The New York Times: Ending a two-month strike, the prestigious Atlantic Theater Company and the labor union representing its crew members said Monday that they had reached a tentative agreement that they anticipated would allow the theater to resume performances.
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It is great to hear that an agreement has been reached in this situation, allowing for better treatment of staff involved in the upkeep and maintenance of the running of these shows. Once again though, talk in the article about producers worrying about the overall impact of this agreement on their financial status as well as how other non-profit theaters will have to start to bargain for similar deals interested me as I do not have a full understanding of how much the salary and benefits increases impact their budget. Often times the lack of transparency around the budget allocation draws doubt as to the exact allocation, and while it is true that the theater also should have the goal of maintaining long term success, it is unclear how much they are sacrificing to ensure that this is the case and if they’ve hit a proper optimization of these allocations. Ultimately, we as the people making theater need to have a better understanding of why there are such constraints so we can better work towards improving all of our conditions.
I am going to quickly co-opt this article to say some fun facts about the etymology of the various uses of the word strike. Did you know that the meaning of strike comes from the idea of “striking” a ship’s sails, meaning to drop them? This emerged from the Middle English version of strike, which had the meaning literally to make something smooth—when you drop the sails of a ship, it becomes flat. Sailors would do this to signal a ship’s refusal to go to sea, which carried into the idea of refusing to work for your employer. This idea of “striking” something meaning to take it down also carried into the theatrical notion of striking a set. I hypothesize that “strike” would be a very annoying word to learn if you were learning English as a second language because it has just way too many meanings. Anyway, it is great news that this union is on tract to get their demands met!
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