agma “likely” to strike nyco
The American Guild of Musical Artists said in a memo to members that “given the changes that George Steel wants to make in our contract, members are advised that the possibility of a strike against New York City Opera is likely.” At issue is what AGMA characterizes as Steel’s intention to eliminate guarantees of work for chorus and production staff. [via Bloomberg News]
Any AGMA members out there willing to forward a copy of the memo to lacieca@parterre.com?
@18, you should listen longer because you’ve got several things wrong. First of all, unless one knows for sure what Steel is making, one shouldn’t speculate. (Probably, estimating, etc…)
Second, he isn’t asking the chorus to be available whenever he wants. It’s laid out in the season when he needs them and for what. It isn’t like they are on call to show up whenever he wants to hear “Va pensiero.” The full forces are needed for Esther, as the article said. They’ll need smaller ensembles for the rest of the shows.
No, the NYCO choristers do not make as much as the Met chorus nor do they work as much as the Met chorus. And, no, the previous chorus-master (I assume you’re talking about Wedow) did not go over to the Met, at least not to direct the Met chorus. That was Polumbo from Chicago.
Just like many of the soloists that perform at NYCO, why shouldn’t the chorus do the day job rigmarole in between NYCO commitments? Shouldn’t they at least be open to this in an interim period?
The contract holds a provision where either side can claim “extraordinary circumstances” that would lead to re-negotiations. If one side disputes that claim, it automatically falls to an arbitrator named in the contract to decide if the contract should be re-opened. NYCO claimed extraordinary circumstances in a letter sent to the union on March 30. The union disputed that saying that the circumstances were the result of poor management by the board. However, as I said earlier, because the arbitrator named in the contract died the previous fall, AGMA now claims that the contract cannot be legally re-opened.
The extraordinary circumstances caveat was put into the contract because the union foresaw that Mortier would need to make changes to the contract after his arrival. This all stems from that.
And I should say that I’m getting all of this information from news reports and from the memo AGMA sent out a couple of weeks ago. It isn’t speculation. From all of these pieces it looks to me like AGMA is being unnecessarily stubborn and aggressive. When you look at all the other unions (both musical and otherwise) around the country bending over backwards to make concessions so that their workers can remain employed, it makes AGMA look bad. This whole dialogue with the press should never have happened.
There comes a point where the job pays so little it is not worth saving. People have to eat. Also, what indication is there that even if NYCO gets through the next two seasons that it will be a going concern?
Banging on AGMA for what ails NYCO is like banging on UAW (United Auto Workers for you intellectual beings) for what ails GM.
And I would say that when GM was beginning to have its troubles, the UAW made concessions in health care, retirement and compensation to try to ease the burden of the company.
can someone explain to me what a “… likely … possibility …” is???
my dictionary took to its daybed with a strong case of the vapors when i asked it …
This is an interesting discussion, but many of you seem very misguided. AGMA’s job is to successfully negotiate contracts that protect our members.
None of you could be so naive as to believe that successfully negotiating contracts occurs just across the table. AGMA, and any other union, uses every conceivable forum in which to pressure employers to abandon or soften expectations about givebacks and concessions and to get even a poorly run company to realize that without professional singers there is no opera.
As to City Opera, George Steel has absolutely no experience running an opera company and no experience engaging in reasonable dealings with the unions.
Absent the negative publicity he’s received he would just blindly assume that he could do whatever he wanted to do only to find out in September that he had no singers and no orchestra. Now he knows that to keep his own job he has to care much more about NYCO’s AGMA-represented singers keeping their jobs.
There is no intelligent way at all to respond to people who honestly believe that City Opera’s problems are caused by unions other than to say that they simply don’t understand that, unlike most opera companies that have financial problems not arising out of their mismanagement, City Opera has been poorly managed for years, spent a fortune on, and incurred massive contractual obligations because of, the decision by its Board President first to look for a new home, to cancel an entire season, and to hire a guy because she sat next to him at a dinner party. Unions had nothing to do with the causes of City Opera’s problems, which are the result of Board foolishness and not by the current economic crisis.
No one wants City Opera to close but unlike every other opera company that asks us for reasonable concessions, NYCO wants to gut its union contracts. At some point, all employees have to decide how many givebacks they can tolerate and still maintain their self respect as professional singers.
It might well be that some of our members at NYCO would take whatever work there is, at whatever salary they’re offered, and under whatever conditions George Steel might impose but for the unions. Truthfully, I can even understand that some members might need to do that because they have no other source of income, even if the majority of their co-workers thought it better to engage in a strike rather than crossing the line of their own self respect. But even my understanding of such need can not hide the fact that, in the labor movement, those people are called scabs.
Alan S. Gordon
Executive Director
#23 Yes the UAW “gave back” to GM which promptly turned around and spent billions developing Hummer and Saturn while simultaniously closing Oldsmobile. Long story short, it did not help.
But clearly from what we are being told by #25 the situation is deteriorating as we speak.
Any chance Mr. Gordon of some givebacks provided AGMA gets a board seat (or two) like UAW and GM, and NYCO hires someone with real opera experience to run the company?
I hope you are “thinking outside the box” because New York City needs NYCO and, I humbly believe, your members need NYCO.
Good luck!
Mr. Gordan,
I appreciate your candor, however I suspect you would also be just as open about admitting that your response here is just one more of your aforementioned “conceivable forums” with which to bias the public and generate pressure.
I’m afraid you’re defending AGMA on the wrong charge – I agree that it would be folly to blame AGMA for the financial situation in which City Opera finds itself PRESENTLY. Surely we are all quite clearly aware of the mismanagement and poor judgement heretofore exhibited by City Opera’s board and some of its administration.
The issue is what role AGMA will play in either helping or hindering the future existence of this company. A foul little congress of cheering, self-congratulatory gentlemen who represent a group of artists who no longer have a company at which to sing and be paid does not a Union make.
To advocate, represent, manipulate and connive for the well-being and prosperity of your members is by all means the union’s rightful and necessary purpose, but I fail to see how you will claim to have successfully accomplished this purpose once City Opera closes and, even after it liquidates its assets and fulfills its contractual obligation to AGMA’s members, can no longer provide any of them any work any more?
I just have two things to say to Mr. Gordon. When you say the “majority of their co-workers thought it better to engage in a strike,” are you speaking only of choristers or have you polled the soloists who have performed at NYCO over the past seasons?
And finally, those of us who wish the union would sit down and talk to NYCO, wish they would have sought a replacement for the arbitrator that passed away and wish they would communicate with ALL of its members and not just the ones in choruses are not scabs. Calling us so is incredibly insulting. No one has said anything about wanting to roll over and die for the company. All that has been said is that AGMA should sit down with NYCO and talk and NEGOTIATE. Instead, it appears that the only thing AGMA is interested in doing is using the press as a club to beat NYCO into submission.
Togu #13:
If there is a strike and NYCO folds (for that reason or any other reason) then the options of the chorus will be to wait tables, temp at Citibank, or go home and live with their parents.
Mr. Gordon:
I hate to have to say this, but you lost some points, at least in my normally supportive attitude for Union demands with the quote I just read in the Bloomberg acount of this situation:
““It’s questionable even if all of our members and the orchestra worked for free, that City Opera can survive,†said Gordon.”
I gotta say ( whether that opinion is true or not–and the case hasn’t yet come to jury, yet..) that statement MAYBE should not have been made for publication—how can that POSSIBLY HELP this situation, in a positive way?