When the Guggenheim walked away from six years of negotiations with Gulf Labor in April, director Richard Armstrong singled out our tactics as the reason. It now appears that this response was openly duplicitous. In fact, the museum leadership has also refused any further dialogue with the leading human rights organizations that Gulf Labor brought to the table.

For years, the Guggenheim has protested about being singled out among the arts institutions invested in Saadiyat Island. Accordingly, Human Rights Watch and the ITUC wrote to all three museums, inviting them to a summit in Brussels or London. While openly encouraging such an initiative, the Guggenheim (along with the British Museum) flatly turned down this invitation, and the Guggenheim never bothered to respond when further questioned by HRW and the ITUC about the future of dialogue with the NGOs. This is another bad decision on the part of the museum’s leadership. Either that or they are forbidden by their Gulf paymaster to talk to anyone with expertise in the field of human and labor rights.

In the meantime, the museum has declared its trust in the labor monitoring process overseen by TDIC. Here is our response to the latest monitoring report from PricewaterhouseCooper, which clearly shows how many of TDIC’s employee policies continue to go unenforced.

Here are the letters sent by the Guggenheim and the British Museum. The Louvre never responded at all.