are unions to blame for strikes? only if you read the papers...

[acroyear]

How to wreck an orchestra: [from a former season pass holder of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO)]

It is the duty of $400,000-a-year CEOs to make sure fundraising is done properly and financial plans are kept within the realm of sanity.

Over very few years, the DSO management allowed its base of donors to erode from 25,000 to 5,000. More and more it relied on wealthy members of its board to ante up when fundraising fell short.

Why did the DSO fail at raising money? For a number of years, fundraising went on with great success. But when the two DSO officials in charge of fundraising departed, they were succeeded by new money-raisers propelled by Orchestra Halls’s revolving doors.

Eight fundraising heads came and went in four years.

It was deemed easier to hit the rich few for money rather than expend the effort to broaden the donor base.

But failure to meet fundraising goals was only part of the problem.

When the DSO proposed a $60 million addition to Orchestra Hall known as “The Max” after benefactor Max Fisher, enough money was raised to pay for construction of the new building.

But instead of paying for the project from money it collected from donors, DSO management chose to bet the money on the stock market. They speculated that they could parley donors’ money into even more money and tap interest on their endowment to pay for construction of the new building in addition to regular operating costs.

DSO bosses might as well have trusted donors’ money to a casino.

In 2008, the stock market tanked.

Meanwhile, the DSO has been tapping principal of its endowment to meet $3 million-a-year payments on bonds it used to finance The Max.

In January of 2010, a group of banks holding DSO debt pointed out that tapping principal is draining collateral the DSO used to secure its debt. The banks started to make noise about foreclosure.

That’s when DSO managers, led by the orchestra’s $400,000-a-year CEO Parsons, started beating on the musicians to give up salary, pension and health benefits with added time doing community outreach aimed at achieving the fundraising that was Parson’s job.

So the DSO strike is not really about musicians’ salaries and benefits.

It’s about DSO managers’ attempts to hide their own incompetence by charging the consequences of their ill-advised financial arrangements to the musicians.

This is not an explanation you’ll read about in The Detroit News, which loves to bash strikers.

But it helps to understand how a world-class orchestra could get into such a mess.

granted, many of the fund-raising problems were also caused by the recession, or more the failure of the region to recover from the FIRST Bush recession as Detroit lost yet more factories during the Bush era, which meant it was dealing with a shrinking financial pool.  Still, had that been addressed honestly, the Strikes might have been averted.

If you really read the details behind strikes, you'll almost always find at the heart of it the corporation (or in Wisconsin's case, the governor) lying to the workers - even the infamous Disney strike had REAL corporate problems to address (in spite of being instigated by the left-wing rabble-rousers the press like to write about today), such as the failure of the company to hand out promised bonuses after the success of Snow White (Walt and Roy were more focused on using the money to pay for the new studio building (in the bigger picture, a VERY good investment), pay off debts over Snow White, and the investment in technology necessary for Fantasia - they were looking long term, but not necessarily being honest about that focus to workers who were promised bonuses).

If a company is honest, particularly honest about the money (profits), people stay content.  It really is that simple.  Explain honestly that there's troubled waters ahead BEFORE they hit, and the workers will often ride through with you.  Suddenly spring it on workers that they're the ones to pay for the troubled waters they never knew about, and you have seeded a discontent that the company will really never recover from.

Comments

[stori-lundi.livejournal.com]

Arts fund-raising is notoriously incompetent. Many rely on blue-hairs or ladies that lunch to tap their network of wealthy friends. When those friends are tapped out, the ladies go on to another organization and hit up their friends again. The NSO and Washington Opera is going through the same issues.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

it is to a degree akin to the constant flood of mail I *still* get from the san diego zoo after having "joined" them once for the discount tickets we got back in 2009. the same people can only tolerate getting requests for money for so long before they cut you off entirely.

[stori-lundi.livejournal.com]

I threatened to to report the opera after some little blue hair harassed me on the phone for not buying a subscription package.

Direct mail is a different scenario. They know they will only get a small percentage of return on that (it's stupid small like 2% or so) but they keep trying anyway.