The art handlers at the Guggenheim work under some unusual conditions, having to hang paintings slightly askew and tilted to account for the museum’s sloped floors and curved walls.

But this spring, the handlers mounted something never before seen at the Guggenheim: a successful union drive.

With their rarefied spaces and lofty missions, museums and other cultural institutions have not been known as tinderboxes of labor activism. But the fight against income inequality has taken hold in their world, with curators, handlers and designers publicly pressuring executives to raise their wages, and in some cases forming unions.

The workers said they had been inspired by recent union drives at media companies and among graduate student s, and their efforts even echo the #MeToo movement in its use of Google Doc crowdsourcing. In one widely shared spreadsheet, arts workers are anonymously posting their job titles and salaries, alongside those of museum officials who in certain cases are making eight times as much as some curators.