The Brooklyn Rail

Just in time for May Day 2025, the Association Representing Teaching Staff at Manhattan School of Music (ARTS-MSM), the union representing the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music’s Precollege program, ratified a new contract with the school’s administration. The contract was a remarkable victory, guaranteeing a seventy percent increase in the wage floor over five years and a total rollback of the school’s attempt to drastically increase class sizes. After months of hard-fought struggle, the membership was elated with these significant wins and finished the school year on a high note. The sense of satisfaction was cut through with relief, to be sure, but also a certain degree of shock. Did we really do it? Did we actually strike? Did we actually win?

The haze of astonishment probably correlates with a number of factors. In many ways, ARTS-MSM could not be a less typical union local: faculty members universally count this one-day-per-week program as but one among numerous gigs that they juggle as freelancers; the faculty is tremendously diverse, covering a wide spectrum of musical specialties, instructional roles, and number of work hours; and the Precollege program represents a minority of the overall programming at MSM (which is primarily a post-secondary institution). Freelance workers are generally not accustomed to feeling empowered on the job, and musicians, in particular, are quite familiar with employment structures in which their implied (or sometimes overtly stated) replaceability is always front of mind. As conventionally understood, teachers at MSM were operating from a position of significant structural disempowerment in this contract fight, and yet, we were able to organize effectively and secure tremendous wins under challenging conditions. How was this even possible?

Much has been written about the “gig economy” over the last decade. As more and more workers find themselves unwilling members of “the precariat,” Guy Standing’s prophetic 2011 term for the “dangerous class” of disempowered workers that has exploded in post-industrial economies rings truer than ever. For these workers, things like job security, consistent employment, and work-related benefits are relics of what feels like an inaccessible past. In the United States, while the political right has reconfigured itself to be a channel for populist rage—both through the ugly eliminationist project of the alt-right and the head-spinning neo-protectionism of Trumpism—the political left has had significant trouble connecting with these workers on a consistent basis. While the spirit of Occupy Wall Street may still blow through the ranks of Bernie true believers, DSA locals, and the various nonprofits and organizations that form the backbone of the progressive activist class, huge segments of everyday working people have either disengaged or found themselves tempted by the Siren songs of an American right wing that has suddenly renounced—however implausibly—free-market fundamentalism.

As the new millennium dawned and neoliberals laughably sat back to observe the “end of history,” there was no shortage of thinkers on the left who accurately identified the threat that rising income inequality and the degradation of workers’ rights posed; however, they have mostly seen their proposed remedies ignored by elected officials or attempted only at a trivial scale. Things like a temporary Universal Basic Income pilot project for a handful of residents of Stockton, CA, or a social housing experiment in a single county of Maryland might produce very useful research data and tangible benefits for the small number of people directly affected, but these narrow experiments have not exactly established confidence among the American working classes that the left has a comprehensive and tenable program that can address their immiseration. Even when the left has been able to implement broad and broadly popular policies—like the financial assistance programs that were part of COVID emergency legislation—they have not shown an ability to maintain them. The tragic and inexcusable expiration of the wildly popular child benefit payments that helped millions of families in 2021 is a perfect example. This incredibly effective program reduced childhood poverty by 30 percent essentially overnight, but was discontinued at the demand of ghoulishly corporatist former senator Joe Manchin, who enjoyed quasi-veto power in the Democrats’ majority caucus at the time.

To the extent that the left has shown signs of life among everyday working people in the United States in recent years, it has most often been when workers have taken matters into their own hands. The Fight for $15, the explosion of unionization drives nationwide (at Starbucks, most prominently), non-union workers’ organizations like Los Deliveristas Unidos and the Independent Drivers Guild forcing the hand of local government to engage its regulatory powers to the economic benefit of workers, students fighting and winning the right to organize for student workers and athletes on college campuses, the decriminalization movements that have won important protections for sex workers in a variety of states and municipalities and provided legitimate economic opportunities in the cannabis field—all of these are examples of grassroots workers’ movements that have scored major wins in the last fifteen years. This tangible progress for working-class people, albeit localized, tends to go a lot further in convincing frustrated workers that the left is on their side than theoretical frameworks like a federal job guarantee or universal basic income that have had essentially no impact on their day-to-day lives. For many, calls for broad systemic change in the absence of the political follow-through to really make it happen have understandably led to a sense of being cheated by “the elites” and a lack of interest in hearing their ideas about how to improve workers’ lives, no matter how promising they might be.

Many of the grassroots workers’ movements that have found success in recent years have been celebrated for their innovation and creativity, and the use of new technological tools or unconventional tactics are often credited with their success. While that’s certainly a valid analysis in many cases, it runs the risk of ignoring the use of “old school” tools for building worker power that have often been just as important in these recent fights—unionizing, striking, and leveraging community organizing to effect legislative change. In the same way that many workers today often view benefits like affordable health insurance, pensions, and a predictable, full-time work schedule as unattainable relics of the past, a similar sentiment can exist around the tools that workers and the labor movement employed to win major victories in previous generations. At a time when the tech bro oligarchy is doing its level best to dismantle essential functions of the federal government under a turbocharged Trump 2.0, it is especially important that we don’t overlook the utility of the tools that workers still do have and learn from recent examples in which they have been wielded successfully.

“Gig” has become such a universal term that you might be forgiven for forgetting that its roots are in music. The popularization of the term is often traced to jazz players in the 1910s, but musicians’ relationship with precarious employment has a much longer history. Street musicians throughout time have been reliant on the whims of the crowd to earn their keep, and patronage-based models that persisted through much of Western history commonly tied musicians’ livelihoods to the fickle taste of powerful masters at court or church. In the modern era, working musicians certainly benefited from the emergence of the labor movement, but the residue of precarious employment has never disappeared entirely. Today, certain sectors of the music field enjoy strong worker protections and are heavily unionized, but this represents a minority of musical work; the vast majority of working musicians today continue to make a living by juggling a complicated network of freelance gigs. These disempowering structures exist throughout the field, impacting seasoned veterans as well as those just starting out, and are common in both performance and teaching work. As the original “gig workers” with centuries of collective experience navigating economic uncertainty, unstable and ever-changing job structures, and complex relationships with employers, the experience of music workers has unexpectedly become an increasingly relevant point of reference in recent years for an ever-growing proportion of workers in precarious employment across the economy. In light of these developments, these struggling workers and the leaders trying to help improve their lives could do well to learn from musicians’ many generations of experience.

The faculty of Manhattan School of Music’s Precollege program are classic examples of freelance musicians. All of MSM Precollege’s programming happens on Saturdays, and it does not provide the bulk of most of its faculty’s income, nor is it a reliable source of consistent employment. Faculty work is generally dependent on student enrollment; the administration has no obligation to guarantee teaching hours; and employment comes with no benefits of any kind (not even access to the school’s health insurance plan). The precarious aspects of this employment are keenly felt by its faculty, and they were historically used as tools to keep teachers scared of the administration and isolated from each other. The existence of a unionized workforce under such conditions is remarkable and exists only because of a dogged, years-long fight that culminated in union recognition in 2009 and a first collectively bargained contract in 2013. This initial collective bargaining agreement established wage floors for the first time in the program’s history and provided important protections for teachers that made it harder (though certainly not impossible) for the administration to steamroll faculty. The contract was historic, extremely hard-fought, and provided important protections, but it couldn’t fix everything overnight. Since unionizing, teachers have benefited from increased stability and other significant improvements in the terms of their employment, but the wages that MSM was paying fell further and further behind the cost of living as the economy reeled from one shock to another. By the time the union’s second contract expired last summer, the minimum pay level had fallen to nearly half that of peer institutions and well under half the going rate on the private instruction market. To be clear, MSM Precollege’s wages had never been great, but after years of not keeping up with industry standards, things had reached a breaking point.

Following the expiration of the contract, ARTS-MSM came to the bargaining table with some basic demands: MSM wages should be comparable to those of similar institutions like Mannes School of Music and the Juilliard School (both of which operate similar pre-college classical and jazz preparatory programs in New York City), and teachers would not accept administrative changes like substantial class size increases that would be harmful to our students’ education. In response, the administration immediately engaged in hardball tactics, retaining a notorious union-busting lawyer, avoiding the negotiating table for weeks on end, and eventually offering up egregiously insulting wage increases of a few dollars per hour to a workforce getting steamrolled by the cost-of-living crisis. The unreasonableness of the administration’s behavior was all the more galling because the school’s ability to afford the teachers’ requests was crystal clear, as demonstrated in MSM’s own publicly available financial statements. Their rhetoric attempting to demonize teachers or paint our demands for fair pay as an existential threat to the school also fell resoundingly flat—it is not hard to grasp the idea that paying half the going rate threatens an institution’s ability to remain competitive and maintain a reputation for high standards. (In fact, MSM seems to have no trouble understanding this when it comes to administrative salaries, which, unlike teachers’ compensation, are not significantly lower than the industry norm.) The faculty weren’t being reckless; it was actually the administration’s greed and intransigence that posed serious threats to the institution’s future.

While MSM’s administration and their union-busting lawyers were clearly betting that the unwieldiness of the ARTS-MSM bargaining unit would minimize its ability to effectively organize a counter-offensive, they vastly underestimated the determination of our teachers and the broad community of support that was ready to stand behind us. Beginning with a public petition that drew over two thousand signatures, ARTS-MSM implemented an inside-outside strategy to engage and activate members while simultaneously creating an expansive coalition to support our fight. Education and outreach campaigns to parents and MSM alumni began in earnest, and faculty were invited to participate in the open bargaining process with the administration—a transparent structure that the union insisted on. Public messages of solidarity from prominent musicians were secured and press coverage was achieved, initially in the small but highly influential music press. On a weekly basis, faculty organized pressure campaigns, frequently demonstrating out front of the school building and educating parents and students about the negotiating process. Over the course of four months, teachers worked under the terms of an expired contract and the union negotiated in good faith, but the administration made it clear that they were unwilling to meet the teachers’ entirely reasonable demands. Throughout this time, community support only grew, with buttons supporting teachers proudly displayed on students’ jackets and instrument cases every week, and parents sending letters and making calls to the administration to encourage the school to agree to a fair contract.

As the end of the first semester neared with the administration continuing to dig in its heels, the union called a strike authorization vote for the first time in the school’s history. While this escalation was unprecedented, it was viewed as the only path forward given the administration’s consistent intransigence and our faculty’s deep frustration with the status quo. In preparation for the strike vote, union officials undertook a comprehensive outreach campaign, contacting each and every member to discuss the urgent circumstances and to take the temperature of the faculty. Countless hours of phone conversations, text message threads, and forum discussions unfolded among our increasingly engaged and unified membership. Ultimately, the vote was 98 percent to 2 percent in favor of authorizing a strike—a shocking result that should have communicated clearly to the administration that their position at the bargaining table was unsustainable. In an indication of how dangerously out-of-touch the administration remained, that message was ignored. Three weeks after the strike vote, with no meaningful concessions from the administration having been made, the union took the next step and called the strike. For the first time since the school’s founding over a century ago, the teachers at Manhattan School of Music were going to collectively withhold our labor.

ARTS-MSM is an independent local of NYSUT, the teachers’ union that represents most public school teachers across New York state. We are atypical in a number of ways, including the fact that our members are not bound by New York’s Taylor Law prohibiting public employees from going on strike. In preparation for the strike, ARTS-MSM quickly amped up coordination with NYSUT leadership, but also recognized that this strike could not follow a standard playbook if it were to be maximally effective. Many MSM faculty are active performers and also members of other unions, primarily the American Federation of Musicians (AFM Local 802) or the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA). These are the two most prominent musicians’ unions in the United States and represent workers at many of the country’s most prestigious ensembles and music venues. ARTS-MSM leadership immediately reached out to these sibling unions for support and began coordinating efforts to build a united front that could speak with a powerful voice in the music world. At the same time, efforts were made with NYSUT to coordinate with education unions and with NYC’s Central Labor Council, ultimately resulting in the relatively tiny ARTS-MSM strike receiving endorsements from some of the largest unions in the state, representing hundreds of thousands of workers and influential connections to elected officials. This solidarity came together on multiple fronts and helped with strategy, logistics, and boots on the ground, and the coalition helped amplify our message, tighten up our internal organizing, and maximize the pressure on the administration from a variety of different angles.

We always held out hope that the administration would realize it had been outmaneuvered and get serious at the bargaining table, so that we wouldn’t actually have to go on strike and potentially disrupt the school year for our students. However, as time passed and the administration continued to dig in its heels, those hopes dimmed. It became more and more clear that the administration was operating in a delusional bubble, becoming increasingly isolated and detached from reality. The weekly demonstrations that had been taking place in front of the school continued, transitioning into educational efforts about how students and parents could support teachers during a strike. Buttons proclaiming “Musicians Strike Together” appeared everywhere on campus, even proudly displayed onstage during some student performances. Scabby the Rat, the enormous inflatable vermin of NYC labor lore, became a regular presence outside the school building, standing tall as a testament to the administration’s shameful union-busting behavior.

Ultimately, the recalcitrance of the administration left us no choice but to walk off the job, and the strike kicked off with an epic ten-hour picket line on the frigid first morning of February. Showing their true colors, the administration tried desperately to get teachers to scab, contacting faculty individually and asking them to cross the picket line digitally by teaching remotely. They clearly hoped to intimidate faculty and create a permission structure that would allow teachers to violate the strike without having to come face to face with the colleagues they would be betraying. We had anticipated these attempts and had coordinated with the musicians unions to communicate to their large numbers of members that crossing our picket line was unacceptable. We also preemptively recruited musicians not currently employed by MSM to sign a “No Scab Pledge,” publicly promising to reject any offers of work at the school as long as the strike was in effect. The administration’s unscrupulous attempts to break the strike were met with the overwhelming unity of our faculty and the undeniable power of our solidarity—we held the line. In the end, the administration was left with no other choice but to shutter the school and admit that the Manhattan School of Music simply cannot function without its teachers.

None of this happened by chance—rather, it was the result of months of hard work put in by union leadership and engaged teachers who organized our colleagues into a unified force, capable of taking action together. We built trust by prioritizing transparency and by refusing to let the administration frighten us, demonstrating to our members that we were willing to take a stand and emboldening them to do the same. At the same time, our coalition-building with other unions transformed the ARTS-MSM strike into something with bigger stakes: crossing this picket line wouldn’t just be an affront to our small union local, it would be defying some of the biggest unions in both the fields of music and education—potential career suicide for any professional musician or music educator. In the end, the administration’s underestimating us turned out to be one of our biggest strengths. When instead of being able to intimidate us into submission they were blindsided by a broad and influential coalition with the capacity to shame them publicly and shut down the basic functioning of the school, they had no choice but to fold.

ARTS-MSM chose to limit the initial strike action to one week to demonstrate to parents and students that we were doing everything possible to avoid disrupting students’ education; at the same time, the effectiveness of our strike action made it crystal clear that if the administration did not come to its senses, we had the power to shut down the school indefinitely. When the administration did not immediately make adequate concessions following the strike, ARTS-MSM called a mass rally during school hours to physically (and audibly!) demonstrate that the strong community of support that had been built in the fight for a fair contract was not going anywhere, and that the unity of the faculty would not be broken. The rally culminated with the crowd singing “Solidarity Forever,” led by musicians from the Metropolitan Opera (AGMA members), and a six-minute communal racket timed to sonically symbolize the six months teachers had been working without a contract. Shortly thereafter, the administration agreed to federal mediation, which resulted in a Memorandum of Agreement that served as the basis for our historic new contract.

We were the underdogs, but we won—an outcome that not only shocked MSM’s administration, but also came as a genuine surprise to many of our members. Some of our faculty will see an immediate rise of $40/hour in their wages. Others who have taught at MSM for decades will receive an immediate bump in pay of $21/hour, a belated but richly deserved acknowledgement of their many years of dedication. All faculty will start the new school year with a 38 percent increase in the minimum pay rate and recently received a check for back pay at the higher negotiated rate for Year 1, providing a welcome financial boost after many months of toil under the terms of the expired contract. All of this was won from an administration that started negotiations by telling us they could afford meaningful increases only for a handful of teachers with thirty or more years of service, followed by $1/hour increases in hourly rates for the remainder of the contract! When you are accustomed to knowing that the deck is stacked against you, it can be hard to imagine your desire for positive change actually being satisfied, but that’s exactly what we were able to achieve through our organizing efforts. To be sure, our experience in this fight can’t be replicated in exact detail by other workers, but recent times have shown us that there isn’t a single winning playbook. In fact, being creative and learning lessons from other workers’ experience while strategizing intensively around the particulars of your own situation can be vital tools in organizing to win. In our struggle, we learned a lot and took great inspiration from the 2022 strike at the New School (which included the music educators in the Mannes Prep program) that resulted in tremendous gains for workers there. Not every aspect of their strategy was applicable to our situation, but we certainly benefited from studying and learning from their experience. And let’s not forget: in recent years, many of the most successful worker-organizing movements have been among people who were thought of as having the least secure footholds in the economy. Sometimes having to create your own playbook can actually be a secret weapon.

In short: we can and should learn from each other. So, what wisdom have we acquired through this experience at MSM that we can share with our fellow workers?

 

ORGANIZING WORKS

• The reason ARTS-MSM was able to take the school’s administration by surprise and publicly shame them (no small thing in the reputation-sensitive professional music world) was because of a huge upsurge in organizing work by our members. This increased engagement allowed us to build a community of support that broadened the playing field beyond just the administration and our union leadership. They desperately wanted this fight to happen behind closed doors, but we refused to let that happen. Our insistence on transparency meant that they couldn’t hide their bad behavior, and our press and social media strategies allowed us to set the terms of public messaging in a way that kept them on the defensive. Our multifaceted strategy isolated the administration and kept them consistently off-balance.
• Recent worker victories nationwide share a common thread of strategic and creative approaches to organizing, often including the skillful use of public messaging. Let’s be honest: labor law is set up so that workers are almost always at a disadvantage. Because of this, thinking outside of the box and taking a strategic approach to organizing can be a key tool that workers can use to outmaneuver structural disadvantages in the system and reconfigure the playing field in a way that facilitates success. Networks of power differ from industry to industry, but an organizing strategy that isolates management and introduces conflict in the relationships that it relies on to maintain its leverage and/or its standing among its peers can create an opening for workers to overcome structural disadvantages and build a path to victory.

 

DON’T BE AFRAID TO GET OLD SCHOOL 

• Just because innovative approaches can be useful doesn’t mean that traditional labor tools don’t have their place. Without question, being represented by a union provides workers with invaluable frameworks of support that can’t be easily replaced. Knowing that you are part of a bigger entity makes taking action as an individual less frightening, and feeling certain that your state/national union has your back provides a powerful sense of protection for workers when they are being asked to take radical action like walking off the job. Being part of a union can also provide access to resources and networks of support that would otherwise have to be built up from scratch. Additionally, the collective bargaining process provides a structured and legally binding format that compels employers to interface with workers as a unified entity, not as individuals that they can manipulate or turn against each other. This fundamentally changes the stakes in any negotiation between workers and management.
• With that said, not all unions are the same. While NYSUT is a great example of a union that lets individual locals take the lead on issues affecting their particular membership, there are other unions whose top-down approach can stymie the voices of workers at the local level. This can be counterproductive and sometimes leads to a sense of disempowerment among the rank and file. Solidarity actions of sibling unions and organized labor overall were unquestionably invaluable in ARTS-MSM’s contract fight, but we also know that a huge part of our success was our focus on being transparent and accessible to our members at the local level. Unions need to be wary both of becoming so focused on their own parochial issues that they lose sight of the power of broader labor solidarity and of operating with a remove from their members, which can erode engagement and ultimately lessen the potential power of collective action.

 

SOMEBODY HAS TO DO IT

• If you’re like many workers, the reality is that your boss is literally paying one or more people to keep you disempowered. (And probably paying them a lot more than they pay you!) Because you and your coworkers probably don’t have the luxury of hiring someone to fight back on your behalf, it’s more likely than not that you’re going to have to do it yourselves. If you’re in a union, that might be as simple as getting engaged with your local or stepping into necessary leadership positions that help it to be effective. That could be as easy as simply printing out some leaflets or as involved as volunteering to be on the negotiating committee. Like most organizations, unions work best when they work democratically. That means that the more rank and file members engage with the union (that’s you!), the more likely it is that the union’s work will reflect the workers’ needs and aspirations. If you aren’t in a union, that might mean taking the reins and organizing your fellow workers from the bottom up. Don’t forget that federal labor law protects worker advocacy on the job regardless of union membership. Retaliation is illegal!
• Irrespective of the mechanism, behind every worker victory there are always dedicated people doing the grunt work to forge the pathway to success. There is no magic recipe here, and it is not one size fits all. In the case of ARTS-MSM, our peculiarities as music school faculty of a selective private institution in a union that mostly represents public school instructors meant that the standard NYSUT playbook was not going to work for our contract fight. That didn’t stop us from working intensively with NYSUT leadership, and with their help and our partners in the musicians’ unions, we were able to create an effective strategy that leveraged resources and support that we would not have been able to easily access on our own. Every struggle is different, but engaged workers contributing their time and skills to develop and support a structure for effective collective action will always be the baseline for success in any workers’ movement. Winning in a system that is designed to disempower you is never going to happen by itself: the only practicable solution is to roll up your sleeves and get to work.

 

SOLIDARITY IS CONTAGIOUS

• There are real and legitimate reasons why workers are afraid to stand up to the boss. Pretending otherwise does a disservice to the real human beings coming to work from a diversity of backgrounds and lived realities that invariably make up any group of workers. Hearing and respecting people’s concerns is an important mechanism for building trust. Isolation is one of the boss’s best weapons, and if the only relationship you have at work is between you as an individual and management, you will always feel disempowered and outgunned. The first and most effective step in organizing a workforce is very often the facilitation of social connections. When workers know each other and have a communication structure in place where they can freely express themselves about the conditions of the job, bonds of trust and community will take shape. The trust that grows from these social bonds builds the foundation for what can become collective action. If and when the time comes to take radical action, if colleagues know and trust each other, making that move together reduces the fear and burden on any particular individual. For organizing to be effective, solidarity can’t only be theoretical: it must be interwoven with our social networks.

 

PRECARIAT WORKERS HAVE POWER

• The fact that a precariat class exists at all is clearly a failure of our political and economic systems; however, that doesn’t mean that workers in the precariat must wait for the political or economic systems to solve their problems! To be sure, these workers often have to confront additional hurdles when they organize colleagues or take labor action, but in no way does that mean that these fights are impossible to win. The argument that we must first elect worker-friendly politicians who will then empower unions who will then make it better for workers overall is increasingly unconvincing to working-class people. While that strategy might make sense in theory, what has become clear over the last several years is that wins for working people are often won at the grassroots level. When workers organize and take action together, they compel change. This was as true in the wildcat West Virginia teacher strikes in 2018 as it was for the Boeing contract fight last year, for the wave of Starbucks workers who finally overcame their notoriously anti-union employer’s efforts to prevent unionization across the company, and for the Taxi Workers Alliance hunger strike in 2021 that led to a 350 million dollar city bailout for debt-burdened workers. There might not be a universal playbook for success, and it might require some outside-of-the-box thinking, but workers in the precariat class are not doomed to sit around waiting to be rescued by the very political class that created their current (insufferable) condition. Fundamentally, when workers organize and act collectively, we can manifest positive change. There are documented cases of workers taking collective labor action stretching back all the way to ancient Egypt. From struggle to struggle, the particulars have always varied in important ways, of course, but the common thread is that collective action always has the potential to build worker power. This is no less true for today’s precariat workers who have been made to put up with too much for too long. We don’t need to be rescued; the power is in our own hands!