Cathy, my experiences with unions--both as a member and as an observer--are not dissimilar to yours. They are necessary when dealing with hostile management that underpays its workers and doesn't want to provide essential services such as health care. But they are also discriminatory, especially with respect to women and BIPOC. Dancers w…
Cathy, my experiences with unions--both as a member and as an observer--are not dissimilar to yours. They are necessary when dealing with hostile management that underpays its workers and doesn't want to provide essential services such as health care. But they are also discriminatory, especially with respect to women and BIPOC. Dancers who are in union "shops" have more job protection than those who don't but are often paid less than the members of the orchestras that accompany them--because of gender discrimination, which is rampant, and because of the pressures on dancers by management not to make a fuss. The Vienna Phil did not admit women as full members until 1997 (I checked), which means it was the last holdout. Even the Berlin Phil had relented and admitted women as regular members over a decade before. So I don't really consider it a good example of communitarianism. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/23/arts/music/women-vienna-philharmonic.html
Trumka had worked himself up from the coal mines into his position. In the story on NPR last night, the thing that stood out for me was his yelling at union members whose racism made them hesitant to vote for Obama. They played the clip. Obama wasn't great for unions but dang, he was a better bet than either McCain or Mittens. And yet--as Trumka pointed out--these guys were willing (as they did with Reagan, who did more damage to unions than anyone) to vote against their best interests because, as Trumka said, "of the color of his skin."
The person who ushered in the new age in unions was Reagan, who made it acceptable to fire striking workers and replace them with scabs. In the process, he demonstrated to union leadership that they were better off feathering their personal nests than trying to make lives better for their workers. Reagan was also the architect of the destruction of American manufacturing, of the destruction of our environment and climate, of the destruction of our system of public education. The cognitive disconnect between the damage he wrought and his public memory is, to me, staggering.
Are unions corrupt? yep. Are unions necessary? Again, yep. How to reform them so that they are not corrupt? That's the question.
Reagan’s affability masked the cruelty of Republican policies and the movement of wealth upward. I fully agree about the disconnect between the damage he wrought and his public memory. He was a master of sound bites.
My father who was a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, and later in life, a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, had mixed feelings about unions. But we never had discussions about the reasons for his mixed feelings; we just didn't discuss things like politics, religion or finances in my household growing up.
Later I had a boss who stated on many occasions that "any company that had a union deserved a union." I grew to appreciate this as I entered the workforce. Treat your employees humanely, with good pay and benefits, and a safe work environment and both the company and its employees will succeed; treat your employees like easily replaceable cogs in a machine, and eventually you will have a unionized work force.
Linda, your letter ends with this: "Reagan was also the architect of the destruction of American manufacturing, of the destruction of our environment and climate, of the destruction of our system of public education." I admit I remember little of what Reagan did, probably because I was so involved in bringing up two sons and not paying much attention to politics. Can you recommend some readings that would enlighten me on Reagan's "destructions." I think to many Americans at the time, Reagan was a reassuring figure because of his Hollywood charm and his position against Russia. Thanks, Linda.
The marquee act was his firing of the nation's Air Traffic Controllers and hiring scabs to replace them. This decimated the PATCO Union and signaled to the business community that it was open season on Unions. That was a turning point where Unions lost an immense amount of their clout in national politics.
I remember it quite differently, the head of PATCO called a strike which was a direct threat to the economy of the nation, the president ordered them back to work while negotiations were to continue, PATCO refused and the president terminated their contract, some members went back to work and others refused, I used to know some of them, the union ceased to exist, commerce in the US continued to grow and we still have the safest flight ✈️ management that I know of. I say this as a 30 year union member who flew often during those years. PATCO was wrong to try to shut down the US economy and they paid the price.
I was in my teens at the time and only know the broad outlines. Thanks for fleshing it out a bit. Negotiations are a hardball game and PATCO got squashed.
Some union houses for orchestras, opera, and dance have protected their members during the pandemic. Others, like the Metropolitan Opera, have shafted their company members. When it is time for people to make donations, look into how organizations have treated their employees and contractors.
Indeed--but alas too often it hasn't been the unions taking care of the performers, staff, and techies. Here in KC all the major union houses (Ballet, Symphony, Lyric Opera) have worked like crazy to fundraise and support everyone in their organizations and they have largely succeeded. KC is different from a lot of other mid-size midwestern cities in its level of philanthropy but what they've done here is a testament to the determination of the administration's of all these organizations and rather less the support of the unions, although that is vital to things like health care for dancers and pensions.
In the United States the auditions for orchestras started to be done behind a screen so the jury couldn't see who it was playing. It worked pretty well. Even have a few women conductors doing well.
We were lucky in Eugene to have Marin Alsop as our Symphony director for a number of years! I also got to see the Philadelphia Orchestra when they came to town just after Carol Jantsch got the principal tuba position at age 21; the youngest member of the orchestra and the only female principal tuba player in a major symphony.
The son of one of my musician friends was a substitute Tuba player for the New York Philharmonic. He played a solo at church once and his gorgeous sound filled every nook and cranny of the sanctuary. The best way to describe it was being inside a glass of fine wine.
If you want to listen to Christmas music in August, and are on Facebook, look up a video on the Oregon Tuba Association's Facebook page and listen to our rendition of "How Far is it to Bethlehem" that we played in 2018. A friend described it as "liquid sound". I'll see if I can post a link to that when I get a chance.
Cathy, the behind the screen auditions go brilliantly--and they are extremely interesting to observe because of the white men who are so dismayed by the results, since they are hiring people who "do not look like them." The bias of the observer/judge is a well-known phenomenon that is consistently studied and proven over and over in hiring practices of all kinds. Another place where blind judging has become a super interesting issue is TV cooking contests (to which I admit I am addicted). Introducing blind judging--the judges have no idea who cooked the food because no contestants are named and none are in the room--has meant that the old reliable winning of men in those situations disappears. In those contests, the women are winning in very significant numbers. This tells you something about high-end chef-y stuff as well.
Thank you for this "view from both sides". I am curious as to what flavor of music caused you to be required to join AFM/AFoM. I have never worked in the private sector, and was a 28 year member of LCPOA (Lane County Peace Officer's Association) which did an adequate job of protecting its members from the not infrequent management attempts at signaling out specific individuals for "attention". Sadly, our management was so incompetent that they kept messing up the termination of a deputy (a guy I thought never should have made his probation, and ended up being "wrongfully" terminated for lying and sexual harassment and eventually terminated (after 30 years of employment) for "untruthfulness" after double dipping the county and the city where he was a city counselor for reimbursements. The district attorney declined to prosecute misdemeanor theft charges against him but did "Brady List" him (meaning he couldn't testify under oath because of his demonstrated untruthfulness.) He retired in lieu of termination, and still sits on the city council.
what a sad story...and you know there are thousands just like it. The apathy, the unwillingness to take the time and trouble to do the right thing; wink, wink, nod, nod. Challenging, it can be, to gather the documentation for ending employment, but so necessary to weed the garden. What we call weeds are plants in the wrong places. Sometimes, people are the wrong places.
I'm a violinist. Also play viola, some double bass, and a bit of piano. One of the most fun times was playing in the Aspen Festival Orchestra for three summers. You might say I fiddle around a lot.
Wow Ally. Just . . . wow. But also, alas, not unique--I hear about things like this frequently from friends and students who work for government organizations. Also academia has a similar problem with tenuring people who should never have been allowed in the classroom. It screws it up for the rest of us.
Wow. A double whammy from Cathy and Linda. So much food for thought. So many people that are fair minded and discerning have a lot of trouble deciding about unions. It is because of Linda’s double edged sword’s question.
Everything that starts out as good and pure has the potential to turn backwards and become opposed to what it was when it started. I've seen this personally so many times. Unions is a great example. What was once good and even necessary, has turned in on itself and become hierarchical and bloated and corrupt. Just look at the Police Unions that favour police non-accountability over well run and well working police forces. Just look at the Republican Party (RIP).
Just because Unions have devolved into a pathetic shadow of what they once were, doesn't mean they can't be resurrected, though it may be easier to replace them with a different system, one that can't be corrupted as easily.
Cathy, my experiences with unions--both as a member and as an observer--are not dissimilar to yours. They are necessary when dealing with hostile management that underpays its workers and doesn't want to provide essential services such as health care. But they are also discriminatory, especially with respect to women and BIPOC. Dancers who are in union "shops" have more job protection than those who don't but are often paid less than the members of the orchestras that accompany them--because of gender discrimination, which is rampant, and because of the pressures on dancers by management not to make a fuss. The Vienna Phil did not admit women as full members until 1997 (I checked), which means it was the last holdout. Even the Berlin Phil had relented and admitted women as regular members over a decade before. So I don't really consider it a good example of communitarianism. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/23/arts/music/women-vienna-philharmonic.html
Trumka had worked himself up from the coal mines into his position. In the story on NPR last night, the thing that stood out for me was his yelling at union members whose racism made them hesitant to vote for Obama. They played the clip. Obama wasn't great for unions but dang, he was a better bet than either McCain or Mittens. And yet--as Trumka pointed out--these guys were willing (as they did with Reagan, who did more damage to unions than anyone) to vote against their best interests because, as Trumka said, "of the color of his skin."
The person who ushered in the new age in unions was Reagan, who made it acceptable to fire striking workers and replace them with scabs. In the process, he demonstrated to union leadership that they were better off feathering their personal nests than trying to make lives better for their workers. Reagan was also the architect of the destruction of American manufacturing, of the destruction of our environment and climate, of the destruction of our system of public education. The cognitive disconnect between the damage he wrought and his public memory is, to me, staggering.
Are unions corrupt? yep. Are unions necessary? Again, yep. How to reform them so that they are not corrupt? That's the question.
Reagan’s affability masked the cruelty of Republican policies and the movement of wealth upward. I fully agree about the disconnect between the damage he wrought and his public memory. He was a master of sound bites.
My father who was a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, and later in life, a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, had mixed feelings about unions. But we never had discussions about the reasons for his mixed feelings; we just didn't discuss things like politics, religion or finances in my household growing up.
Later I had a boss who stated on many occasions that "any company that had a union deserved a union." I grew to appreciate this as I entered the workforce. Treat your employees humanely, with good pay and benefits, and a safe work environment and both the company and its employees will succeed; treat your employees like easily replaceable cogs in a machine, and eventually you will have a unionized work force.
Linda, your letter ends with this: "Reagan was also the architect of the destruction of American manufacturing, of the destruction of our environment and climate, of the destruction of our system of public education." I admit I remember little of what Reagan did, probably because I was so involved in bringing up two sons and not paying much attention to politics. Can you recommend some readings that would enlighten me on Reagan's "destructions." I think to many Americans at the time, Reagan was a reassuring figure because of his Hollywood charm and his position against Russia. Thanks, Linda.
The marquee act was his firing of the nation's Air Traffic Controllers and hiring scabs to replace them. This decimated the PATCO Union and signaled to the business community that it was open season on Unions. That was a turning point where Unions lost an immense amount of their clout in national politics.
I remember it quite differently, the head of PATCO called a strike which was a direct threat to the economy of the nation, the president ordered them back to work while negotiations were to continue, PATCO refused and the president terminated their contract, some members went back to work and others refused, I used to know some of them, the union ceased to exist, commerce in the US continued to grow and we still have the safest flight ✈️ management that I know of. I say this as a 30 year union member who flew often during those years. PATCO was wrong to try to shut down the US economy and they paid the price.
Thanks for this perspective.
I was in my teens at the time and only know the broad outlines. Thanks for fleshing it out a bit. Negotiations are a hardball game and PATCO got squashed.
Some union houses for orchestras, opera, and dance have protected their members during the pandemic. Others, like the Metropolitan Opera, have shafted their company members. When it is time for people to make donations, look into how organizations have treated their employees and contractors.
Indeed--but alas too often it hasn't been the unions taking care of the performers, staff, and techies. Here in KC all the major union houses (Ballet, Symphony, Lyric Opera) have worked like crazy to fundraise and support everyone in their organizations and they have largely succeeded. KC is different from a lot of other mid-size midwestern cities in its level of philanthropy but what they've done here is a testament to the determination of the administration's of all these organizations and rather less the support of the unions, although that is vital to things like health care for dancers and pensions.
In the United States the auditions for orchestras started to be done behind a screen so the jury couldn't see who it was playing. It worked pretty well. Even have a few women conductors doing well.
We were lucky in Eugene to have Marin Alsop as our Symphony director for a number of years! I also got to see the Philadelphia Orchestra when they came to town just after Carol Jantsch got the principal tuba position at age 21; the youngest member of the orchestra and the only female principal tuba player in a major symphony.
The son of one of my musician friends was a substitute Tuba player for the New York Philharmonic. He played a solo at church once and his gorgeous sound filled every nook and cranny of the sanctuary. The best way to describe it was being inside a glass of fine wine.
If you want to listen to Christmas music in August, and are on Facebook, look up a video on the Oregon Tuba Association's Facebook page and listen to our rendition of "How Far is it to Bethlehem" that we played in 2018. A friend described it as "liquid sound". I'll see if I can post a link to that when I get a chance.
I'd love to hear it!
Cathy, the behind the screen auditions go brilliantly--and they are extremely interesting to observe because of the white men who are so dismayed by the results, since they are hiring people who "do not look like them." The bias of the observer/judge is a well-known phenomenon that is consistently studied and proven over and over in hiring practices of all kinds. Another place where blind judging has become a super interesting issue is TV cooking contests (to which I admit I am addicted). Introducing blind judging--the judges have no idea who cooked the food because no contestants are named and none are in the room--has meant that the old reliable winning of men in those situations disappears. In those contests, the women are winning in very significant numbers. This tells you something about high-end chef-y stuff as well.
Thank you for this "view from both sides". I am curious as to what flavor of music caused you to be required to join AFM/AFoM. I have never worked in the private sector, and was a 28 year member of LCPOA (Lane County Peace Officer's Association) which did an adequate job of protecting its members from the not infrequent management attempts at signaling out specific individuals for "attention". Sadly, our management was so incompetent that they kept messing up the termination of a deputy (a guy I thought never should have made his probation, and ended up being "wrongfully" terminated for lying and sexual harassment and eventually terminated (after 30 years of employment) for "untruthfulness" after double dipping the county and the city where he was a city counselor for reimbursements. The district attorney declined to prosecute misdemeanor theft charges against him but did "Brady List" him (meaning he couldn't testify under oath because of his demonstrated untruthfulness.) He retired in lieu of termination, and still sits on the city council.
what a sad story...and you know there are thousands just like it. The apathy, the unwillingness to take the time and trouble to do the right thing; wink, wink, nod, nod. Challenging, it can be, to gather the documentation for ending employment, but so necessary to weed the garden. What we call weeds are plants in the wrong places. Sometimes, people are the wrong places.
I played with several professional symphony orchestras -- an ensemble of about 100 musicians -- all classical music although did some pops concerts.
This amateur tuba player wants to know what instrument(s) you play!
I'm a violinist. Also play viola, some double bass, and a bit of piano. One of the most fun times was playing in the Aspen Festival Orchestra for three summers. You might say I fiddle around a lot.
Wow Ally. Just . . . wow. But also, alas, not unique--I hear about things like this frequently from friends and students who work for government organizations. Also academia has a similar problem with tenuring people who should never have been allowed in the classroom. It screws it up for the rest of us.
Wow. A double whammy from Cathy and Linda. So much food for thought. So many people that are fair minded and discerning have a lot of trouble deciding about unions. It is because of Linda’s double edged sword’s question.
Thank you!
Everything that starts out as good and pure has the potential to turn backwards and become opposed to what it was when it started. I've seen this personally so many times. Unions is a great example. What was once good and even necessary, has turned in on itself and become hierarchical and bloated and corrupt. Just look at the Police Unions that favour police non-accountability over well run and well working police forces. Just look at the Republican Party (RIP).
Just because Unions have devolved into a pathetic shadow of what they once were, doesn't mean they can't be resurrected, though it may be easier to replace them with a different system, one that can't be corrupted as easily.