When the cabin crew of British Airways announced a twelve-day strike to impact its customers flying around the world in late December 2009, thousands of vacations were disrupted, weddings were ruined, and the currency of the airline plummeted from the unreliable to the worthless. Who would buy a ticket for a plane that might not fly? Who would want to be served by a bunch of surly and (according to the newspaper reports) overpaid and (according to them) under-appreciated space waitrons?
Calling a strike is an adult tantrum of limited worth whose success is far from guaranteed. If your service is essential and your cause a good one, then the public might be on your side, eventually. But throwing a wobbler in public is a risky and often humiliating tactic that can easily backfire; I for one have torn up my British Airways credit card, I will never fly on British Airways again, and I will never miss an opportunity to steer away from them any business that I can by sharing my story of the European family reunion vacation that almost never was.
For an American symphony orchestra like Detroit’s to go on strike in 2010 presumes that the members consider their services vital to the smooth running of city services, which is of course as quaintly misguided as it is chronically out of date. Whether the majority of citizens will notice this ceasing of operations is anyone’s guess, but I would hazard that with the median house price in Detroit currently at about $7,500 (seven thousand five hundred dollars) I doubt that the survival of the local symphony is at the top of most people’s list of essentials; that list would more likely comprise utility bills and groceries and less a weekly helping of live Mendelssohn.
The striking musicians are trying to raise awareness of the necessity of art to the community, but their argument is incomplete. The issue they are focusing on here is the usefulness of live art, and whether a city of Detroit’s miserable economic predicament can afford the luxury (for luxury it is, without a doubt) of a band of professional musicians trotting out the classics of yesteryear for the benefit of fewer than 1% of the population. How about everyone assemble as usual, and they listen to the music as planned, but what would be lost if instead of a live orchestra, the evenings’ concerts were given over to playback of recordings, available on CD and much more inexpensively licensable for public broadcast?
Sure, the pageantry and thrill of the concert experience would be lost, but the product would be the same. The audience would still get its piano concerto, the hall would still get its box office receipts. You live within your budget; you eat frozen pizza when you can’t get to Naples, you drive yourself when you can’t afford a chauffeur, you cut your coat to suit your cloth. Nobody died from recorded Mendelssohn. (Anyone?…..) Cities benefit from the pat on the back that they get from displaying their wealth, and a concert by a symphony orchestra is a significant method for communicating to the city’s occupants that all is well in Musicville. But all is not well in Detroit, as any casual tour around the city will reveal; these players must really not get out much.
Demanding to be seen as essential is its own irony. Placards like “HELP US SAVE YOUR ORCHESTRA” scream disingenuous propaganda (suddenly it’s ‘my’ orchestra?) at an uninterested public who have better and more worthwhile things to do than encourage adolescent hissy fits about cutbacks at the office. We all have to pack a lunch sometimes, so get used to it. Not every family can afford a European vacation every year, not every city can afford a professional symphony orchestra, and parading in public your scorn for other people’s hardships brings the industry into disrepute. Shame on the musicians of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra for giving in to their sense of entitlement and yelling at their fellow citizens that they owe them a living, because they don’t.