“The Metropolitan Opera and two of its biggest unions reached a tentative labor agreement Friday,” writes Michael Cooper in Friday’s (8/3) New York Times. “In a break with past practice, neither the Met nor the two unions—Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, which represents the orchestra, and the American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents the chorus, singers and stage managers, among others—released the terms of the deal…. ‘Since the agreement is subject to ratification by the full membership of both union groups, we won’t be able to provide any details of the agreement until it has been ratified in the first week of September,’ ” Met General Manager Peter Gelb stated. “Four years ago the Met’s unions agreed to their first pay cuts in decades to help put the company on more solid footing—but the cuts were less than half of what management had sought. It was unclear if the new tentative deal would raise or cut pay…. Mr. Gelb has said in recent years that he hoped to win agreement from the unions to begin performing on Sundays … which is prohibitively expensive under the Met’s current contracts.”
Posted August 6, 2018
