I heard this story on American Public Media’s Marketplace a couple days ago, and it got me to thinking. Here are the salient points from the opening of the transcript of the radio story (emphasis is mine):
John Plauche is a fourth-year associate at a top New York City law firm. He got a $20,000 raise last year. When his firm announced salary hikes across the board in January, he received another 20 grand. At 30 years old, he’s on $210,000 a year. He says he knows what’s behind his good fortune.
“Wall Street and Wall Street bonuses.”
He says firms like his do a lot of work for investment banks and hedge funds. Some lawyers end up defecting to work in-house at those companies. And pay at those places has been breaking records recently. That puts pressure on the law firms.
“So to keep talent, basically, the law firms have to keep raising pay to keep up with Wall Street.”
That, he says, has a knock-on effect at elite firms across the country.
Bill Urquhart agrees. He’s a senior partner at Los Angeles law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver and Hedges. After news of the New York raises rampaged across the Internet, his firm announced it would match the hikes.
“For law firms like ours, you really don’t have a choice but to pay what the market is demanding you pay. Otherwise, you start either a quick or a long-term decline.”
He says he and his rivals are in a fierce battle for the best law-school students in the country. Once they’ve tapped those superior legal brains, they want to keep them.
This got me to thinking about how orchestra managers set out to negotiate wages and other parts of the collective bargaining agreement with musicians. Wouldn’t the typical manager want to both attract and retain the most highly sought-after musicians from other orchestras and the top music schools?
When I joined the Oregon Symphony in 1995, we were right in the middle of the pack of ICSOM (International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians), with the base wage somewhere in the neighborhood of $35,000 per year for a section player. It was a enough to live on, as Portland’s real estate boom hadn’t yet begun.
Now, as we are in yet another year without a contract (our last one expired weeks after agreed to), we find our positioning in the orchestral pay hierarchy slipping – we’re now right on the bottom third, and several orchestras have either passed us by on the way up or are right on our heels.
Many of our auditions are frustrating experiences because other high-paying and more prestigious jobs are holding auditions at the same time or close by, and we lose the best of those who would ordinarily show up.
We’re at a geographic disadvantage, too: it costs a lot to get to Portland, and we’re a long way away from the big East Coast centers of music. When we do hire an excellent young (or not so young) musician, they all almost immediately begin auditioning for other jobs, because they know that they can’t have a good standard of living in Portland on the wages we’re paid. Just as man doesn’t live on bread alone, the improved artistic standards of the orchestra don’t pay the mortgage or buy the groceries.
Right now I feel totally at the mercy of the bottom line: every decision seems to be made based on how much it costs right this moment, not with an eye to how much this will bring in in the future. Short-term thinking only produces short-term solutions.