In San Francisco Opera’s upcoming production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, the title heroine may fear the jealous Don José, but she will be safe from a strike by the SF Opera Orchestra.
As the orchestra’s temporary contract extension ran out on Oct. 31, the SF Opera administration and American Federation of Musicians Local 6 have now settled on another extension, this one longer-range and slightly modifying the current terms. The agreement is good through May 30, 2025, just before the company’s summer season begins on June 3, 2025.
An announcement from the administration explains that the company is still in “active negotiations with our orchestra” and that the temporary extensions, including a wage increase this fall for the musicians, “allow productive conversations to continue.”
The announcement reads further: “We have incredible respect for the musicians of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and deeply value the talents that they bring to the company and the community. We have been in discussions with the orchestra for the past four months and share the orchestra’s desire to reach a mutually agreeable resolution as soon as possible.”
A statement from the musicians’ union expresses hope “that during this time management will operate in good faith and put forward a proposal that fairly values the contributions of the orchestra, protects and invests in the artistic product of the organization, and allows us to continue producing world-class performances.
“A long-term extension that meets these criteria is the only way to provide for the stability that the orchestra, and [SF] Opera as a whole, will require to be successful in the coming years.”
The statement calls management proposals to date “woefully inadequate and unacceptable to our members — with proposed cuts to pay relative to inflation, a reduction in benefits, and drastic reductions to the number of musicians in our complement — [yet] we remain hopeful that we can find an agreeable resolution in the time afforded to us by this extension.
“Until then, we will continue to demand a fair, long-term contract and we will not settle for any agreement that jeopardizes the future of our musicians and the organization.”
In recent years, collective bargaining negotiations for the orchestra, already complicated, were dramatically exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which locked SF Opera out of the War Memorial Opera House for 532 days, between March 7, 2020, and Aug. 21, 2021.
This calamity came amid financial and organizational problems at the company that began well before 2020 — and ahead of the expensive, artistically challenging centennial season in 2022–2023.
As a result, collective bargaining negotiations since 2020 have often dealt with how much salaries and benefits should be cut, not raised. For instance, the pre-pandemic contract’s base minimum salary of $95,284 for 2018–2019 had been set to rise to $107,243 by 2022–2023 but was cut by 44 percent in fall 2020 due to the pandemic. “Growing levels of guaranteed compensation in subsequent years” followed, with the base salary “restored in full to $110,467 by the 2023–2024 season,” says the administration.
A basic contention from the orchestra — which made news this season when its members agreed to the first of those temporary extensions in the moments before curtain on opening night — is that, even now, that promised restoration is incomplete or insufficient.
The administration stands on claims of a fiscal crisis, which General Manager Matthew Shilvock describes as “the impossibility of our overall financial model. Over decades, there has been a growing gap between revenues and expenses, and that model is now at a breaking point.”
In one sign of stability, as SF Classical Voice reported last week, SF Opera Music Director Eun Sun Kim, the subject of a recently released documentary, had her contract extended by five years.
Across the street from the War Memorial, at the San Francisco Symphony, similar trouble is brewing. The contract for the union singers in the SF Symphony Chorus expired on July 31, and management has proposed a major reduction in wages. The SFS Chorus went on strike on Sept. 19. Meanwhile, the orchestra’s current contract runs through Nov. 18, and as of now, there’s no sign of progress in negotiations in that case either.
Correction: This article has been updated with more precise figures relating to the orchestra musicians’ base minimum salary.
