On a lighter note this morning, some good new came to New York and everyone who visits that likes to take in a show on Broadway. After nineteen arduous days, Local One and the Theater owners finally came to an agreement to end the longest theatrical strike since 1975. So be warned Times Square workers, foot traffic is about to return to normal at a quarter to eight in the evening and after 10pm.
From The New York Times:
At the center of this dispute were work rules in the stagehands’ contract that the producers’ league considered costly and inefficient. The league wanted changes to several rules, including those governing how many stagehands must come to work every day that a show is being loaded into a theater; minimum lengths of time for which stagehands can be called to work; and the kinds of tasks stagehands are allowed to perform during certain work calls. [....]
Neither side released details of the settlement.But among the changes the league was able to achieve, according to officials involved in the talks, was a daily minimum of 17 stagehands on the load-in, the lengthy and costly period when a production is loaded into a theater. In the recently expired contract, producers would set a number of stagehands needed for a load-in — say, 35 — and all of them would have to stay every day for the entirety of the load-in, an arrangement that producers said often left large groups of stagehands with nothing to do.[...]
In return for these changes and others, union members would get yearly raises well above the 3.5 percent that the league had been offering.
Well for not releasing any details, the NY Times certainly got a heaping load of them.
So the question is, who won out in this slugfest? It is hard to tell how much the union workers gained, a raise over 3.5% could be 3.6% or 10%, but that would be their only gain. The theater owners got what they wanted, reducing the amount of stagehands working by half. Over the long run, that is great news for their budgets. Of course they also lost out on millions in revenue over the last two-plus weeks, so try to muster some sympathy for those rich bastards.
There were certainly plenty of losers here. Theater-goers, local restaurants, anyone who is employed directly or indirectly in the Theater District and the city's lost revenues of $2 million a day. At least the strike is over now, and (most) of the stagehands can go back to work.
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