By Joel Thurtell
Start with a world-class orchestra, one ranked in the top 10 in the United States.
What would be the easiest way to destroy such a beacon of musicianship?
Well, you could provoke a strike of musicians, and then blame the end of concerts on musicians and their union.
Americans mostly love to bash unions, and it’s a position our newspapers easily adopt, since they are businesses that don’t like unionized workers any more than the management of a symphony orchestra likes them.
But this is only a thumbnail scenario. It doesn’t capture the whole essence of what has been happening with the strike of musicians at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
Management forces workers to strike, then blames the strike on workers. News media — with their own distaste for unions and local history of labor-bashing — pretty much swallow management’s line, even editorializing against the musicians.
If you want to understand what’s been going on at the DSO, forget the News. Check out the musicians’ website.
My wife and I were DSO season ticket-holders for many years. As soon as we heard the musicians had struck, we demanded a refund of our ticket money. I wrote a letter to CEO Anne Parsons explaining that I would not buy tickets to the orchestra again until management had bargained a fair contract with DSO musicians.
That was in October, 2010.
It’s February, 2011, and DSO management still has not bargained a fair contract with its musicians. Instead, it has prolonged the strike and meanwhile dumped the remainder of its 2010-2011 concert schedule.
DSO management pretends those greedy musicians are to blame.
We got our DSO refund, but never got a response from Parsons, the DSO’s $400,000-a-year CEO.
It’s late February, 2011, and now I understand why Parsons never answered my request that she and the DSO board deal fairly with the musicians.
Her silence tells me she and the board never intended to give the musicians a square deal.
Why?
Because Parsons and the board have dug a huge financial pit for this once-splendid orchestra, and they need to rip huge and unreasonable concessions from the musicians in order to stave off the DSO’s bankruptcy.
That’s what I said: bankruptcy.
In the eyes of its creditors, the DSO is insolvent.
You can read about this unsung libretto in more detail at the musicians’ website. DSO oboist Shelley Heron and clarinetist Doug Cornelsen have laid out the history of bungling and incompetence by DSO management over the past few years.
The problems arose from botched fundraising and a financial plan that was just plain imbecilic.
It is the duty of world-class musicians like Cornelsen and Heron to put on fabulous concerts. Musicians should not be held accountable for managers’ fundraising failures.
It is the duty of $400,000-a-year CEOs to make sure fundraising is done properly and financial plans are kept within the realm of sanity.
Over very few years, the DSO management allowed its base of donors to erode from 25,000 to 5,000. More and more it relied on wealthy members of its board to ante up when fundraising fell short.
Why did the DSO fail at raising money? For a number of years, fundraising went on with great success. But when the two DSO officials in charge of fundraising departed, they were succeeded by new money-raisers propelled by Orchestra Halls’s revolving doors.
Eight fundraising heads came and went in four years.
It was deemed easier to hit the rich few for money rather than expend the effort to broaden the donor base.
But failure to meet fundraising goals was only part of the problem.
When the DSO proposed a $60 million addition to Orchestra Hall known as “The Max” after benefactor Max Fisher, enough money was raised to pay for construction of the new building.
But instead of paying for the project from money it collected from donors, DSO management chose to bet the money on the stock market. They speculated that they could parley donors’ money into even more money and tap interest on their endowment to pay for construction of the new building in addition to regular operating costs.
DSO bosses might as well have trusted donors’ money to a casino.
In 2008, the stock market tanked.
Meanwhile, the DSO has been tapping principal of its endowment to meet $3 million-a-year payments on bonds it used to finance The Max.
In January of 2010, a group of banks holding DSO debt pointed out that tapping principal is draining collateral the DSO used to secure its debt. The banks started to make noise about foreclosure.
That’s when DSO managers, led by the orchestra’s $400,000-a-year CEO Parsons, started beating on the musicians to give up salary, pension and health benefits with added time doing community outreach aimed at achieving the fundraising that was Parson’s job.
So the DSO strike is not really about musicians’ salaries and benefits.
It’s about DSO managers’ attempts to hide their own incompetence by charging the consequences of their ill-advised financial arrangements to the musicians.
This is not an explanation you’ll read about in The Detroit News, which loves to bash strikers.
But it helps to understand how a world-class orchestra could get into such a mess.
