These are professional musicians with real skills, each of them with many years of training. They walked because the best case scenario was their already meagre salaries being cut.
They weren't making dev salaries after a few months of a boot camp.
After years of dedicated study, the average salary for a symphony musician is about $70,000.[1] The San Antonio musicians already only made about half that to begin with[2] and then management cut that in half - base pay of a little over $17,000 a year.
And for the people claiming this was bargaining failure, no, this ended the failures. The bargaining failures happened over many years. Many years of accepting wage and benefit cuts over and over without making management offer something in return. They didn't bargain in the past. They just rolled over and showed their bellies.
[1] First link that popped out at me, but similar numbers in other places:
$70,000 is a full time salary at a relatively successful symphony in a large city. It’s the symphonic musician’s equivalent of making it into the big leagues. Many more are part time and pay far far less.
I have a family member who has played in a couple different mid sized city professional orchestras. If you consider preparation and rehearsal time, the pay for either of them equates to less than minimum wage.
Did you miss the part where op, said that's average not what they were getting in San Antonio. They were getting half that and then were cut down to 17k per year.
I know what it says. I am saying it is misleading. There is no way that is correct for anything but a full time role. The vast majority of professional orchestras are part time and pay far less.
I cannot believe the discussions occurring here surrounding professional musicians, people who have trained for years to hone their skills. I cannot believe that the attitude towards a union -"wouldn't they all be better now since they'd still be employed"? These are statements made by someone who never had to face the reality of the fact that sometimes a job offers so little money that you are BETTER off not working. The reality in many poor countries is that you could work for 5-10$ a day, but people choose not to work jobs but rather to engage in subsistence farming as that offers them at least food to survive, whereas the 5-10$ a day wouldn't. I cannot believe the narrow mindedness of such statements...
I found it offensive that I used to make more than someone playing in a symphony as someone working in retail. I found it offensive that I made more money in a week than they did in a month and all I did was peddle more garbage for people to buy to make themselves feel better about their empty pointless and gluttonous lives...
I feel sad that at this point this is where art is headed. Its shocking to see that art is potentially returning to the same dynamic that we saw in the Middle Ages - where some wealthy benefactor is needed to allow artists to continue their activity. Each time something like this happens we lose big chunks of what and who we are as a species. We're normalizing the death of art, of imagination and of beauty and assume that everything needs to have a monetary value attached to it, that everything needs to yield ROI. It's repulsive...
I don’t see this at all. They didn’t make less than you because of some moral failing by society at large. They made less because there is such a glut of artists that the bottom pay rate is literally less than zero, hence “do it for the exposure”. There is more art created every day today than ever before. The old school art forms you think are so crucial just aren’t.
Exactly this. All of the holier than thou disgust at economics and ROI just means OP doesn’t understand those are the consequences of demand.
The reality is that the vast majority of people would rather entertain themselves shopping in retail than going to a symphony. Pass judgement all you like, but it won’t change the reality that people simply don’t value “the arts” as much as you do (or at least, the specific arts that you do).
Poor symphony pay is not because of labor oversupply. It’s due to a lack of revenue. Many rely highly on grants and donations to make payroll, with ticket sales only being a small fraction of their income. The budget is determined by how many wealthy donors send in money.
It’s more complicated than people buying fungible quantities of widgets. A donors choice to donate is not really linked to supply of labor. Wages are more greatly linked to the supply of rich philanthropists in the local area, than the supply of labor. One orchestra can supply an infinite number of philanthropists. It’s not a consumable.
Should the symphony pay them all six-figure salaries until it becomes insolvent, and then closes anyway?
I'm not sure what you want to happen here.
It seems like the people of San Antonio are not interested in paying for a symphony. That's their prerogative. Many cities don't have a symphony. There's a great many goods and services that take years of skill to master that I don't pay for because I don't want them.
It seems to me like they are expressing shock that cities the size of San Antonio aren't willing to pay enough or for whatever reasons don't raise enough for a symphony. There's not really an alternative, the suggestions of professional symphony players working for almost nothing or compromising their performances by not practicing are rather offensive.
From a union of musicians perspective, I think they made the right choice. No symphony for San Antonio, no reason to return to the table. Maybe other cities will be a little more careful than they would have been with raising and using funds.
I didn't get the impression from the article the city administers the symphony or that the budget for the musicians comes out of public funds.
They aren't expressing shock at the city, they're expressing shock at one or two comments on here that they deem morally disgusting. It's totally unnecessary (we can read) but pretty standard.
It seems to me like you are inventing ridiculous interpretations. A city of a million can do whatever it likes with private and public fund raising to support it's art and sport choices. San Antonio wanted a professional symphony for 1/4 the rate by impoverishing the participants. They didn't come back to the table because they should find another job or a different city.
The rebuke of the performers for not negotiating is right in the OP. It's not the performers fault that there's no workable solution for the cities level of interest in a symphony. If the symphony goes down in quality there will be even less money.
I don't know why your first sentence is necessary.
As I said, the San Antonio Symphony does not appear to be a public organization. Of course I could be wrong, I just read the article. Wikipedia appears to confirm my interpretation. Though even if it were a city can't do "whatever it wants" they still have budgets and stuff. But it isn't so your point is moot.
I never said it was the performers fault. No idea what you're responding to.
A city has a government, a city is also the collection of people, organizations, etc that are interested in the success of the city.
The point being argued was that someone is disappointed by comments in these threads and somehow their upset is inappropriate. Looking at the comments many of them back this management being disappointed that performers and their union destroyed this public good by not negotiating when offered lower compensation.
The city as a whole is saying it can't afford a professional symphony and that's fine. That isn't the performers fault and they were protected from a downward spiral by having a union that didn't let them go into poverty either working for free to their no longer compensated standards or losing more and more funding through poorer quality while they worked other jobs.
No one would accept the argument that IT workers are in the wrong if they refuse ever increasing pay cuts to stay in an environment that is no longer able to support them.
I read all the comments that were posted prior to the morally outraged top-level comments before I replied. There are very few (maybe 1-2) blaming the musicians, expressing anti-union sentiments, or anything like that. And of course, the first few comments are rarely representative of the general sentiment of a discussion, which is why I said the morally outraged comment expressing disgust was not necessary. I also agree musicians should not have to work for $17,000 a year, or $34,000 a year.
The morally disgusted comments at the tenor of the discussion were posted 8 and 9 hours ago, respectively. The sole comment posted prior to that, as far as I can tell, with anti-union sentiment was
"If the musicians weren't unionized, wouldn't they all be better off right now since they'd still be employed?"
which has a bunch of pushback in the replies immediately. So again, the point that the moral outrage at the HN crowd and their anti-union sentiment trying to force the musicians into poverty seems unnecessary.
"many of them back this management being disappointed that performers and their union destroyed this public good by not negotiating when offered lower compensation"
I don't see many. Feel free to share (posted before the morally outraged comments, of course).
The Symphony Society, which governs the local symphony through a board of trustees and management, made a “Last, Best and Final” offer on September 13.
That offer would:
- Cut the number of full-time symphony musicians from 72 to 42.
- Reduce the symphony season length from 31 weeks to 26 weeks.
- Slash the salaries of full-time musicians from roughly $36,000 a year to $24,000.
- Hire some musicians part-time with an $11,000 salary.
The proposed pay cuts follow two years of little-to-no income for many of the musicians who were furloughed in 2020 during the pandemic and returned in January of 2021 with reduced salaries and fewer performances due to safety protocols that limited the number of performers who could be on stage. The changes meant some musicians made just 20% of their typical symphony salary.
The union, represented by a select group of symphony musicians and representatives of the American Federation of Musicians Local 23, did not accept the Symphony Society’s offer.
Reading further down in the article you cite - talking about this as a labor vs. management battle pushes a lot of people's buttons, but that's just an emotional side-show.
The Real Story: An organization had neither enough income to survive, nor good prospects of improving that situation. So it died.
Given the letter written by the board, I think it's fair to discuss. At the very least, the board is trying to save face by blaming the shutdown on "the union being unreasonable". That always makes me suspicious about the details being left out.
The nuances around went it died are also important. Could it have been saved with a different managerial approach? That's especially relevant for a cultural institution.
Call me old and cynical...but my read of the letter was "We are financially dead & headed to the Chapter 7 chop shop". Followed by all the required-by-social-conventions things they're supposed to say, regardless of truth.
From skimming a couple sources, it sounds like the Symphony had profound financial problems, going back decades. Prospective local donors & sponsors tend to have long memories of such things. A little local non-profit can't play corporate name games to escape from a bad reputation. Nor count on attracting the best of board members or managers.
I agree that the nuances, details, "could it have been saved?", local cultural institutions, etc. are important. But unless some long-term insider from the SAS pops up here on HN, I don't think we've any chance to find out. :(
Thanks for grabbing the numbers. I have a good friend who's in the union for my hometown's theater. Hearing his stories over the past few years have made me deeply suspicious of anything posted by management that boils down to "we're shutting down because the union is being unreasonable."
It's a completely different world than tech, and some of the managerial incompetence that's blamed on the union (and before it was formed, the lowest paid workers) is astounding.
Classical music and symphonic orchestras have always been expensive endeavours requiring a healthy influx of money. Before the 20th century that support was coming almost exclusively from patronage. With the advent of the recording industry, a large influx of money from record sales allowed to develop a large industry around western classical music supporting many performers and orchestras.
The subscription model that has replaced album purchase has now destroyed the revenue stream for the classical industry. To make matter worse, most recordings from the last 50 years were recorded with great qualities making it hard for new recordings to stand out: you are effectively competing with huge catalog of high quality music available for next to nothing on the mainstream streaming services.
The end result is that orchestral formation are now back to be being dependant on donated money (individual donation, corporate patronage and public funds).
Genre requiring a single or few performers will probably be fine, but orchestras are so expensive due to the number of people involved they have no chance to make enough money just performing.
We should not be surprised to see more of lower tiers orchestra disappearing in the coming years.
2 years hiatus of public performance would have been a non-event in the 20th century. You could just have used the time to release some new records.
Yes, COVID has nothing to do with the classical music industry woes. Spotify and its terrible redistribution model is the main culprit.
Of course, COVID might have been what pushed this particular formation over the edge but it is just the extra drop spilling over. Fees from public performance has never been enough to fund a full symphonic orchestra.
> You could just have used the time to release some new records.
If you were a soloist you could have used the time. If you were a 5 piece you could use about half the time depending on region. Larger groups had a lot of problems given time delays in remote communication.
Some important context here: The AFM is quite militant, and in its bylaws stipulates that individual locals cannot ratify a collective agreement without the approval of the AFM. Eight years ago, when the Vancouver Musicians Association (AFM local 145) negotiated a contract the AFM didn't like, their response was to fire the VMA board, fine the the board members personally $50,000 each, and rip up the contract which the membership had ratified.
It's entirely possibly that the musicians of the San Antonio Symphony are willing to negotiate a contract but the AFM won't let them.
Honestly from this article nobody comes off looking great: there are musicians refusing to accept fiscal reality on one side, and management acting in bad faith and firing the conductor out of spite on the other.
They were skilled employees at a business. The business decided to substantially cut half the employees' salaries from $36,000 to $24,000 and demote the other half to part time workers making only about $10k per year. The employees did not accept this. Nothing about that speaks ill of the employees.
What constitutes a "better thing"? Anything that pays better? Is working in ad tech somehow "better" than being a musician? I think it shows the priorities of our society, and I think that's part of the problem (if you can't make money, you don't deserve to exist)
> there are musicians refusing to accept fiscal reality on one side
In what way? The article specifically cites Lubbock (a significantly smaller city) as managing to handle paying their musicians and being fiscally solvent.
This doesn't seem to be an unsolvable problem yet the current Board of Directors can't seem to pull it off.
Let it go bankrupt. Surely someone will want to put a symphony together and they can avoid all the baggage.
It's important to remember that this is a statement made by one party to a dispute, not a neutral statement of facts. It's unclear whether any of the claims made in the statement are true, or whether this is an intentionally destructive response to hard bargaining by the musicians.
They filed chapter 7. It’s gone. Many symphonies around the US are struggling with money. If your income can’t pay the bills, you can’t operate. This isn’t the first one to shut down and it won’t be the last. Patronage is declining.
It will take a few of these to make the point and that’s okay. If the free market isn’t willing to pay a reasonable wage (which was already dismal at $36,000), then we just won’t have symphonies for now.
The vast majority of symphonies in the US aren't full time, like most performing artist jobs in the US. There are well more than 1,000 symphonies in the US and only something like a couple dozen that are full time; San Antonio was notable in that it was. The free market supports many symphonies that pay 4 digit "salaries" (often they're paid per-service) per year. But they're only working a few days per month. San Antonio was trying to cut back, but negotiation didn't work out. This wasn't a free market decision to disappear, it was a labor negotiations decision.
I look forward to hearing the argument that society should indefinitely bankroll large symphony orchestras at good salaries, but I am skeptical that it would actually convince people. It seems to me that outside of the very rich and the very old, the popularity of classical music has dramatically among audiences. "Think of the oboeists!" is not necessarily a winning campaign slogan. I mean it when I say that I hope this changes, but I don't see how it can unless classical musicians find a way to actually appeal to a broader segment of the public.
I thought it was "we won't pay you money we don't have" (also: ...for a passion project that many do for free, including likely most of the board members and volunteer staff).
The problem was that they did zero bargaining, pay kept getting cut until it wasn't paying enough to be worth doing anymore. They filled chapter 7, it's done.
You can see something similar with the "worker shortage". People don't want to do many jobs for what they're willing to pay. If workers had more leverage in bargaining, pay and benefits could rise to be worth doing.
They weren't in a position to bargain since they'd already accepted repeated cuts and it's hard for a symphony to stay solvent when it doesn't have any musicians.
It looks like the musicians have started performing on their own. I hope that works out for them.
These salaries were not tenable at all. What about endowments or other longer-term sourced of funding? There must have been long-running mismanagement..
Years ago, I had a partner that was a highly trained symphony musician (studied musicology and performance at a major university, PhD etc). After all these years of training and having incredible skills, she was unable to support herself.
The fundamental problem is that there are maybe 30 symphony jobs in North America for her instrument that pay enough, and there is a world of new players being churned out by Fine Arts departments all competing for the one or two spots where someone is retiring. The university departments know there are no good jobs for these students they produce, but like other university departments they compete for funds by enticing students to peruse almost useless degrees.
I am always confused why people do this to themselves - a PhD no less! It would not have taken more than an hour of research to know that you'd be unable to get a decent paying job - whether it's fair or not.
No, they'd be stuck working for not enough money instead of looking for actual livable jobs like they are now and likely have been doing for the duration of the strike.
Like many professional orchestra members, they likely made much of their income from teaching and other related activities. One of the advantages to being in an orchestra is the recognition it brings in attracting students and gaining employment at summer festivals and universities. However, if the orchestra salary drops too low, it probably isn't worth the time anymore.
> If the musicians weren't unionized, wouldn't they all be better off right now since they'd still be employed?
Who says they aren't? The people I've known working in the arts very often have multiple jobs, even if one of them is notionally “full time”, usually at least one of the jobs is a personal business. Performers very often are tutors/teachers of the same kind of performance.
What's stopping the entire union from starting their own symphony as a co-op.
I mean there's a lot of unemployed musicians in San Antonio now....
They can drop the baggage (the board of directors), hire a marketing consultant and some ancillary staff, and maybe do other things with the arts in the area.
What's stopping the entire union from starting their own symphony as a co-op.
The AFM won't let them. Members aren't allowed to take gigs which pay less than union-defined minimum rates. In many cases they're not even allowed to donate their services to non-profits; the closest they're allowed to do is to get paid, remit union dues, and donate cash to the non-profit.
The AFM has pretty much every professional performance job in the country locked down. Getting kicked out of the AFM means giving up their orchestral career.
What? I know some US sectors are somewhat locked down by unions, but that typically means there is more than a single union in that field anyway - and I would find it surprising that a union can stop you from playing music around the whole of Texas.
Definitely the scenario you mention is impossible in Europe.
For this tiny group of people, maybe and even that’s not guaranteed. Not worth giving up collective bargaining power, reasonable hours and benefits for over the long term.
And if this symphony dies and takes its Board of Directors with it perhaps the city of San Antonio can get a symphony and people running it who can actually pay the bills.
short term maybe, long term no. They still have their instruments, people still like music, bankruptcy hurts the owners more than anyone else. Giving your collective bargaining power up for something like this doesn't strike me as smart.
These are professional musicians with real skills, each of them with many years of training. They walked because the best case scenario was their already meagre salaries being cut.
They weren't making dev salaries after a few months of a boot camp.
After years of dedicated study, the average salary for a symphony musician is about $70,000.[1] The San Antonio musicians already only made about half that to begin with[2] and then management cut that in half - base pay of a little over $17,000 a year.
And for the people claiming this was bargaining failure, no, this ended the failures. The bargaining failures happened over many years. Many years of accepting wage and benefit cuts over and over without making management offer something in return. They didn't bargain in the past. They just rolled over and showed their bellies.
[1] First link that popped out at me, but similar numbers in other places:
https://work.chron.com/pay-scale-average-member-orchestra-52...
[2] https://www.expressnews.com/entertainment/arts-culture/artic...