There are questions to be asked:
* Did the work stoppage come as a surprise? (It shouldn’t have.)
* Prior to the work stoppage was there any indication over the
preceding year(s) that a crisis was approaching? (There should have
been.)
* Did all parties understand and have access to the orchestra’s
financial information? (They should have.)
* Did all of the parties trust each other? (They should.)
* What collaborative efforts (musicians, management, board), if
any, occured to address the problems? (There should have been plenty.)
* Were problems addressed only through contract negotiations? (They
should not have been.)
* Was there any formal process in place for regular and ongoing
collaboration (musicians, management, board) in all aspects of
orchestra operations? (There should have been.)

The responses to these questions will indicate the extent to which
there is a “working together” mindset. It appears that the “us/them”
mindset hasn’t worked in Minnesota, which is the point of Mr.
Teachout’s closing question in the Wall Street Journal article.

Bill Cahn

…not all have been affected to the same degree and some institutions have sought cuts clearly (sometimes wildly) disproportionate to the actual degree of the institution’s financial distress. That lack of proportionality suggests that something other than financial condition is driving bargaining postures for those institutions. What is it? Still other institutions have worsened their financial condition vis-a-vis labor costs by prioritizing non-labor expenditures (e.g., hall improvements) and (arguably artificially, given the timing of those decisions) constraining the labor budget as a result. What has driven those priorities? In the absence of coherent answers tied meaningfully to institutional health, it is tempting to suspect faulty and/or destructive ideology at work.

It is indeed. And I’m sure in some places (most notably Minnesota) there is a strong ideological component. I’ve said that numerous times on this blog, in fact.

But not all situations are Minnesota. I suspect Indianapolis was, in large part, a failure of governance; how else can one explain that a board tried to run an orchestra with essentially no senior staff? Atlanta was also a governance failure, at least in the sense that the Woodruff Center, rather than the board of the ASO, appeared to be the real decision-maker when it came to contract negotiations.

I understand the anger about Minnesota. I share it. I’ve described the conduct of the board there in very harsh terms on this blog on multiple occasions. I’ve told people at the League I regard the MO board’s conduct as somewhere between immoral and criminal. But anger at Minnesota does not justify seeing plots and conspiracies where there are none.

I think there are others who have jumped on the “new model” bandwagon as an expedient buzz-meme to justify down-sizing that, in turn, takes the pressure off boards and managements to perform their functions with excellence, with no accompanying institutional innovation.

You’re absolutely right.

Whether these trends–and they are clearly trends–are League-driven or whether the League has simply failed to provide the kind of leadership one would hope for from a service organization that collects such a substantial amount of dues from its members hardly matters. Either scenario is an indictment.

That’s a little too pat. Of course it matters whether or not the League is driving an anti-musician agenda; that’s why the charge has been made by the AFM and ICSOM over and over again in various ways.

The desire for “leadership” in this instance is, with respect, really a desire that the League take public positions regarding its member orchestras’ conduct that you agree with. If the League took a position of formal support for the Minnesota Orchestra board’s conduct, I doubt you’d consider that an example of “leadership,” although no doubt some managers and board members would. But why is one position “leadership” while the other isn’t?

Part of me would love to see a formal denunciation by the League of that conduct. But, as a board member, I would have to vote against such a denunciation – because, in the end, it would go a long way to destroying the League’s ability to help anyone in this field.

The decision whether or not to belong to the League, and to pay dues to it, is in the hands of managers and boards. What do you think their reaction would be to such a denunciation? I’m pretty confident it would be “why should I pay dues to an organization that might choose to publicly condemn how I’m running my orchestra some day?” More than a handful of those and the League’s ability to do its basic work of assisting orchestras by helping staffs and boards to be better would be severely compromised.

The League itself talks about leading the field. But, in the end, I don’t think that’s the League’s role, nor do I think that anyone in the field would let it be an effective leader in setting policy. Our field – on both sides of the table – is allergic to top-down national leadership. What the League can do well is to help orchestras be managed and governed better.

To use the SFS situation as evidence of an absence of a League lockout agenda is disingenuous and misses the point. As you note, the situation there was vastly different from those where the employer has sought large cuts and there simply was no middle ground on which the parties could arrive in a reasonable time frame. No one is suggesting that the League has promoted a no-matter-what lockout strategy.

Actually, the SFS example was precisely on-point. Not only did Brent Assink not lock out the musicians, but he didn’t seek massive cuts either. But, as we both know, the two are intimately related. A lockout agenda makes less than zero sense without the economic incentives behind it. What sense would it make for the League to promote a lockout agenda unless it also believed in massive cuts? And, of course, there is no League position on the necessity of massive cuts either.

What SFS shows is that even if one believes in a League “agenda,” it’s clear that even orchestras led by those in leadership positions at the League base their decisions on local factors. I know that the fact that Lowell Noteboom is both chair of the League board and on the SPCO board is cited as evidence by some in SSD that both Twin Cities lockouts are part of a League agenda. But Brent Assink is a key member of the League board as well; why is a very different approach to labor relations on his part viewed as irrelevant when assessing whether the League is pushing lockouts?

For that matter, the only member of the League board to comment publicly on the Minnesota Orchestra lockout, except for some fairly anodyne comments by Jesse Rosen, has been me. And what I’ve written has been rather unkind to the Minnesota Orchestra board and management. So why doesn’t that matter in assessing the League’s position?

The fact remains that the AFM assumes the League has an agenda when there is no evidence (as that word is defined in most dictionaries) to that effect and some evidence to the contrary. So the AFM chooses to ignore both, and simply believe what’s easiest and politically safest to believe.

And to say that “no one is suggesting that the League has promoted a no-matter-what lockout strategy” is simply assembling a straw man to attack. When the IM publishes an article that begins

The AFM staff and members have repeatedly expressed the opinion that the industry`s national association is driving a national labor relations lockout agenda. I sought empirical data to test this hypothesis. The charts and article below support this theory

I think it’s fair to assume that the AFM is indeed suggesting that the League is promoting lockouts. The “no-matter-what” part of your statement is pure straw, and not something I ever accused the AFM of believing.

So if it is the case, as you seem to assert, that the League has no particular interest in supporting the use of the lockout as a bludgeon to downsize labor agreements, the more important question in my mind is this: what exactly is the League doing to lead boards and managements away from this destructive and (in my opinion) misguided approach? What is the League doing to model excellence?

The League is trying to help boards and staffs to better do their jobs. I’ve long been a strong advocate of the League not being involved in labor relations; I’ve never felt that the labor relations issues in our field were a result of a lack of ability to negotiate on either side. But an institution that is poorly run and/or poorly governed is eventually going to be unable to provide the kind of compensation that its musicians and staff need and want. At that point, no amount of skill at the table is going to solve the problem.

In terms of “modeling excellence,” it’s hard for the League to do so when it’s not itself an orchestra. The League has a very good board, a very good staff, and operates in a fiscally responsible way. That’s about as far as it can go as a model. On the other hand, I think the League has done a very good of highlighting excellence in the field, although there are many ideas of what excellence really is.