I’m a musician in NYC, and there’s not a lot of security in the work, so I try to be tactful about requests and concerns when I interact with a business that employees me with regular work. One of these places pays bargain basement rates and generally prioritizes every other class of workers above the musicians there. An important detail is that musicians work as part of a two-person collaboration with a teacher, so relationships are important.
A number of months ago, I asked for a raise from this employer, outlining my reasons, offering the industry standard as evidence to why this isn’t just an arbitrary request, and was met with “we aren’t entertaining raises at this time.” Fine. It’s not that bad, and I still work with a teacher where respect is mutual.
That teacher had to miss a few weeks of classes recently, and no one at this organization let me know. So I asked the administration if they could please let me know to expect subs in the future – the relationship between teacher and musician is pretty important here and a change in one radically impacts how the other does their job. Their response? “That’s too much work for us, we won’t do that.” Ok. This is less good.
Today, my regular teacher had to miss the class, and the teacher that came instead was just terrible for a number of reasons, so I reiterated my request to the administrators and explained 1. why it was so important to let me know, and 2. why it’s so unprofessional for me to find out as I’m walking through the door. They doubled down that it would be too much work, so I went on the offensive.
I drew attention to the fact that they need to respond to the teacher calling out, contact and confirm with the teacher coming to sub, and update their website – surely they could find two seconds to CC me on one of those tasks, couldn’t they? “No, the scheduling is just one small part of one person’s job and it adds too much.” So I doubled down on the lack of respect when it comes to how this organization handles its musicians – compensation, communication, and conditions are all lacking. The business manager described how she “constantly advocates for all of the employees” and “wouldn’t let my negative view of her character change that.” So I pointed out that I wasn’t passing judgment on her character, but rather on her job performance and lip service – you can’t say you advocate for your employees if you don’t actually do it. Her response dropped my jaw: “I’m glad you got that off of your chest. We will miss your talents and your lively emails, but you’re free to leave X at any time.” Sounds like an advocate to me.
I’m already looking for other work to replace this, and I’m lucky that this one place is a small part of my freelancer pie, but Jesus. They don’t have an HR person and I’m not sure who I would even elevate this to if I wanted to. I don’t think there’s anything legal to do, and I’m not sure I’d have the resources even if there was. It shouldn’t be at this point, but it’s baffling to me that administrators and managers can be so clueless at their jobs, or that upper management allows them to be. /rant