Tag - Negotiations

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Some Good Orchestra News (for a change)
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Norman doesn’t get negotiations
3
Was it worth it?
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Time to end the Detroit strike
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Another deadline in Detroit
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The Musician's Union: A Contrarian Point of View–Sort of
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Community outreach – ideas for guidelines
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Orchestras and the union movement
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The worst is yet to come
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Don't try this at home

Some Good Orchestra News (for a change)

It’s common for the general public, and even musicians to dwell on the negatives when speaking about the current state of orchestra affairs. Of course it’s not all gloom and doom. Here’s a positive. Pittsburgh Symphony settles contract with musicians a year early By Sally Kalson and Andrew Druckenbrod / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette At a time when major[…]

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Norman doesn’t get negotiations

It’s not surprising that Norman Lebrecht was right on top of the Chicago Symphony strike. It’s also not surprising that much of what he wrote missed the point or was simply wrong: Chicago is where the present inflationary cycle started when Henry Fogel, the former manager, caved in to a union demand for a $104,000[…]

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Was it worth it?

There is a famous (although possibly apocryphal) story about Richard Nixon’s visit to China. Reportedly, Kissinger told Nixon that Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai was a student of the French Revolution. So Nixon asked him, during their first informal meeting, what he thought the impact of the French Revolution on the course of history had[…]

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Time to end the Detroit strike

I am no longer working for the musicians’ union so I am just going to call it like I see it… It is time for the musicians of the DSO to make their best deal and go back to work. Sadly, we have seen this so many times – musicians using brute force to try[…]

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Another deadline in Detroit

DSO management has apparently set yet another deadline: The musicians claimed management set an April 1 deadline for a deal or the summer season would be lost and the fall season would be jeopardized. They also said management was unwilling to meet at the bargaining table before the Friday deadline. The two sides have not[…]

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The Musician's Union: A Contrarian Point of View–Sort of

Here’s a blog posted on March 15, 2011 by Columbus Symphony bassoonist, Betsy Sturdevant on her blog.  In it she makes some interesting observations about unions in general, and the Musician’s Union in particular.  Good food for thought.  What do you think? Musician labor unions: the pros and the cons Labor unions formed in the[…]

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Community outreach – ideas for guidelines

It appears that a big reason that the Detroit Symphony potential settlement fell apart was a dispute over $2 million for community outreach. I am sure there is more to it than that but if there is still a spark of hope embedded in that concept it is worth taking a closer look. The term[…]

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Orchestras and the union movement

Milwaukee is not quite equidistant from Madison and Detroit, but it does sit precisely on the line between them that a crow (or a Boeing) would fly. So it’s fitting that events in Detroit and Madison resonate so loudly with this member of the Milwaukee Symphony – an orchestra in the Rust Belt that’s had[…]

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The worst is yet to come

If you think that the Detroit Symphony labor dispute has been hard to watch, steel yourselves because the worst is yet to come. If the parties can’t find their way to a settlement in very short order, it will be even harder to watch the orchestra disintegrate. The recent “farewell” posting by the entire DSO[…]

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Don't try this at home

We’re having an interesting couple of weeks here in Wisconsin, as has been reported not only by the usual suspects but by the BBC and Al-Jazeera as well. Here was my favorite sign from my visit to Madison on Saturday: Today appeared a life lesson in the form of some frank talk by our Governor[…]

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