Wisconsin’s ongoing battle over public-sector unions is not the country’s only noteworthy labor dispute. In October 2010 the musicians of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra went on strike, claiming that the orchestra’s management was demanding unreasonable salary cuts and seeking to impose unacceptable work rules. The two sides continued to negotiate for 21 weeks. In February the musicians voted to reject a final contract offer, and management responded by “suspending” the remainder of the 2010–11 season. The musicians offered to submit the dispute to binding arbitration by a three-person panel, but management declined to take part.

The strike dragged on for six months before being settled in April on terms highly favorable to the management, with the musicians accepting one of the biggest pay cuts in the history of any top-tier American orchestra. By then, three-quarters of the DSO’s 2010–11 season had been scrapped.

What happened in Detroit bears only a partial resemblance to what happened in Wisconsin. But the two conflicts do have something important in common: they arose in part from a clash of cultures. The management and musicians of the Detroit Symphony, like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the union members who oppose him, do not speak the same language, nor do they see the world around them in the same way. And although it is possible that the situation in Wisconsin will in the short run resolve itself in favor of the unions, it was from the outset far less probable that the DSO musicians would prevail, for their view of the world—and their place in it—was sharply at odds with the realities of life in Detroit.

_____________

The basic facts are not in dispute. In order to survive a major financial crisis—the DSO is $54 million in debt and incurred a $9 million operating deficit last year—the orchestra’s management proposed to slash the pay of its existing players. It also sought to expand the orchestra’s community-outreach programs, arguing that such programs are needed to bolster local support for an organization like the DSO now that public interest in classical music is on the wane.

According to Mark Stryker of the Detroit Free Press, the original proposed contract “slices base pay for veterans about 30 percent from $104,650 to $70,200, rising to $73,200 in three years. (Nearly all players make more than scale.) The contract cuts salaries for incoming players by 42 percent to $61,200 and introduces sweeping work-rule changes that fold teaching, chamber music, and outreach into the job for all players. Players are currently paid extra for such work, though some also volunteer their time.”

The position of the players (as stated on detroitsymphonymusicians.org, their website) was that such salary cuts and work rules would “downsize the orchestra from a world-class, internationally acclaimed ensemble . . . to a second-class orchestra.” Arguing that the orchestra had been badly managed in past years and that the players could not be expected to pay for mistaken managerial decisions, they countered by offering to accept a 22 percent pay cut, followed by a series of raises over the next three years that would restore a significant portion of the initial cut.

Management responded by proposing to cut all base salaries by only 23 percent but declined to go along with the out-year raises, offering to tie additional compensation to participation in community outreach. Once again, the players rejected the proposal, and the strike continued.

_____________

Other orchestras have gone on strike for similar reasons, and in a few cases they have folded as a result. But the Detroit Symphony is not a second-tier regional group whose demise would go unnoticed in the world of classical music. For much of its century-long existence, the DSO has been universally ranked as one of America’s top 10 symphony orchestras, in terms of both pay scale and artistic quality. Many of the recordings that it made for Mercury in the 50s and 60s under Paul Paray, the orchestra’s most celebrated music director, are regarded as classics and remain in print to this day, and in recent years it has flourished under the leadership of Neeme Järvi and Leonard Slatkin, who became the music director of the DSO in 2008.

How was a provincial city like Detroit able to support so distinguished an ensemble? Because of the charitable largesse made possible by the presence in Detroit of the American auto industry. But that industry’s protracted collapse, coupled with large-scale “white flight” (and, more recently, middle-class black flight) to the surrounding suburbs, sent the city into a decline that shows no signs of reversal. Whereas some two million people lived there in 1950, Detroit’s population is 713,777 today, down 25 percent over the past decade. Except for New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, no American city with a population of more than 100,000 has ever seen so steep a decline. Forty of Detroit’s 140 square miles and one-fifth of its housing units are now vacant. Mayor Dave Bing, who is facing an $85 million budget deficit, has responded by seeking to cut civic services to the bone and by encouraging Detroit’s remaining residents to cluster in the healthiest of its surviving neighborhoods.

Could such a city afford a top-tier symphony orchestra with a 52-week season? A growing number of local opinion makers thought not. The editorial page of the Detroit News, for instance, declared that Detroit is “no longer a top 10 city by any measure. The reality may be that this region can no longer support a world-class orchestra, or art museum, or opera company.”

Not surprisingly, the News took a similarly cold-eyed view of the decision of the members of the DSO to go on strike: “The offer the musicians rejected would have made them the 12th-highest paid symphony in the nation. That’s not bad in a city that has been economically ravaged, and in a state where household incomes have dropped 22 percent in a decade, and now stand as 37th lowest in the nation.”

But the members of the Detroit Symphony saw the dispute in very different terms. On their website, they contended that the orchestra’s management deliberately precipitated the strike in order to “bust the musicians’ union” and turn the DSO into a smaller non-union ensemble “with a small vision befitting management’s perception of metro Detroit.”

_____________

In this conflict of irreconcilable visions lay the essential similarity between the DSO strike and the protests in Wisconsin.

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, had 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. Their position, though they would never admit it openly, was that the News is in essence correct: the city of Detroit can no longer afford a world-class orchestra. Furthermore, unless the DSO makes permanent cost cuts and embarks on a campaign of systematic community outreach aimed at creating a broad-based civic constituency for some kind of orchestra, however diminished in size or quality, Detroit’s citizens might well come to the conclusion that they need no orchestra at all. In order to avoid this fate, they 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.

The members of the DSO, by contrast, seemed to think that the only thing standing between them and a fiscally sound future was the small-mindedness of management—and, presumably, of those wealthy citizens who declined to open their pockets still further to support the orchestra as it was then constituted. Moreover, there were those in Detroit who agreed with them. “What’s incredible, and ineffably sad, is the complacency with which Detroiters are shrugging off the disintegration of a cultural infrastructure our predecessors spent the entire 20th century putting in place,” Brian Dickerson, the deputy editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press, wrote.

But it is anything but complacent to admit that. In a city that is itself in financial straits far more desperate than those of the Detroit Symphony, ensuring the continued existence of a world-class orchestra may not be the highest of civic priorities. 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.

As several commentators on the strike have observed, this amounted to playing chicken with the managers—but the managers were playing a different game. Instead of giving in, they scrapped the rest of the season, and no one in Detroit did much of anything other than express mild dismay.

_____________

It is not yet clear whether Wisconsin voters have come to a similar conclusion about the necessity for root-and-branch fiscal reform. They may well decide that Gov. Walker and the Republican-controlled state legislature have gone too far, at least for now. But other states are in the process of enacting equally far-reaching reforms, and it appears that American attitudes toward public-sector unions, as well as labor unions in general, are undergoing a commensurate sea change. A March 11 Gallup poll showed that 38 percent of Americans now have a negative attitude toward labor unions, and only 34 percent have a positive attitude. Over the long haul, this shift in public opinion cannot bode any better for the protesters in Wisconsin than the continuing indifference of the citizens of Detroit to the fate of the DSO boded for its striking musicians.

Detroit, to be sure, is a worst-case scenario, a hollowed-out city that can no longer afford the tokens of its past glory. But symphony orchestras, opera houses, and ballet companies all over America are facing similar fiscal problems as their longtime subscribers grow old and fail to be replaced by younger patrons. Sooner or later, the members of these organizations will have to ask the same question to which the musicians of the DSO gave the wrong answer: Do we fight to preserve an untenable status quo for as long as we possibly can, or do we acknowledge the new realities, join forces with management, and try something different?

This question will grow more pressing over time. America’s regional cities once regarded the presence of cultural institutions like the Detroit Symphony Orchestra as indispensable symbols of civic stature. It was generally felt that no city worthy of the name could afford to do without an orchestra, and even those wealthy citizens who took no personal interest in classical music felt it was their duty to support such organizations. But few of the up-and-coming generation of well-heeled social climbers see any utility in associating themselves with classical music, which has lost its cultural cachet. It will thus be vain to look to them for help, financial or otherwise. Symphony orchestras and other classical-music organizations must instead cultivate a new kind of audience—and a new kind of donor—or run the risk of going out of business.

As for the hapless members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, it is easy to sympathize with their plight. They were perfectly right, for instance, to argue that cutting the average salary of a DSO player by 30 percent would have transformed the orchestra, very possibly beyond recognition. It was more than likely that many, perhaps most, of the orchestra’s best members would have left as a result, and that the DSO would have found it difficult if not impossible to attract replacements of like quality.

But the players’ decision to respond to the proposed cuts by voting to strike was a quintessential manifestation of a cultural entitlement mentality—in this context, the assumption that artists ought to be paid what they “deserve” to make, even when the community places a far lower value on their services. And the 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. In the end, few privileges are more costly than that of ignoring reality.