I heard this story on American Public Media’s Marketplace a couple days ago, and it got me to thinking. Here are the salient points from the opening of the transcript of the radio story (emphasis is mine):
John Plauche is a fourth-year associate at a top New York City law firm. He got a $20,000 raise last year. When his firm announced salary hikes across the board in January, he received another 20 grand. At 30 years old, he’s on $210,000 a year. He says he knows what’s behind his good fortune.
“Wall Street and Wall Street bonuses.”
He says firms like his do a lot of work for investment banks and hedge funds. Some lawyers end up defecting to work in-house at those companies. And pay at those places has been breaking records recently. That puts pressure on the law firms.
“So to keep talent, basically, the law firms have to keep raising pay to keep up with Wall Street.”
That, he says, has a knock-on effect at elite firms across the country.
Bill Urquhart agrees. He’s a senior partner at Los Angeles law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver and Hedges. After news of the New York raises rampaged across the Internet, his firm announced it would match the hikes.
“For law firms like ours, you really don’t have a choice but to pay what the market is demanding you pay. Otherwise, you start either a quick or a long-term decline.”
He says he and his rivals are in a fierce battle for the best law-school students in the country. Once they’ve tapped those superior legal brains, they want to keep them.
This got me to thinking about how orchestra managers set out to negotiate wages and other parts of the collective bargaining agreement with musicians. Wouldn’t the typical manager want to both attract and retain the most highly sought-after musicians from other orchestras and the top music schools?
When I joined the Oregon Symphony in 1995, we were right in the middle of the pack of ICSOM (International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians), with the base wage somewhere in the neighborhood of $35,000 per year for a section player. It was a enough to live on, as Portland’s real estate boom hadn’t yet begun.
Now, as we are in yet another year without a contract (our last one expired weeks after agreed to), we find our positioning in the orchestral pay hierarchy slipping – we’re now right on the bottom third, and several orchestras have either passed us by on the way up or are right on our heels.
Many of our auditions are frustrating experiences because other high-paying and more prestigious jobs are holding auditions at the same time or close by, and we lose the best of those who would ordinarily show up.
We’re at a geographic disadvantage, too: it costs a lot to get to Portland, and we’re a long way away from the big East Coast centers of music. When we do hire an excellent young (or not so young) musician, they all almost immediately begin auditioning for other jobs, because they know that they can’t have a good standard of living in Portland on the wages we’re paid. Just as man doesn’t live on bread alone, the improved artistic standards of the orchestra don’t pay the mortgage or buy the groceries.
Right now I feel totally at the mercy of the bottom line: every decision seems to be made based on how much it costs right this moment, not with an eye to how much this will bring in in the future. Short-term thinking only produces short-term solutions.
5 replies on “why no wage competition?”
This is from a player in the Calgary Symphony:
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately – it’s the same situation up here in Calgary. The oil boom in Alberta has accelerated prices on the real-estate market in Calgary to record levels, and it’s impossible as a musician (paid approximately the same amount in Canadian dollars) to keep up to that pace.
Management in our orchestra is sympathetic to musicians in our situation, but hasn’t taken any steps towards raising our salaries to a decent level. Those players in the orchestra who bought houses 20 (and even 10) years ago are fine; their mortgages are pretty much paid off, their property has appreciated, and they’re sitting pretty… but those of us who have just joined the orchestra, even myself in the last 5 years, cannot even qualify for mortgage here anymore.
But, all in all, it comes down to supply and demand – we can’t expect management to cough up the dough when they themselves have a bottom line to adhere to – it’s not as if the organization is making record profits, and just neglecting to pass those profits onto the employees/contractors: Ticket prices need to be raised, the public needs to be interested in paying those extra dollars, corporate entities need to find value in sponsoring arts groups for fostering the community OR public visibility OR tax breaks, and philanthropists (of ALL ages, not just the blue-haired) need to be wooed. And ultimately, it comes down to public perception of classical music (or whatever genres your group performs), and the value that’s found in it. That’s for another discussion!
Also, the position of management is symptomatic of a business mindset, I think: They are admittedly being short-sighted in not addressing musician wage-growth (compared to the growth of almost every industry around), since they are focused on the “right now” cost, rather than thinking of it as an investment. However, they may not be only looking at the cost-to-possible-return aspect; it’s the unfortunate observation to some that Classical music’s popularity is waning – and from the view of an ‘investment’, what investor wants to put their money into a company that is on the downturn?
So sure, management everywhere is dealing with the industry as a business, or as a public market company, as they have to – and it stands to reason that they want to cut costs and live in the black after each season; but with that mindset, musicians wages go down, top notch musicians can be hired (at the beginnings of their careers) but quickly lost (in the quest for greener pastures), top-tier soloists won’t be hired because the cost is too high, a standard of mediocrity is established in presenting concerts to an audience, and the audience loses interest (and so do corporate and government sponsors, philanthropists, etc.). And that’s the day the music dies.
SO! How do we turn that around? What’s the key to fostering the audience, and a culture of concert-going?
I don’t know how exactly it could/should be done, but I think that the key is making the symphony a vital, exciting, relevant part of community life. Establishing “buzz” is key – younger potential audience members like to do something interesting and cool, and I don’t think that’s out of our realm.
I once got really, really pissed in a board meeting and yelled at our president when she said something about how the new people that were moving to our area were not ‘our kind of people.’ Well, whose people are they? What are their musical needs and interests? Why aren’t we meeting them, and showing them a symphony orchestra has something to offer for everyone?? There is no need for any orchestra anywhere to starve if this question can be answered.
You’ve got that right, Jen – we need to work hard to make orchestras relevant to our communities, or we’ll see an inevitable decline.