By Joel Thurtell
Once upon a time, before the Great Newspaper Strike of 1995, the Detroit Free Press published a huff-and-puff editorial chastising Big League Baseball for putting on games during a strike of players.
“Scab Ball,” the Free Press righteously intoned in its headline.
When the shoe was on their foot, the Free Press shucked off that fake piety and along with The Detroit News hired plenty of “replacement workers,” aka scabs.
Now the Detroit Symphony Orchestra musicians are on strike, and the DSO is playing the same game.
And wouldn’t you know, they got some editorial encouragement from their high-class pals at The Detroit News.
A couple of soloists are putting on a concert Monday, and DSO management is hoping orchestra patrons will use their tickets to attend this concert and thumb their noses at the picketing musicians.
Scab music.
Rather than negotiate with musicians, DSO muck-a-mucks are pretending life can go on as usual.
Scab music won’t work.
On Friday, we mailed our season tickets back to the DSO with a letter to CEO Anne Parsons explaining we want a refund because management is dealing unfairly with musicians.
DSO patrons have a choice: They can play management’s game and attend this scab concert, thereby identifying with the bosses and lining up as enemies of the players.
Or they can stay away from scab concerts.
Better yet, ticket-holders who consider themselves friends of DSO musicians ought to mail those tickets in to Anne Parsons and demand a refund.
This is not a one-step operation. We will take our refund, and then we will observe how management deals with the musicians. If the DSO board continues to abuse musicians, and if there is no just contract, we won’t be going back to the DSO.
The Detroit newspapers lost hundreds of thousands of readers during the Great Newspaper Strike. Many of those readers still refuse to read the Detroit papers. Hard feelings from that strike endure, and contributed significantly to the decline in those papers’ circulation. They might still be delivering newspapers seven days a week had they not screwed the unions back in ’95.
The DSO risks alienating many serious concert-goers.
Today, we will attend a concert at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor. If we like it, we might buy season tickets from the University Musical Society, and bye-bye DSO.
Musical choices abound in the Detroit area.
Whether the DSO remains one of our choices is up to the orchestra’s managers.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
