Settlement in Louisville – at least for now

Finally some good news from Louisville:

After 20 months of contentious negotiations, the Louisville Orchestra’s musicians and its management have reached a one-year labor agreement that will allow for a 30-week season beginning this fall, and both sides are optimistic that a long-term deal will be reached by next spring.

The deal, announced Wednesday onstage in Whitney Hall at the Kentucky Center, calls for performances with up to 57 musicians during the abbreviated season and a budget of $5.3 million.

The agreement also calls for an expert to review all aspects of the orchestra’s operations, then serve as a binding arbitrator on any issues upon which the two sides don’t agree when negotiating a multi-year contract.

The musicians will receive base pay of $925 per week, along with medical and pension benefits. The season begins Sept. 8.

This appears to be quite similar to what the musicians had been proposing for the past month or so. So what changed?

One hint is contained in an article earlier yesterday:

Leaders for the Louisville Orchestra Musicians Association announced late Tuesday that the group had ratified an agreement for a new contract with the orchestra management – potentially ending a months-long impasse.

“We are really please to be bringing symphonic music back to Louisville,” said Kim Tichenor, a violinist with the orchestra and the players’ negotiating committee chair, who stood in the musicians’ union hall surrounded by her colleagues, who cheered her announcement.

The agreement calls for a one-year contract covering 57 musicians for 30 weeks with a base salary level of $925 per week, including medical and pension benefits. It also calls for a binding arbitration process involving a mutually agreed-upon orchestra professional to work with both sides to establish a longer-term contract….

Orchestra CEO Robert Birman responded to a request for comment with a text message saying, “We’ll reserve comment until we see the proposal.”

Birman was conspicuously absent from the press conference announcing the deal. Perhaps he was busy canceling the online ads for replacement musicians. He certainly didn’t appear to be in the loop regarding the pending settlement.

This dispute had always seemed to me to be about Birman’s desire to make his bones by doing something that hadn’t been done before in the orchestra business. That “something” was originally the conversion of occupied full-time positions in the orchestra into part-time jobs, but then morphed into replacing musicians who were on strike (or locked out, depending on one’s point of view) with new non-union musicians. The dispute was only going to end when his board took a fresh sniff of the Kool-aid they’d been served and decided they no longer trusted the mixologist.

There are lots of lessons for musicians to learn from this epic labor dispute, and some for board members and managers as well. But for now it’s enough to be happy that the desire to get the orchestra back on stage has at least temporarily trumped ideology.