The union representing about 200 workers at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts voted Wednesday to hold a one-day strike next week, with union officials saying management refuses to budge over wages and other issues after more than seven months of contract negotiations.
More than 96 percent of members of the MFA Union, which represents public-facing staff, library workers, educators, curators, conservators, and administrative and professional workers, voted to picket outside the museum on Huntington Avenue on Nov. 17, according to union officials.
Eve Mayberger, a member of the union’s bargaining team, said workers are concerned about pay, safety, workplace diversity, requiring union membership, and job growth. .
“Management has not really engaged with most of these issues and are coming back with very mild adjustments,” said Mayberger, an assistant objects conservator who has been at the museum for five years. “It’s . . . interesting to think about how many hours we have spent talking about it and how far apart we still are.”
MFA officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
MFA employees voted overwhelmingly to unionize in November 2020 by a vote of 133 to 14, after an effort begun in summer 2019 to join the roughly 5,000-member United Auto Workers Local 2110, which is based in New York.
Maida Rosenstein, president of UAW 2110, said the museum’s proposed three-year contract would not guarantee raises for workers until its final year.
“Compensation is really low to begin with, lower than other similar institutions,” she said. “The whole industry standard, really, is too low to begin with, particularly when you look at the salaries of a lot of museum executives, including those at the MFA.”
Rosenstein said the museum has not been in contact with the union since it announced the planned strike.
Mayberger said museum workers have “general concerns about, How do we live in Boston? You read these reports coming out daily of 6 percent inflation rates, and we’ve already had a salary freeze for the past few years. It’s every day, the practicality becomes more challenging for our members.”
Mayberger remains hopeful that workers and management can find common ground.
“We are eager to work with the museum to come to a point of consensus with these negotiations, but we do feel like they need to listen to the workers who are in the building every day, and those people who are still working remotely, and try to come to . . . a fair and equitable contract,” she said.
Jeremy C. Fox can be reached at jeremy.fox@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jeremycfox.
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