Strike the Set

CITY JOURNAL
Winter 2010

Strike the Set
by James Panero

A militant union smothers New York theater.

You’ve got to hand it to New York’s stagehands’ union. Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) has been collective-bargaining the life out of New York theater for over a century. Just how much does this union of carpenters, electricians, and prop masters bleed from city arts organizations? Carnegie Hall’s tax returns for its 2007–08 season suggest an answer.

Dennis O’Connell, Carnegie’s properties manager, has pulled down headline-making salaries from the concert hall for years. Between 2001 and 2003, for instance, his annual salary ranged between $309,000 and $344,000. But for the fiscal year ending in June 2008, O’Connell’s earnings topped $530,000, making him Carnegie’s highest-paid employee after its executive director, Clive Gillinson. Four other stagehands—carpenters James Csollany and Kenneth Beltrone and electricians John Goodson and John Cardinale—came in just behind, with salaries exceeding $400,000 apiece.

The Carnegie payouts received wide circulation in the New York media last fall after being reported in Bloomberg News. Yet the story only hints at a deeper truth well known in the New York arts community—one that affects Lincoln Center, all of Broadway, and numerous other venues. Because of the stranglehold of Local One–negotiated contracts, New York theater owners must all pay a sizable tribute each day just to keep the lights on. The pay rates that Local One secures for its stagehands far exceed the deals struck by other IATSE chapters nationwide, and many employees can pad their base pay with multiple surcharge triggers—overtime, missed meals, and tasks that mandate excessive staffing.

The money comes out of arts organizations’ bottom lines, driving up production costs and ticket prices and inhibiting the evolution of New York theater. “Any programming that does not resemble programming 30 years ago is prohibitive,” explains one theater manager. Pricey union contracts have “absolutely prohibited arts organizations from doing new things, particularly in difficult times.” The contracts also prevent organizations from expanding their reach through advances in technology like webcasting and simulcasts in movie theaters. The Metropolitan Opera had to spend years at the bargaining table to launch its Live in HD program.

The union has established a closed network of unchecked power. (To get a sense of its might, just try to speak to someone on the record.) When Local One workers talk about their “brotherhood,” some of them mean it literally: the chapter president, James J. Claffey, Jr., is the son of a Local One member and counts five brothers in the union. The leadership is predominantly Irish and male, and of the union’s 3,000 members, only about 130 are women. Thanks to a tiered salary structure and a union-controlled promotion system, not all of the members benefit from the big payouts. One anonymous blogger who identifies himself as a rank-and-file member rails against what he calls the union’s “Irish loop” system of preferment: “2500 victims plus the 350 to 500 plus relatives and loop boys (white, Irish, males).”

In better economic times, when theaters were flush, Local One’s impositions were bad enough. Now, as arts organizations are failing in the recession, the union’s compensation packages should receive the same scrutiny as the pay rates of top management. Keep in mind that the high salaries commanded by maestros and executive directors, which can exceed $1 million, were determined in an open marketplace. Could another prop master do O’Connell’s job just as well, and for less pay?

You can’t fault O’Connell: he performs a service and enjoys his legally agreed-upon compensation for doing so. The true blame rests with an arts leadership too weak-willed to fight union demands. The former general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Joe Volpe, showed that such fecklessness wasn’t necessary. A former stagehand himself, with sons working as union extras, Volpe knew how to play tough against Local One. “At labor negotiations, for example, I can whoop and holler and scream and carry on like a wild man,” he once said. “I’ll shout that they can burn the place down but I’m never going to give in. And I’ll walk out. And their attorney will come over to me later and tell me it was great—that my act really helped him because until then the union was stuck in its position and he couldn’t get them to change.”

While Local One protects the lucky few at the top of the stagehand food chain, many more New Yorkers in the arts, unionized or not, are seeing their positions eliminated or their salaries cut during the current downturn because of unsustainable budgets. Arts leaders, who need to start controlling costs at all levels, also need the backbone to stare down the threat of a Local One strike. And if negotiations break down in the future, the arts community must overcome its unwillingness to cross picket lines for a justified cause that will help all workers. You don’t have to be antiunion to confront the inequity of Local One. You just have to be anti–Local One.

James Panero is the managing editor of The New Criterion.

Why 'Forgot He Was Black' Comment Spells Trouble for President

James writes (from Big Government):

One of the most talked about lines from the State of the Union came not from Obama but from a comment the MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews made after the President’s address: “He is post-racial by all appearances,” Matthews observed. “You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country and passed so much history in just a year or two.”

I am prepared to take this comment seriously. No doubt Matthews meant it as a compliment. A cheerleader for the President, Matthews once famously remarked that he “felt this thrill going up my leg” following another Obama speech. But the observation of a “post-racial” President spells trouble for Obama. For one, judging by Matthews’s backtracking, the comment has inadvertently exposed the subject of Obama’s race to be a continuing taboo for any meaningful discussion. Why is it taboo? Because race remains the key issue through which one can unlock and understand the power that brought Obama to office, and Obama’s defenders do not want to give that key away. Harry Reid’s recently reported comments about Obama being a “light-skinned Negro” raised hackles for similar reasons.

Also, if race has played a key role in the making of this President, the concept of a “post-racial” Obama means the President could be losing his “racial” gloss with the electorate. If the voters have indeed “Completely forgotten it…. Completely forgotten it,” as Matthews claims to have forgotten that Obama is black during the duration of the SOTU, then the President may be “transcending race: only to lose the source of his political power.

Since the attacks of 9/11, the sociological effects of a war on terror have made the electorate more fluid, harder to define, tending towards extremes, and looking for salvation. They have also been more willing to take risks on candidates. The Obama election was a consequence of this dynamic. After the perceived fatigue of the Bush presidency and the war in Iraq, the electorate desperately needed to be liked, and the election of Obama provided a way for the electorate to prove its likability.

Obama tapped into the main artery of the electorate and ran on an undefined, broad platform of hope. But what is hope? Hope implies risk. Hope can be a gamble. The instinct that brought Obama to office was the same instinct that fed the economic bubble. The electorate doubled down on candidate Obama and purchased a complex political instrument they did not really understand.

The 2008 election was the demonstrable event. The perceived importance of electing America’s first black President cannot be underestimated. Little may have been known about candidate Obama, but everyone could appreciate Obama’s race. Race was so prominent in voter calculus and media coverage, in fact, that Obama did not need to address it himself in a direct way, except when compelled by Jeremiah Wright. The issue was obvious.

There was only secondary concern for how Obama would lead once elected. The electorate wanted and needed to show that it could elect a beautiful man and put his family in the nation’s first home–a “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” Norman Lear, “Sesame Street” fantasy. The election of this symbolic figure alone would then address our international standing, it was assumed, appease the Muslim world, and solve our own racial psychosis at once. The problems of the world would be half-solved by the time he took office.

Of course, the problems of the world have not ended. We now get to spend four years with a president we don’t really know. And a year in, we are still not liked.

I think Obama has changed much less than the public perception of him has changed. We got what we elected, an unproven freshman politician as President, a terrible leader who manages to project weakness even when he does something forceful (as in rightly sending more troops into Afghanistan).

Hope has evolved to distrust. The electorate is moving on. If the election of Obama, rather than the governance of Obama, was the thing, now that this act has been completed, the variable of Obama’s race has become far less important for the Chris Matthews of the world.

It is undeniably significant to elect America’s first black President, given the sordid history of race relations in this country. It is, however, far less significant to *reelect* America’s first black President. With the aura of race quickly dissipating, Obama is losing a source of his power. He had the world on a string before the election. But in office, his Midas touch has left him, which is why his emergency appearances could not rescue Democratic candidates in New Jersey, Virginia, or Massachusetts and will provide little uplift to Democrats in the mid-term elections.

Obama was a good campaigner because he understood how to manipulate race to get elected. This had been David Axelrod’s specialty, after all. But Obama has not evolved into a popular President, in part because he has not figured out how to keep his race significant. He was supposed to be an agent of change, but I doubt whether he can change *himself* in time to keep up with the electorate’s changing expectations. A year ago the voters thought they were getting a black version of Abraham Lincoln. Now they need a Ronald Reagan, and any color will do.

War Through Weakness: How the Terrorists Win

James writes (from Big Government)

For those who were expecting the election of Barack Obama to yield a peace dividend in the war on terror, the resurgence of Al-Qaeda has come as a surprise. Obama’s obsequious diplomacy was supposed to be a tonic to the aggressions of the Bush years, but his appeasement seems to have only encouraged more war. Rather than calm the Islamic world, Obama’s passivity has invited attack.

As in the Cold War, the current battle of ideology takes place in proxy wars. Unlike in the Cold War, the war on terror is largely fought through symbolic actions. Islamists do not make tactical attacks. They do not bomb Boeing factories or destroy highways and rail lines as in a conventional land war. Instead they destroy iconic buildings, trains, and airplanes. They use the spectacle of destruction, carried out in a diabolical way by suicide agents, as their means of waging war. That is the definition of a terror campaign.

The proper response to terror is not appeasement but counterattack. Islamists wage their terror campaigns in order to cow American influence abroad, especially in the Gulf. The answer to such attacks, if we hope to avoid them in the future, is to increase American involvement in Muslim countries both through soft influence and force of arms. Such a strategy was one of the best but least articulated justifications for the Second Gulf War.

Obama doesn’t get this. When the State department closed its embassy in Sanaa, Yemen for two days last week due to intelligence of an imminent terrorist threat, this action only increased the existential threat to Americans in Yemen and abroad. It came off as a symbolic withdrawal of American influence, especially so close to the attempted Northwest airline bombing. The temporary closing betokened a myopic vision of the war on terror as an isolated series of security issues rather than an ideological battle fought through connected symbolic action.

All of the West’s technology and intelligence can never prevent would-be terrorists from penetrating our defenses. The only way to prevent terrorism is to make it clear that terror attacks will result in symbolic outcomes that are most advantageous to us and least advantageous to them. We need a Containment Policy for the 21st Century.