Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
It is deadline day for the Metropolitan Opera (Met) and if the organization and its union employees fail to reach an accord by midnight, it is expected that the employer will initiate a lock out. Over the past few days, union employees have been removing personal equipment and any other personal belongings they don’t want to go without for an extended period of time the HR department is almost certainly buzzing …
Over the weekend, the Metropolitan Opera (Met) Orchestra musicians and their employer engaged in a round of he-said, she-said PR exchanges in the wake of the musicians 84 page document examining what they define as administrative failings. Granted, there’s plenty of material there worth exploring but today’s post is going to examine a crucial bit of news via the 7/25/2014 Associated Press (AP) that flew under the radar. Published in the …
The 7/23/2014 edition of New York Times published an article by Michael Cooper that reported on the communication from the Metropolitan Opera (Met) to its employees informing them to anticipate that they will be locking out union employees whose contract expires on July 31, 2014. What’s interesting to note in Cooper’s article is reference to the relatively low number of labor dispute related work stoppages in the Met’s history: a lockout …
The 5/30/2014 edition of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an article by Jennifer Maloney titled New York’s Metropolitan Opera Opens Its Budget Curtain although that’s really a misnomer. Having said that, Maloney’s article manages to peel back the first paper thin layer of the onion that is the Metropolitan Opera (The Met) budget and just as likely to make you cry. But the one thing you can count on throughout …
A move that might be best described as entirely expected, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra musicians unanimously authorized their negotiating committee to call a strike if negotiations fail to produce a new agreement after the current one expires on Thursday, July 31, 2014. Interestingly enough, the 5/12/2014 edition of the New York Times reported that the “union representing the orchestra…vot[e]d to authorize a strike should negotiations with management fail.” This is a …