The Board of Directors Announces the Dissolution of the San Antonio Symphony
sasymphony.org
sasymphony.org
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...
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.
You can make more busking on the street probably.
"Comparably reports that the average annual pay for a U.S. orchestra member is $69,86"
I cannot believe the discussions occurring here surrounding professional musicians, people who have trained for years to hone their skills. I cannot believe that the attitude towards a union -"wouldn't they all be better now since they'd still be employed"? These are statements made by someone who never had to face the reality of the fact that sometimes a job offers so little money that you are BETTER off not working. The reality in many poor countries is that you could work for 5-10$ 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...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2022/03/28/why-is-the-san-an...
The Real Story: An organization had neither enough income to survive, nor good prospects of improving that situation. So it died.
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.
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. :(
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.
So they want to change from a symphonic orchestra to a chamber one.
Even if most symphony performances include 72 players, not all of them do, and it's not always the same 72.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pity.
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.
Or not. And that will say something as well, no?
Maybe the "fiscal reality" is that they can use this time to do better things which maybe are also paid better.
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.
How far will you accept fiscal reality ?
There is another world outside the economical one.
At the end of the day, you eventually run out of other people’s money.
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.
It just sounds as though the symphony isn’t economically viable anymore.
It looks like the musicians have started performing on their own. I hope that works out for them.
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.
So, maybe? McDonald's will likely have better compensation.
https://www.afm.org/2021/09/san-antonio-symphony-musicians-d...
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.
As the article points out, Lubbock, a much smaller city, doesn't seem to have a problem with paying their unionized musicians or staying solvent.
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.
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.
Definitely the scenario you mention is impossible in Europe.