Members of the Louisville Federation of Musicians Local 11-637, part of the American Federation of Musicians, and the Louisville Orchestra successfully reached a three-year collective bargaining agreement.
“We were basically looking to make sure that we were honoring the musicians who have been in the orchestra, trying to retain the musicians who have joined the orchestra in the last three years,” said Jonathan Mueller, chairperson of the Louisville Orchestra Musicians Committee.
Mueller has been a violist with the orchestra since 2006. He said he and other negotiation committee members sent out surveys and hosted open sessions with orchestra members to find out what they wanted in the contract.
“We're not always going to be able to accommodate every single person's issue or desire, but it's our job as a committee to kind of collectively come together and synthesize something that's going to work for the musicians for this three-year period,” Mueller said.
Highlights from the contract include an 8% pay raise in the first year which will be followed by 9% raises over the following two years and increases in life and instrument insurance. The audition process was updated with the aim of diversifying the ensemble's member makeup.
The Louisville Orchestra also agreed to work with Heuser Hearing Institute to provide members with custom earplugs to help protect their hearing when playing.
Louisville Orchestra chief executive Graham Parker said he was inspired by a comment someone on the negation committee said.
“If you join the orchestra, you should open the collective bargaining agreement, and it should be kind of a job description,” Parker said. “And it hadn't. It had just kind of fallen out of step with kind of where we are as an organization.”
Parker likened the needs of a musicians’ union to that of a pilots’ union.
“Highly skilled, highly trained under extraordinary amounts of pressure, also in a very variable work environment,” said Parker. “The demands on a week, or we call them services, you know, a three-hour rehearsal block or a concert are very varied, very pressured.”
Negotiations between the union and the Louisville Orchestra have at times been tense. In 2011, an impasse in contract negotiations led to a musicians’ strike which canceled celebrations for the orchestra’s 75th season.
“I think both sides approached it with kind of, let's not bring that baggage to the table,” Parker said, who wasn’t with the orchestra at the time of the strike. “Let's bring honesty to the table. Let's bring openness. Let's bring facts and figures.”
Parker said both sides, the union and the orchestra leadership, worked 200 hours over a three-month period to create and agree on this contract.
For Mueller, the success of the negotiations and subsequent contract show the importance of workers across fields having some type of representation.
He said musicians feeling seen and secure create the best artistic product possible.
“The way that we can do that is to making sure that we have a good morale, a good amount of time to have off, to kind of refresh ourselves, security, to make sure that we aren't worried about losing our job the next day if we miss a note,” Mueller said.
The contract was ratified by union members July 1 and went to retroactive effect for June of this year. The contract will last until May 2027.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Jonathan Mueller is a violist.
