The San Francisco Symphony and its musicians have finally signed a two-year agreement.
The new weekly base minimum salary is $3,313, rising to $3,450 in the second year.
The payments will be backdated to November 27, 2022, and runs to November 18, 2024.
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If my math is correct, $3,313 per week calculates out to a minimum annual base salary of $172,276; a perfectly respectable figure.
Their season is less than 52 weeks
The SFS season is certainly 52 weeks
Not if your rent is over $3,000 a month and you can’t buy a house for under a million.
1. 3313 x 52 = 172,276
2. 3450 x 52 = 179,400
——————
/= 150,000
Still not enough to live in that city!
And when do you plan to factor in the private lessons and other teaching activities that virtually all orchestral musicians take part in? The orchestral working week is little more than 20 hours. Granted there needs to be time to go over parts and learn new works. But to suggest that the vast majority of orchestral musicians in SFO live on their symphony salaries can not be true.
There is prep time you know. They don’t just walk in and sight-read, I like to think. Harpists should get paid double for all the extra work they have to do to make a part playable. Unlike any other instrument.
Cue the Europoors saying it’s too much money.
My friends’ starting salary as an engineer in SF came out to around that much. It’s barely a professional class salary. USA is just a lot wealthier.
Imagine that the US one makes 115k after taxes, and needs 100k to cover housing, transportation, health insurance, higher education debt and groceries. And now think that in a continental western European country one makes 40k after taxes and can cover all that with 21k… Who is wealthier?
“…and runs to November 18, 2024. ”
They’ll barely have time to tune before they have to start negotiating all over again.
So if I win the next audition, I’ll have to pay more than 10 bucks a month on my half mill musical education? Maybe I’ll stick to the regional orchestras
FYI, in San Francisco that starts to approximate the salary of a janitor.
Great job!
That should keep them in fentanyl.
Perhaps they should have demanded a custom-built apartment building so they would have affordable housing nearby.