The gathered musicians were, unsurprisingly, terrified.
They were about to take part in a musical protest of sorts, using a specially-written song to challenge their oppressor face to face, and demand justice for their people. But their oppressor was the most powerful person they could imagine… the leader of the Aztec Empire.
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Merry Christmas! What better way to celebrate the joy and wonder of the season than by… picking a mean-spirited labor fight, when everyone is reeling from the pandemic!
And that’s just what Peter Gelb is planning for the Metropolitan Opera in New York: an aggressive labor action to lock out the MET’s stagehands. In a piece in the New York Times today, Mr. Gelb lays out the plan: he seeks to lock out its stagehands at midnight after the union representing the workers balked at the company’s demands for pay cuts.
First, I want to say that as someone who is on the Board of an important arts organization, and as someone who is a professional fundraiser, no one is more aware of the financial challenges groups are struggling with right now. The pandemic is clobbering the arts world.
But it is… grating to have the MET generally, and Mr. Gelb specifically, arguing that the only way to meet the ongoing storm is through draconian cuts. Which will conveniently come exclusively at the expense of the workers trying to make the MET a success. And just as conveniently are a carbon copy of the arguments he made to force union concessions during the last MET labor dispute in 2014.
As a counter argument, the Minnesota Orchestra, which faced a major labor dispute of its own at nearly the exact same time as the MET’s last one, has gone on in a completely different direction. In response to the pandemic and the financial challenges it has unleashed, the Orchestra has made changes, negotiated cuts in good faith, and still gone ahead with presenting arts programming and delivering it to the community. No universal furloughs at all. Moreover, the Orchestra has worked with our local PBS station and public radio to deliver performances live, in a virtual format. And best of all, the Orchestra has completely overhauled its programming so that it is much more innovative; each performance includes works by composers of color and/or women. They have done heroic work to keep their musicians and staff engaged… and paid.
So, it can be done.
The MET, however, gone in a different direction. It has furloughed everybody, and has once again decided that it’s going to cut its way toward prosperity. To justify this, it has pulled out—in some cases literally—the exact same talking points from the last major labor dispute in 2014. The weakness of the arguments back then made it clear that Mr. Gelb was interested not in sustainability, but rather in extracting union concessions as an end goal. And it seems that that is the same plan this year, too.
A few observations.
Continue readingWhat the…?
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Okay… sorry, I still can’t believe the recent editorial in the local Star Tribune about… yes, that blasted Minnesota Orchestra Lockout of 2012-2014—a half-page editorial that uses the lockout to preemptively complain about negotiations surrounding the Orchestra’s new labor contract with its musicians.
Let’s just drop all the elegance and introduction and get into why this has got to be one of the most idiotic things our state’s “newspaper of record” will publish this year.
And while we’re at it, let me say a few words about why I’m so hopeful about the situation.
You know, in my many years as an arts administrator, I’ve seen my share of wrong-headed thinking about the arts. I’ve seen ideas that seemed good at the time turn out to be disastrous. I’ve seen great ideas languish because too little effort was done to make them work.
But the last couple of weeks watching the leadership of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO) flail around has been truly awe-inspiring.
This week, the true extent of this galactically bad thinking was laid out in an article in the Baltimore Sun. An article where supposed leaders of the organization openly muse on folding up a 103-year old organization and (maybe) creating a replacement.
This isn’t a case of not being able to see past blind spots. This isn’t a case of being overly ambitious.
No, this is a case of willfully embracing a wrong-headed strategy solely on ideological grounds, and being willing to burn down an existing organization to possibly create a hypothetical new one more to their liking.
To be blunt, this is an example of astonishingly short-sighted thinking, warped by ideology, presented by way of a bad-faith argument, that shows profound ignorance of how the world works, and is setting up the organization for an epic failure.
Let me draw directly from the article to explain.
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Well… it’s déjà vu all over again. In fact, it’s so déjà vu all over again that there’s no point in trying to come up with a different cliché to describe what’s going on.
For those who had not heard, the management of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO) has locked out its musicians, following a pattern of strong-arm tactics that has attempted by the leaders of several other classical music organizations all over the country.
At this juncture, it’s fair to wonder aloud why a management would attempt this same tactic. Famously, this bit of hard-ballism failed spectacularly in places like Minneapolis, Atlanta, and elsewhere. But it was more than just some tactical failure—again and again, as other voices/actors in the community really started paying attention, and began digging into the justification for the strong arm tactics, these justifications fell apart. Deeper analyses revealed that the managements’ positions were frequently built on shady finances, bad-faith negotiations, short-term thinking, and groupthink, and primarily driven by simple hostility to unions. Again and again, the realization that these various managements were being less than candid about their tactics and grand strategies led to a ferocious backlash from the community. And again and again, this community backlash led to the forced removal of the managements that tried to play hardball in the first place.
Simple self-preservation would suggest that managements would drop strong-armism as a tool in their toolkits.
Alas, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
I’ll be keeping my eye on this dispute as it unfolds—the eye of an interested outsider who has seen this play out way too many times before, and has lost all patience for this kind of nonsense.
On that note, a few comments about the self-serving message the BSO management sent out to the orchestra’s supporters. Continue reading
Curious. Once again, we’re hearing complaints that an arts organization—today, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO)—is not supporting itself strictly on ticket sales, and therefore needs to come up with a new business plan. Continue reading
Last week, an editorial came out in the Baltimore Sun that weighed in on the burgeoning labor dispute between the management of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO) and its musicians.
And I feel a response is necessary.
Let me say off the bat that I do not pretend to have any insider information into this dispute, and I have no direct ties with any of the parties involved. And I hardly want to start a fight with the Sun’s editorial staff—I readily concede that the editorial goes out of its way to point fingers and keep a measured tone. Curiously for an editorial, it doesn’t… well, editorialize.
And for me, that’s a bit of a problem. Maybe this reticence is due to the fact that they don’t want to call out anyone unless there are clear indications of misbehavior. Maybe they want to give everyone the benefit of a doubt. This is a noble sentiment. But one of the key frustrations with the Minnesota Orchestra dispute (which was happily resolved years ago, thank goodness) was that again and again, reporters and other observers relentlessly tried to push some form of “well on one hand, but on the other hand” balance in their descriptions about what was happening. There was such a dedication to the principle of “balance” that they ended up creating hugely inappropriate false equivalencies.
In my own mind this is artificial… and ultimately dangerous. There is a massive imbalance in a situation where one side of dispute has the power to make unilateral decisions to weaken the other side. There is a massive imbalance in a situation where one side is arguing in bad faith. There is a massive imbalance in a situation where one side is acting out of bounds, and engaging in destructive activities as a negation strategy. So, the editorial’s attempt to smooth everything over into a “he said/she said” kind of piece feels… off.
Let me explain. Continue reading
One of the recurring refrains of the many classical music labor disputes has been the need for the organization to cut costs. The imperative to save money—Save Money!—is widely regarded as self-evident, obvious and somehow immune to challenge. When an arts organization runs into financial trouble, there is a natural reaction among many in the community, and many from the ensemble’s leaders, to instinctively reach for the budget scissors as the first and only solution.
And now the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s (BSO) management is throwing their hat into the ring, with this same argument. They are (again!) making the case that they need to cut their way to prosperity.
From my own experience as an arts administrator, the former Board President of an important arts organization here in Minneapolis, and as keen observer of far too many classical music labor disputes, I say the following: although the mantra of budget cuts is a natural reaction, it may not be the best reaction. Why so? Just look at the instructive example of Howard Johnson’s. Lewis Carbone, a respected business consultant who was on hand during the HoJo’s tumultuous last days, has documented the fall of this once-mighty company and the lessons it provides about the dangers of prioritizing cost savings over a customer’s experience and satisfaction.
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What on earth is the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s management thinking?
As you all know, I’ve weighed in on my share of classical music labor disputes over the years. I was, obviously, deeply involved in the Minnesota Orchestra’s lockout… and over that year-and-a-half disaster, I pretty much saw it all. I had hoped that the lessons learned in Minneapolis would keep organizations from going down a similar path, but alas that was not to be the case. The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, MET Opera, San Diego Opera, and too many other ensembles decided to take a similar path of trying to impose brutal new business models on their organizations in the name of “fiscal responsibility” or “sustainability.” And similar to what happened in Minnesota, they got burned as a result.
And now the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO) management has taken up this misbegotten fight. And they did so with gusto; they chose to preemptively cancel the entire summer season, which had only been announced just five weeks ago. More surprisingly, they did so days after the announcement that Maryland’s General Assembly had promised $3.2 million to stabilize the BSO’s finances while all sides worked to build a comprehensive, shared plan to rebuild the organization’s fiscal health.
Based on decades of work as an arts administrator, board member, board president of an arts organization, and a classical performer myself, let me say unequivocally that the BSO’s decision is a disaster. Well, “disaster” hardly covers it—one could argue that it’s a hot mess of a train wreck careening toward a wheel-less bus parked next to a red-flag factory.
In one fell swoop, the BSO administration is threatening to blow up relations with all its key stakeholders… simultaneously. I fear the potential fallout could be immense. Continue reading
Woo-boy. I’ve chronicled various marketing disasters from the world of classical music before… but I don’t know that I’ve run across something like this. In other cases, the mishaps were often the result of good intentions gone wrong (been there), ideas that seemed good at the time (been there), working too fast (been there), or some similar reason. In short, they were unintentional.
This one by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra (FWSO) was not. Continue reading
Mask of the Flower Prince 