What’s at stake in the Philadelphia Orchestra’s labor clash

We’ve been here before, and yet it’s still jarring to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra, adored for its trademark homogeneous sound, riven by dissonance. Players and management are adversaries in talks over a new labor contract that have stretched into overtime.

The musicians made a show of their unhappiness on the way out of town last month, staging a sidewalk demonstration before going on a short tour “under protest.” They’ve taken public aim at the salary of Matías Tarnopolsky, the Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center, Inc. (POKC) president and CEO. And on Sept. 29, the union representing players filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board.

Orchestra members say they don’t want to strike but may have to do so in the name of maintaining the orchestra’s ability to attract top talent by being among the top-paid in the country.

Management has staked out the stance that it must balance what it calls a strong offer to players with its own financial challenges. POKC incurred a $5 million deficit for the fiscal year ending Aug. 31, about $4 million of which is attributed to the Philadelphia Orchestra. Ticket sales are soft. In an astonishing admission, management says it has fallen $4 million short of its $31.8 million goal in its other main source of income, philanthropy — astonishing because fundraising efficiency was sold as a major benefit of the 2021 merger of the orchestra and Kimmel.

Wherever a settlement may lie, it’s important to recognize that Philadelphia has exactly one thing that stands shoulder to shoulder with any peer worldwide: its orchestra. Our town has a lot going for it — the architecture, food, sports teams we love and love to argue over. But when you put Philadelphia up against New York and Chicago, Berlin and Tokyo, Paris, or Prague, only our orchestra has competed on the world stage consistently for decades.

Any new labor contract must reflect that reality, in no small part because it will take all the fight management and players can muster together to battle the real enemy: apathy. Orchestra concerts in Verizon Hall were filled only to 67% of capacity last season, and COVID is still stalking listeners. Many hope this fall will be the time when attendance comes roaring back.

Sooner or later, a contract is going to get settled. Can’t the two sides sit down and get it done without having to incur the damage that would come with prolonged acrimony or a strike?

The course of a labor conflict is a story of leverage, and players have let pieces of it slip by as they’ve continued to play without a contract for more than a month now.

But perhaps they believe the Kimmel-orchestra merger has given them a potentially more powerful cudgel: shutting down other productions. If players struck, the employer they would be striking against would be the Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center, Inc., and the musicians’ union could urge members of other unions to not cross the picket line into any Kimmel facility. This might mean no Broadway shows — a critical source of income for POKC.

At the same time, the musicians’ argument for big raises has likely lost some teeth. As negotiations here have continued, several other major U.S. orchestras have penned new deals, and the raises are generally far from impressive. Boston Symphony Orchestra players recently won catch-up raises after deep pay cuts during the pandemic. But those of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra have just signed a contract with a 3% boost in each of the next three years. Raises at the Cleveland Orchestra and San Francisco orchestras are only a smidgen better. POKC is offering its players increases averaging in the mid single digits.

Pay is tangible evidence of how much an employee is valued, but intangibles speak, too, and in recent years several slights seem to say something about how much the players are undervalued.

With the Kimmel merger, the Philadelphia Orchestra has become only one part in a larger enterprise and less at the center of why the organization exists. When the orchestra is put on stage as essentially the backup band to groups like Pink Martini, it’s an act of marginalization. The black-shirt-black-tie concert dress adopted several seasons ago sometimes seems emblematic of an orchestra that has faded into the background a bit. The musicians look more informal than before, but also more generic.

I’ve not seen these sentiments expressed in the musicians’ protest materials, but they seem part and parcel of a management proposal whose base minimum salary may not put this orchestra among the U.S. top five (the order of the ranking depends on whether you include extra electronic media income musicians at this and other orchestras receive). The two sides have made progress on noneconomic issues, both say. On pay and retirement contributions, gaps remain.

Of course, musicians might have more moral authority on the question of attracting the best talent if we hadn’t seen so many instances of players hired who were relatives, friends, or students of current orchestra members. And while we’re talking about the composition of the ensemble: nothing has been raised at the negotiating table to address the absurdity of an orchestra living in a majority-Black city and having just three Black members. The ensemble is diverse in a lot of other ways, and I’m not advocating for quotas. But three? The orchestra needs a more equitable recruitment, audition, and tenure process.

Management says both the issues of diversity and the hiring of friends, relatives or students of current orchestra members are being discussed outside of contract talks with different committees. But it’s hard to feel hopeful that greater Black representation in the orchestra might be on its way. The first time the orchestra said it was working toward change was with the launch of its Cultural Diversity Initiative. That was more than three decades ago, when the orchestra had the same number of Black members as now. A redress should be backed by the weight of the labor contract.

Management had intended to get a signed deal with players early, months before the old contract’s Sept. 10 expiration. That’s smart practice when an organization is in the early stages of an ambitious fundraising campaign, as this one is. You want to bolster your pitch by demonstrating organizational stability. It’s one reason the orchestra announced a long contract extension with music and artistic director Yannick Nézet-Séguin — to project the image of a steady, unified enterprise.

But without labor peace, it’s hard to make that case. More talks may be on the way. If a deal can be struck in the next week or two, the frictions of the past few weeks may quickly evaporate.

And if there’s no deal soon? It took many years for the orchestra’s 2011 bankruptcy to fade from public consciousness. A major labor clash now would likely cement the Philadelphians’ reputation not as one of the best, but as the problem child of international orchestras.