. As suggested by the PwC report, insufficient progress has been made.
Now more than ever, what I wrote at the end of this August 2015 post rings true:
It is now increasingly clear that good intentions are not, in and of themselves, adequate antidotes for deeply entrenched, unconscionable practices.
The Guggenheim may need to send out a mayday (distress) signal on May Day, if demonstrators again attempt to occupy its flagship building on that workers’ rights anniversary. Instead, the foundation’s leadership should raise a white flag, making peace with those whose concern for humane labor practices it professes to share.