All agree on the need to cut pay, but the size of the cut is up in the air. The numbers involved make for uncomfortable reading: they’re negotiating over its size — should that be 30% 15% 10% to a current guaranteed basic pay of over $100,000? This is skilled work requiring dedication and training, and the musician’s labour market is not a local Detroit market but a global one: the DSO is competing with the LSO and the BSO, and it will want to cherry pick the brightest from Venezuela’s El Sistema youth orchestra programme. Still, in a city of worklessness (an unemployment rate of 11.1% in Dec 2011, according to US Bureau of Labour Force statistics, and an average household income of $26,000 according to 2009 figures), the citizens of Detroit can be forgiven for getting a bit uppity with the striking timpanists: by local standards, they’re still raking it in, and whilst they may be a global elite, they live and work in the city.

Let’s agree that the post-industrial city’s pride needs roses as well as bread. But shiny limos dropping manicured wealth at the door of The Max does little for community cohesion; it’s just an elite workforce meeting a wealthy audience. The stumbling block in the dispute is about community cohesion: how to pay for outreach work. The musicians argue that the £2million in gift income earmarked for outreach should top up basic pay regardless of what each musician contributes to outreach, keeping all workers on the same conditions. The management want this to be a gig fee — a bit of motivation to do community work. Piece rates, if you like.
Both positions recognise that the elite workforce should recognise a commitment to the local. Personally, I don’t mind that Mahler’s been cancelled again, but I would like to know that ‘Peter and the Wolf’ is back on in a local school. This is what grounds the DSO as being Detroit: a localism that takes for granted that, from 1st violin to French horn, all are part of the same city, and will play where they can without extra financial motivation. And it seems to me that the musicians’ position, which avoids earmarking income to outgoings and embeds community work as the norm, not the added extra, is the way to guarantee this.

References

McGoey, L. (forthcoming) ‘The End(s) of Self-Interest’.

What’s notable about the reporting of the dispute is who is imagined to be damaged by strike action: it is you, my reader and telly watcher, you the imagined, eternal and all-important consumer. You are no longer a shadowy presence; you have had your honeymoon plans destroyed. Whilst the workforce are specified by the fact of their employment for BA, you the consumer are everyman, and you the consumer ought not be disadvantaged by those pesky strikers. There is no hint that you are also a worker.

Casablanca Airport by John Spooner

The BA dispute — and the political interventions provoked by it — has broader implications for discussions of pay and working conditions than just this case. It influences the landscape in which further discussions and decisions about labour law and labour rights are made, and relates to political sensitivity to the consumer the worker, to the power of management and the privileged status afforded to protecting the brand. The consumer is not the only universal figure in our social life. We are workers, too.

References

1. Hochschild, A. (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. London: University of California Press.
2. Taylor, S. And Tyler, M. (2000) ‘Emotional labour and sexual difference in the airline industry’. Work, Employment and Society. 14:77–95.
3. Williams C. (2003) ‘Sky service: the demands of emotional labour in the airline industry’. Gender, Work and Organization. 10 (5) 513–550.

John Spooner photographs used under creative commons license