In Impromptus today, I have some fulminating about the “public employees” in Wisconsin, but I also have some notes about DeLand, Fla., the lovely town from which I am now tapping you. I say that one of my favorite streets is “San Souci” — which implies a saint named Souci. Well, this morning, I saw another sign, for that same street, and this other sign said “Sans Souci” (French for “without care”). How conventional. But I just wanted to record that.
By the way, do you know the Gershwins’ song “Who Cares?” One of their best. Also, George’s piano transcription, published in The Songbook (a collection of such transcriptions), is one of the best things he ever wrote (which is saying something).
Okay, it is not so lovely down here that I’ve ceased to stew about Wisconsin. This morning, I thought of something that an insider once told me about the New York Philharmonic. I was inquiring about spiraling costs in the music business — also about why we don’t really have recordings or radio broadcasts anymore. A big part of the answer, of course, is the unions: killing or suppressing music, as they kill or suppress so much else. This insider said, “Don’t think of the Philharmonic as an orchestra. Think of them as Local 802.”
And, sometimes, I do. And, sometimes, so do they. Are the teachers teachers or a union? Can they find a better balance between the two, please? (The Philharmonic does.)
I've noticed that much of the Wisconsin commentary, especially from the left, inserts the comment that Wisconsin is some sort of ancestral home of labor unions.
Maybe we could start inserting the fact that Ripon, Wisconsin is the birthplace of the Republican Party?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAs far as the Philharmonic goes -- you're talking about the sort of profession where mutual-protection unions will quite *naturally* arise, even without any legal framework, unless you attempted to actively suppress them. Highly skilled, highly intelligent workers with fairly high demand for their scarce goods. Why on earth would they not work together to seek out higher wages? It's not like you can hire scabs to replace them.
It's one thing to decry the poisonous effects that some unions have on some areas of our life -- lord knows, I certainly do. And it's fundamentally unfair to use the power of the law to force a private employer to hire only members of a union.
It's another thing entirely to pretend, as you essentially are, that skilled laborers should consider their labor to be a sort of charity and refrain from bargaining as best they can for the highest salary they can find, and those who don't do so are cretins.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI thought it was a given that all conductors were crazy and impetuous and without a union whole orchestra sections would be fired on a whim for coming in late (musically speaking) during rehearsal.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIn London some of the orchestras are cooperative/self-governing, where the musicians own and run the orchestra.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSo instead of negotiating with management about how much they should be paid for recording a film score, they are negotiating with the film studio, directly in competition with other orchestras.
I've noticed that there seem to be a lot more film scores recorded in London than in Philadelphia, or Chicago. It is not that the members of the big US orchestras don't want the work or income, it is just that they boxed their organizations into a position where they are priced out of the market. Hollywood would love to work with them.
I guess having that "management" and "board" between you and the paying customer makes it easy to neglect the fiscal realities of the paying customer when you are negotiating the labor contract.
In the US the big symphony orchestras would die without charitable donations. So although the labor of the musicians is not charity, it is irrevocably tied to charity. If you are running a charity where you have to convince donors that their donations will be effectively spent for a worthwhile purpose, it becomes difficult to justify outsize wages and benefits. There are a handful of orchestras in the US that can successfully solicit donations by saying "if we don't pay more in wages than any other orchestra in the US then we will lose the best musicians and lose our place at the top of the heap, so please give us more money." Most have a harder time.
The Detroit symphony is a great example. The donor-base is dwindling with the city, grants from all levels of government are disappearing, and the negotiators for the musicians appear (to this outsider) to prefer "no job" to "job with changes to the status quo".
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