Mimi Cowan, historian
history.urbanstudies.chicago.
The Tragedy of Two Strikes.
The Metropolitan Opera is about to begin a lock-out of its workers because the unions are resisting a major pay and benefits cut being ordered by the opera's general director. Confrontations between labor and management are nothing new - even in opera. But as our nation's single largest cultural organization counts down to go to the mattresses, it's worth looking back at other notable labor battles. What's changed? What hasn't changed? Have we learned anything?
120 years ago this summer, Chicago's Pullman Palace Car Company workers walked off the job after their wages were drastically cut. Admittedly, the union employees of the Met are a far cry from the poorly paid laborers of the Pullman Company. But there are other similarities between the two labor disputes that demonstrate the tragically imblanaced power relationship between one man, on one side, and many workers, on the other side.
Topic
Cause of labor dispute
Living conditions for workers
Options for employees
Effect on company head
Company head's attitude toward workers
How many workers?
Any actions in solidarity?
Unfounded & by all accounts incorrect beliefs of the company head that are contributing factors to the labor dispute
Reality check!
Are all employees affected?
What could the company head have done instead of cut wages?
How does it end?
Legacies
Pullman Company, 1894
Fewer train cars being sold during economic downturn. Company head decides most effective way to cut costs is to cut salaries.
Pullman created a town for his employees far from the main parts of the city. In the company town, they could walk to work and avoid a commuting trip that could take more than an hour each way.
While they could’ve lived elsewhere, it wasn’t really that much of an option.
Pullman owned the town most employees lived in and profited from the rent they paid & the items they bought in the company store. He controlled what was sold & what the prices were. When Pullman cut salaries, he kept rents and the cost of everything else sold in the company town the same.
I doubt Pullman took a pay cut with his employees. Doesn’t seem like his style.
"Workers should be grateful for all I give them: sewers, electricity, running water. And let’s make sure the media portrays them as they are: greedy, dangerous, anarchist foreigners."
(Please note: this is not an *actual* quote from Pulmman. It is my creative opinion of what it seemed like he thought.)
A few thousand.
Railroad workers throughout the nation stopped working in solidarity with the Pullman workers about a month after the strike began. This caused almost all train travel in the U.S. to stop, when trains were the only way to transport goods and people long distances.
Pullman thought his wealth was proof that he knew what was best for his workers. Pullman’s paternalistic attitude was declared “un-American” by federal investigators after the strike.
If Pullman thought his employees would be cool with reduced wages while Pullman continued to charge them the same rent and kept costs of goods the same - and profiting off all this himself - well, let's just say he was sorely mistaken.
No. Porters and a few other positions were not part of the strike.
Maybe take a little off his paycheck. Perhaps look for new markets or streamline processes?
The federal government sent in troops to break the strike because they deemed the stoppage of mail service to be a threat to the nation. 30 workers were killed in the melee surrounding the breaking of the strike.
When he died a few years later, Pullman’s family encased his coffin in a huge cement block before it was buried and put a large cement platform with big columns over it because they were afraid his former workers would attempt to dig up his body in retaliation for all he had done to them.
The Met Opera, 2014
Fewer opera tickets being sold. Company head blames economic downturn & death of opera; other opera company heads worldwide refute his claim with stellar ticket sales. Company head decides most effective way to cut costs is to cut salaries.
Workers must live in or near Manhattan because hours are often very late night and/or split shift-style; in some cases workers must be within a short radius of the opera house even when not working.
While they could live farther away, it isn't really much of an option.
While Gelb certainly doesn’t own or control NYC, it’s still the second most expensive city in the world and prices aren’t going to drop just because the workers’ salaries do.
Gelb took a pay cut with his employees a few years ago. And then recently reinstated his former, higher salary.
"Workers should be grateful to work at the nation’s best opera company. And let’s make sure the media portrays them as they are: spoiled, over-paid thugs."
(Please note: this is not an *actual* quote from Gelb. It is my creative opinion of what it seems like he thinks.)
A few hundred.
Doubtful. Although if the union leaders were smart, they’d be talking to the union reps of other arts organizations throughout the country. A national arts organization strike would make this far more interesting. And perhaps effective.
Gelb seems to think his appointment by the board is proof that he knows what’s best for the company. He has said publicly that it’s not his fault tickets aren’t selling; it’s because opera is a dying art form.
Opera as an art form is actually more popular now than it was 25 years ago. Tickets aren’t selling as well at the Met because of Gelb’s very specific artistic vision, which ticket buyers don’t seem to like very much.
No. The administration is not unionized and will not be going on strike. But have you heard any of them supporting Gelb? No, you haven’t. Seems to me you'd be hearing from them if they supported him.
Oh so many things. He could’ve not ordered a whole new Ring Cycle production, which was pretty unanimously panned and had horrible ticket sales. Not only did the company lose out on ticket sales because of this multi-million dollar fiasco, they will most likely not be able to rent out the production to other companies in the future, so the loss will compound over time.
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. And this column is getting uneven.
Unlike in the 1980s when Reagan stepped in during the airline workers strike, I doubt this will come to federal intervention.
But who knows what the outcome will be? A silent season from our nation’s largest cultural musical organization? Maybe the unions will be forced to cave because their members can’t live without salaries and without health insurance but the salaries they will end up with will be untenable as well so the nation’s best musicians will leave the Met and the Met’s artistic standards will continue to drop, which will fuel a snowball effect of increasingly tragic ticket sales, ultimately resulting in the collapse of one of our nation’s best cultural organizations?
Rather dramatic. Someone should pen an opera about this.
I don’t foresee a cement tomb for Gelb (although there’s always been rumors about the NYC unions and the mafia so let’s hope there’s no cement boots either) but he doesn’t have much more love to lose among his employees. It’s hard to imagine him regaining any respect at this point.
What does all this mean?
The good:
The Metropolitan Opera strike is highly unlikely to end in death, except of the soprano, which happens eight times a week anyway.
The bad:
The workers, whether we’re talking about 1894 or 2014, are between a rock and a hard place. What’s worse – accepting salaries you can’t live on or taking a gamble on no salaries at all for a while to see if you can’t get something workable out of it?
The same:
When the economy tanks, many company heads decide to punish their workers – as if lower profits are any fault but their own. The only protection any worker has against this pattern is sticking together with others. Unions are by no means the answer to all labor ills; in fact I’d go so far as to say they create quite a few problems in exchange for some of the good they are able to do. But for now, for the Metropolitan Opera, unions are the answer.
Meanwhile, we’d all be better off thinking about how we can support one another so that when the time comes, others support us.
Good luck and best wishes to the Metropolitan Opera employees.
NB: There is much opinion in the above and any factual errors are mine and mine alone. Further, I make no bones about my bias. I worked for The Met years ago - before Gelb's time. There were financial issues which were handled poorly then, in my opinion. But not to this extent. When I worked there, I was not in a unionized employee group and it was frustrating making so much less than the unionized employees - for the simple reason that I was not part of the union. I am not unequivocally supportive of unions for that reason, among others.
But as I have read the articles on this labor dispute - most issued by a pro-Gelb PR machine - and put together what I know of The Met and what is being said, combined with having seen productions and heard complaints about artistic decisions made by Gelb in the last few years, I come down firmly on the side of the workers - whether or not they are unionized - at The Met - and opposed to Gelb and his policies, which I view as a product of his ineptness and his alone. As a nineteenth-century historian, I can't help but see lessons in the past. It is for that reason that I wholeheartedly advocate that The Metropolitan Opera board....
#FireGelb