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(en) awsm.nz: A Sound Action
Date
Tue, 25 Oct 2016 13:00:08 +0300
For over a month members of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra (FWSO) in Texas, USA have
been on strike. This happened after a year of ongoing negotiations between the musicians
and management. The final straw was the insistence by bosses that the musicians accept pay
reductions of between 2.5-7% following salary cuts in 2010 of over 13%. ---- An initial
reaction to the strike even from those normally sympathetic to workers taking such action
could be "Why should I support a bunch of well-educated and highly skilled people who only
cater to the tastes of the ‘cultured' middle classes anyway?" It's true orchestral
musicians aren't suffering the same levels of deprivation as some sections of the working
population, but in reality the former are hardly living it up large either. One anonymous
member of the FWSO explained her circumstances this way:
"The proposed cuts of 2016 for the FWSO may seem inconsequential by itself. Someone really
can live on $50,000/year in North Texas in 2017, right? Perhaps they can. These days my
salary covers all of my financial obligations, but I LIVE on what I make outside the
symphony. So, perhaps that question is just too simplistic. When the Fort Worth household
median income in 2014 was $59,530, my FWSO salary was almost $5,000 below that. A 2017
salary of $50,000 only widens the gap.
How do these proposed additional cuts affect me? How do I, a hard-working individual who
financially helps my children and parents, manage to get ahead on $50,000/year? I live and
work day-to-day. I am proud of what I have accomplished, but my story is not an unusual
one. I am not alone with the financial realities I have faced. And I would make the same
decisions if I had it to do it over again. In the end though, I guess people just have
different views on how much $5,000 really is to a person." (Quoted at Slippedisc.com 18/9/16)
The FWSO musicians have made great effort to reach out to the wider community. Prior to
the strike itself, they would hold ‘meet and greet' sessions with the audience and also
leafletted them to explain their positions. Since the strike they have given music for
free on picket lines and when fundraising for the strike. There have been rallies in
support of the strikers and encouragingly they have been joined on the picket lines by
members of the youth orchestra,other musicians and members of the community.
The difficulties being encountered by the FWSO musicians are in no way unique to them,
their peers elsewhere have also encountered cuts, concert cancellations and even orchestra
closures. For example members of the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra had measures inflicted
upon them that amounted to a 10% cut in order to service the deficit they were
experiencing. Musicians also struck in Detroit in 2010 and there were lockouts in Atlanta
and Minnesota in 2012 and 2014. Since this particular strike broke out, musicians in
Pittsburgh and Philadelphia followed suit by walking out on similar grounds to those in
Fort Worth.
The election of the President is only weeks away. The choice of mainstream candidates is
between a crony of Wall Street bankers or a racist, misogynistic, xenophobic millionaire.
With those options the bosses can feel secure that things will go their way overall. In
such a climate, working people in the broadest sense of the term, will have to look for
whatever successes we can find wherever we can find them. The FWSO musician's possible
future victory could be one small glimmer of hope and inspiration for everyone who only
has their labour to sell and therefore isn't part of the small minority in power. As
progressive classical music educator Jose Abreu has argued in general, "Music has to be
recognized as an agent of social development, in the highest sense because it transmits
the highest values - solidarity, harmony, mutual compassion. And it has the ability to
unite an entire community, and to express sublime feelings"
http://www.awsm.nz/2016/10/23/a-sound-action/
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