Valuable lesson from the Detroit Symphony strike

Unless you’re from Detroit — or follow developments in the classical music world closely — you might have missed the news about this year’s Detroit Symphony Orchestra strike.

The latest Commentary magazine covers the strike (at this subscriber link), largely because of the lessons it teaches about ongoing disputes across the nation involving public-sector unions.

Like Wisconsin’s public-sector union members and their ardent supporters, the striking musicians in Detroit believed that the orchestra’s existing pay scales and work rules, having been established through negotiation and set in contractual stone, has acquired the status of (to use a word frequently heard in Wisconsin) a “right,” one that it would have been illegal and immoral for the orchestra’s management to abrogate or alter regardless of circumstances. They also took it for granted that the people of Detroit, having previously been willing to support a world-class orchestra, would continue to do so no matter what. And where would the money come from? No matter. It would be found. Somewhere.

The managers of the DSO had come to a radically different conclusion, one not unlike the view of Wisconsin’s fiscal crisis that has been embraced by governor Walker. … [T]hey believed that the DSO required a new and more flexible model of managerial governance, one that was incompatible with the orchestra’s existing union-sanctioned work rules. …

… Therein lay the crux of the matter. The striking musicians, like the protesters in Wisconsin, refused to admit that circumstances have changed. Instead, they seem to have thought themselves to be so important to the city of Detroit that if they went on strike, the people would rise up and force their masters to give them what they wanted.

What was the result of the clash? “[T]he players paid a high price for having made that assumption: each one has lost at least $55,000 in salary for the face-saving privilege of negotiating a 40-week contract offer that is not substantially different from the one they rejected in February.”