Contract pirouette

In contract negotiations, management is giving the world-class instrumentalists of the New York City Ballet orchestra a "song and dance.” The players have passed a strike authorization vote.  Management may have to "face the music" unless they stop sounding like a "broken record" and "blowing their own horn" about their fairness in negotiation. 

They have made no concessions to either the players or reality. 

On every contractual issue, they insist on "calling the tune” and carp that prohibitive increases in health-care costs makes their further denial of decent benefits for the players a moral imperative. Their castigating the players for expecting a full-time salary for a part-time job (which it is not, actually) assures progress is a slow movement. Woefully off-key.

These bad puns have reached a low note. I will keep time and silence them.

This orchestra has fewer than 100 members. Whether they receive a living wage does not directly affect the majority of New Yorkers. But their plight has significance far beyond those who could care less about the art of ballet and the New York City Ballet orchestra which, since its founding by the legendary George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, remains among the premier ensembles of its kind.

Just knowing it exists and is thriving, at least artistically, should be a subconscious comfort even to New Yorkers for whom attendance at a ballet performance will never make the cut on their bucket list. Lifelong New Yorkers may never have been to the top of the Empire State Building, but just knowing it is a hop, skip and a jump away, even to non-dancers, allows some of its distinction to cleave to them.  

Great buildings, cultural icons and artistic institutions have souls. By virtue of being New Yorkers, we all share them. It's like a magnetic field to which our spirits are tied and trapped.

As the morality of a society can be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable people, so can the orchestra's management by their relationship to its artists. Right now, musicians in the New York City Ballet Orchestra would need to spend the entirety of their annual net income simply to pay for an unfurnished one-bedroom Manhattan apartment. 

Anyone who begrudges them their approximately $75,000 salaries is a crank.  

The members of the orchestra are represented by Local 2 of the American Federation of Musicians, whose president, Tino Gagliardi, is anxious to reach a settlement so that no part of its current 75th season, which has already kicked off to great acclaim, is lost.  The artists and their union feel a bond to their audiences that workers elsewhere rarely feel to the consumers of their products and services. 

"The public be damned" is an attitude that befits other industrial sectors and affiliations, perhaps, but it is utterly out of the realm of performers, no matter how jaded they may be by the business angle of their work. Their audiences are their consumers, and applause is their lifeblood, lifeline and reason for being.

But the musicians must live in the real world and pay real bills. They must practice poverty while management pleads it.

The City Ballet is sitting on a $263 million endowment and ticket sales are brisk. There is no excuse for holding up a settlement. Doing so falls into the category of "no good deed goes unpunished,” because the orchestra members demonstrated enormous restraint during the austerity of the Covid era by making severe and unprecedented sacrifices. 

The orchestra members are paid less today than they were four years ago. During the pandemic they worked 15 months for no pay. Their 2021 contract slashed their pay by 15 percent. Their purchasing power has plummeted by 23 percent since the pandemic.   By contrast, the New York Philharmonic restored the salaries of musicians to pre-pandemic levels more than a year ago, according to NBC.

Did the administrators of the New York City Ballet cut their own pay as a pandemic-era sacrifice, as did the musicians? Are they willing to reveal their financial records as potential proof of good intentions during collective bargaining?

The orchestra members are "cultural ambassadors who help make New York City the artistic capital of the world … and are being asked to make financial concessions once again. This is insulting and unacceptable and musicians are fighting back", said AFM Gagliardi.

The NYC Ballet Orchestra virtuosi are not seeking to storm the bastions of oppression. They're not thinking in those terms. They just want to play Tchaikovsky without having to hear their stomachs rumbling. 

Dancers and stagehands belong to different unions and did not participate in the orchestra members' strike authorization vote, but they are on record in solidarity.

Management's offers so far would further drive the players yet deeper into an economic hole. What they are offering in terms of health-care benefits for the players is unworthy of consideration. Management's absurd rationale is that "NYCB's musicians have received free, year-round individual coverage while working only 24 weeks each year.”

That's the same inane and cloddish argument that union-busters make against teachers who aren't on the clock 12 months a year yet demand liveable annual salaries. Teaching is not part-time, and neither are the orchestra members' jobs. They are not holidaying in Bali during the off-season and then sight-reading complex scores when the curtain rises.  

Some may occasionally get other assignments during the off-season, but engagements are few, far-between and unreliable. 

By management's logic, the next step should be to pay instrumentalists according to how many notes in the piece of music they're performing: cellists would get premium; piccolo players, entry-level ( since they don't enter the music too often).

A fraction of City Ballet's operating budget would likely be enough to satisfy the musicians without adversely impacting the company's fiscal integrity. They don't want to block bridges with their fermatas. They just want, in partnership with dancers, to give "wings to the mind and flight to the imagination.”

And pick up a little discretionary income in the process.

During the early years of cinema in Europe, there were live orchestras or organists that were part of the experience. The mindset of City Ballet management seems almost capable of contemplating replacing a live orchestra with some kind of recording. This idea has not been proposed, but it would be consistent with the highly artificial intelligence of these sagacity-challenged administrators.

A naive observer of labor relations might minimize and deem unfounded and incomprehensible any concerns over the New York City Ballet's management's tactics. They may mistakenly figure that these executives are highbrow "culture vultures" who are constitutionally incapable of playing hardball.

The fact is that management is management, whether it be the CEO of a termite fumigation LLC or a public-school principal or an iconic ballet group. This is according to the embraced Bloomberg Doctrine, the signature philosophy of the former mayor and his equivalent of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. 

It holds that the specifics of an industry, institution or agency do not matter, because the same organizational, human-relations and decision-making skills apply. Not only are training, experience, talent and skills not favorably decisive, they may be disqualifiers.

Although the management of the New York City Ballet Orchestra won't hire old-style waterfront thugs to crack the skulls of picketing tympanists and flutists, they are as capable of harsh pig-headedness as overseers at steel mills ( if there are any left in this country).  

As working laborers, the musicians deserve a standing ovation.

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