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The Met is seeking a 30 percent pay cut, plus cuts to overtime, sick, and vacation pay, health insurance, and other benefits, from workers who have not received a paycheck in an entire year.
Here is a typical day for the 800 backstage workers at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, as described to me by Joe Hartnett of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which represents some of the unions at the facility:
Performers come in to rehearse on Monday at 8 a.m., with a full set and lights. Rehearsal lasts until midafternoon. When it’s over, stagehands strike the set and the lights, move them offstage, and assemble the different sets needed for that night’s performance. That show goes on, and after it ends, a second-shift crew strikes that entire set and puts it away, and positions the set for rehearsals the next morning. The Met does not do consecutive performances of the same opera, so the stagehands never get a day where they can just keep the set in place, with well over 200 performances per year to manage. And the whole time, other backstage workers are building sets for the next production, taking them from ideas scribbled on a cocktail napkin to completed work. “They do this every single day, 365 days a year, for 138 years,” Hartnett explained.
For the last year, Met stagehands have not performed this ritual. On March 12, 2020, the Opera told every backstage worker to leave the building, and no new performances have been conducted since then. In December, the Met locked out its stagehands, after the IATSE Local 1 contract, which covers several hundred backstage workers, expired during the coronavirus lockdown, and negotiations faltered. The Met is seeking an across-the-board 30 percent pay cut, plus cuts to overtime, sick, and vacation pay, health insurance, and other benefits, from workers who have not received a paycheck in an entire calendar year. The Met initially offered a $1,500-a-week “bridge payment” in exchange for this pay cut, but as there has been no agreement, that payment has not been delivered.
With talks not happening and vaccinations bringing us closer to a time when the Met can reopen, workers allege that management has begun to outsource set building to non-union shops in California and even overseas. Musicians have complained of the same tactics—using non-union orchestra musicians in some live-streamed concerts to replace furloughed union workers.
This escalation, stagehands contend, is realizing the Met’s long-sought goal of weakening the union’s bargaining power. And it could be mirrored in institutions across the country, which may use workers’ desire to get back to work to extract concessions.
“It’s a total move against working fairly with the unions,” said Theresa Gonzales, a “scenic industrial” who works with the painters and scenic artists. Gonzales has been working at the Met for more than 20 years. “People here are passionate about their craft and skills and passionate about the company,” she said. “The quality of what we do, generations from now they are going to look back on it. And to have management that doesn’t appreciate that fact is so disheartening.”
According to Local 1, the Met has shipped set design work for upcoming performances of Rigoletto and Don Carlos to Bay Productions, a company in Cardiff, Wales, U.K. Bay Productions has done work for opera houses in Chicago, Brussels, and Washington. The company did not respond to a request for confirmation.
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Another production, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, scheduled for opening night of the 2021–2022 season in September, is having its sets produced at a non-union shop on the West Coast, according to Local 1. The production, based on the memoir of New York Times columnist Charles Blow, is the Met’s first opera from a Black composer.
It’s unclear precisely how much savings the Met would realize from outsourcing, when you factor in having to ship giant sets across the country or over from Europe. Moreover, while the pandemic has eliminated all ticket sales, donations from the Met’s elite band of supporters yielded $130 million in the fiscal year ending July 2020. Combined with not having to pay stagehands or talent, and pay-per-view digital performances of music recitals (revenue which stagehands who built the backdrops do not share in), the opera was able to break even last year, despite months without live productions and 276 total cancellations.
Because of the size of its staff (over 3,000, with an operating budget of over $300 million annually), the Met did not qualify for PPP small-business relief. It has not said specifically whether it would attempt to secure a Shuttered Venue Operators Grant when they go live later this year, though General Manager Peter Gelb has said the organization would seek federal aid. The organization did slightly raise its line of credit by $11 million over the last fiscal year.
The Met did not respond to a detailed list of questions, but Gelb has previously acknowledged that the Opera is “exploring” the use of outside shops for set construction. The Met’s press office told NPR that it was “willing to negotiate at any time, day or night.”
This escalation, stagehands contend, is realizing the Met’s long-sought goal of weakening the union’s bargaining power.
The Met’s stagehands, musicians, and singers have received no assistance since the opera house closed last year, save for an extension of pay to March 31. Management invoked a force majeure clause in the union contract to enact furloughs without pay, though health insurance coverage has been maintained.
“We’re living on unemployment insurance and anything the federal government has put in,” said Tanya Thompson, a carpenter with the Met for the last 15 years. “Some retired and took severance, and aren’t coming back despite 20 to 30 years with the Opera.” Tanya took a part-time job in August when she feared that her unemployment would run out. She’s now a home health aide for elderly residents in the New York area.
Gonzales has also been collecting unemployment. She has been asked to take television and film jobs, but because her daughter has been in remote learning and the family doesn’t qualify for child care subsidies, she hasn’t been able to leave the home. Her husband is an EMT with the city’s fire department, pulled into 12-hour days in some of the hardest-hit areas in New York.
The Met has been through scattered financial difficulties recently. Gelb, the general manager, threatened to lock out stagehands and musicians two years ago, after which union workers agreed to wage freezes and benefit cuts. “In my opinion, he is using the situation of the pandemic to get everything else he wasn’t able to get in the last negotiation,” said Hartnett. Gonzales added that some of the language in the Met’s contract proposal was identical to past efforts to wring concessions from the union.
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Negotiations on a new contract began last July and went nowhere. “Things got to such a point that in December, the president of Local 1 said, ‘Are you telling me if we offered a 30 percent cut and nothing else we would not be allowed back?’ And they said, ‘Yes,’” Hartnett explained. When stagehands refused to take the deep cuts to pay and benefits, Gelb locked them out, preventing stagehands from beginning to build sets for the new season and canceling health insurance contributions.
The Met’s latest 990 financial disclosure shows that Gelb earned $2,025,791 in salary and benefits in the fiscal year that dates from August 2018 to July 2019. The opera company pays for his apartment in Midtown Manhattan, according to Local 1.
Workers have begun to go public with their concerns. A full-page print ad released in February states that “Unless the Met’s management returns to negotiations and treats workers fairly, there will be no opera in 2021.” Local 1 has asked patrons to stop contributions to the Met until the conflict resolves, and lobbied Congress and state lawmakers in Albany to prevent the Met from accessing government aid.
Earlier this month, the union sent a letter to the Ford Foundation, which is underwriting Fire Shut Up in My Bones, explaining that sets have been outsourced to a non-union shop and that workers have been locked out. “At a time when our members have not worked in nearly a year, Gelb has made the cruel decision to inflict more financial harm,” the letter reads. It asks Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, to urge the Met to reinstate locked-out workers, and to withdraw funding if the Met refuses.
Stagehands are willing to accept concessions. “I know, speaking for the shop, we want to get back to work,” said Thompson. “We’re a Met family. We do it for each other. We will raise our game. We just want Peter Gelb to raise his game. We would happily meet him halfway.”
