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ANALYSIS Striking up the orchestra The abysmal state of labour relations at the OSM signals insufficient capital and an outmoded management style. Robert Everett-Green The Globe and Mail May 9, 2005 Too much silence can be a perilous thing for a symphony orchestra. Strikes and lockouts have been the prelude to near-death experiences for orchestras in Winnipeg, Edmonton and Toronto in recent years. Could Montreal be next? The signs aren't encouraging. The musicians of l'Orchestre symphonique de Montréal are on the picket line. Management insists, puzzlingly, that the strike "in no way changes the OSM's reality." Eighteen months of nearly static negotiations have produced a poisonous atmosphere. Players and management are united only in their belief that the other side doesn't have a clue about what a symphony orchestra really needs. In the front office, the talk is all about adjusting to a global symphonic market. To remain a great orchestra, says general manager Madeleine Careau, the OSM must maintain its international renown. That means competing with all the excellent orchestras from the former Soviet Bloc that are now scrambling for foreign tours and for ever-diminishing opportunities to make recordings. To compete, and to tame a $3.4-million deficit, says Careau, the OSM needs more control over costs and working conditions. The musicians have another market in mind: the international market for the best players. Who will want to come to Montreal to fill the 11 positions currently empty, they say, when the OSM already offers far less money than a middling American orchestra? And why should players stay in Montreal when confronted with a punishing workload that may increase the risk of career-ending injuries? Careau didn't calm their fears when she said recently that she wasn't worried about injuries, because "Quebec has a very good workers' compensation program." Her allusions to Bombardier Aerospace, whose workers recently accepted a wage rollback, were also seen by the players as proof that she doesn't understand that a top-rank orchestral musician is a far more specialized and mobile kind of employee. The OSM's problem, says players' committee president Marc Beliveau, is that Careau has failed to capitalize the orchestra properly. It's not enough to talk about raising money for tours and recordings, he says, if there's not enough to sustain the orchestra at a level of musical excellence. The figures suggest that he may have a point. The OSM's current annual budget is $19-million, slightly less than that of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. The OSM gets 45 per cent of its money from governments, compared to just 20 per cent for the TSO. The OSM season is a month longer than the TSO's, which dilutes its earned revenue per concert even further. In short, the TSO appears to be doing a better job of selling itself to its community. True, Toronto is a larger city, but the TSO has to compete for revenue with four performing-arts groups of similar size: the National Ballet of Canada, the Canadian Opera Company, the Shaw Festival and the Stratford Festival. The OSM's only major competitor is l'Opéra de Montréal, which has a much smaller budget ($9-million). In Careau's defence, she isn't the only one looking for more control over workplace conditions. Musicians at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra were stunned when management confronted them last fall with more than 100 proposed changes to scheduling and overtime (the CSO settled its contract in November, after several strike ultimatums). Orchestras in New York, Boston and Philadelphia have all recently had to confront the problem of shrinking audiences and donations. But in those Canadian orchestras where the confrontation has resulted in a strike, lockout or financial crisis, the eventual outcome has always brought the musicians closer to the centre of decision-making. The thing that is really broken in the industry is the old model of management as a wholly distinct entity, running things according to a patrician view of the musicians' best interests. From this angle, Careau's top-down management style does not look like the best way for the OSM to meet the future. In a way, it's already part of the OSM's past. The players' overwhelming choice for their new music director was not another lordly maestro like Charles Dutoit, but the collegial Kent Nagano. The key figure in the coming days may be OSM chairman Lucien Bouchard. Not only is he a skilled negotiator -- he has also shown sympathy for the musicians' argument that what the orchestra needs is more capital. In 1998, as premier of Quebec, he helped end another OSM strike by hinting that more money would appear soon. A few months later, he gave the OSM a $5-million bailout, at a time when government spending was declining across the board. Bouchard isn't in a position to do that kind of thing again. But he can and probably will take a hard look at what the current OSM board is doing to raise money, and at the extremely debilitating state of relations between the players and Careau. Whatever he decides, the future of the orchestra depends on recognizing one simple truth. The musicians are not just the employees of the OSM; they are the OSM.