K'jipuktuk (Halifax) – At a time of year better suited to letting the cares of the physical world drift away to the symphonic rapture of Handel's 'Messiah,' the musicians of Symphony Nova Scotia (SNS) have found themselves otherwise engaged in broken-down contract negotiations. And yesterday, Dec. 19, the 37 musicians represented by the American Federation of Musicians local 571 voted 80% to strike, effective Jan. 17.

The main issue on the table is salary. According to Karen Langille, first violin with the SNS and the union spokesperson, the base salary for a musician at SNS is roughly $28,000 per year. The musicians at SNS want a base salary of $30,000, to be put in place in at most two years.

So far, the volunteer board of directors at the other end of the negotiating table hasn't given Langille or the musicians' negotiating team any hope that this will be offered before Jan. 14, the last scheduled day of negotiation – and three days before the musicians enter a legal strike position.

“We think that the poor salary that we are being paid is actually a symptom of a very serious issue and that issue is how the board relates to its musicians,” Langille told the Halifax Media Co-op. “We think that it's time for the board to raise the level of priority that they're placing on sustaining their musicians and we think it's time that the board actually revisit the model that they're using to do business.”

The SNS's board of directors, comprised of some of Halifax's most wealthy lawyers, bankers and businesspeople – and who it seems safe to say have no personal idea what it is like to live annually, in 2012, on $28,000 – have so far balked from negotiations, going so far as to refuse an invitation from the union to enter into conciliation after talks had become severely strained in late November.

In SNS's 2011/2012 annual report, chairman of the board Brett Mitchell (also the Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation's President and CEO) cautions against the financially unstable times in which we find ourselves, especially in light of government cuts to arts funding.

Indeed, SNS operated at a deficit of $137,790 in 2012. However, SNS recently completed a multimillion dollar 'Listen to the Future' fundraising campaign, and now have, by varying estimates, a $5 to $8 million cushion with which to play. The request for a $2,000-a-year raise for the 37 musicians employed by SNS would only actually amount to $74,000 a year, hardly a deal-breaker, and easily found in, say, the $327,000 spent in 2012 on administration.

To Langille, it isn't that there's no money. It's more a symptom of priorities.

“What it seems to us that is happening is that the musicians' salaries sit very low in the prioritized budget for this organization,” says Langille. “Moneys are spent elsewhere first, and the remaining moneys, once all the fixed expenses have been paid, are what the musicians' salaries are coming from. And inevitably there's a shortfall, and we bear the brunt of that in our salaries.”

The discrepancies in lifestyle and income between members of the board and the musicians has lead to tenuous negotiations. The chief negotiator for the board for example, local lawyer Ron Pink, has quite literally sponsored the seat of a member of the musicians' negotiating team. Pink, normally a lawyer found on the side of labour when it comes to contractual negotiations, appears to have left his solidarity at home in this, perhaps more personal, instance.

The difficulty of attempting to negotiate on equal footing with the man whose name appears on the back of your chair has not been lost on Brian James, oboist and member of the negotiating team.

“The language we're getting from the other end of the table is 'We consider this a part-time job and you should be able to find other work to supplement the income,' and 'If you don't like it here, you should go and find employment somewhere else,'" says James. "And that's really hard to hear for people that have been here for 30 years and have a few kids and have ... devoted their lives to this ... art form. A lot of us started playing when we were 10 years old. We went to university or conservatories and got Bachelor's degrees and Master's degrees.”

“We put in about a 40-hour work week [for] 33 weeks,” adds Langille. “We rehearse, we perform concerts, we get one day off a week – Monday – and our schedule changes from week to week, which makes our lifestyle quite challenging. We can be called in for work morning, afternoon or evening. We have a lot of evening concerts, and we work a lot on the weekends. It's quite a challenging lifestyle for a single person, and even more challenging for those who have a family with one, two or three children. And we have musicians who have families in the orchestra.”

As for the quality of the product on offer, there is no question; Symphony Nova Scotia was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's most recorded orchestra in 2011/2012, garnering rave reviews across the province and beyond. Revenue from ticket sales, according to Langille, has also increased since 2008. Coming off a four-year contract that began in 2008, she can't see why that hasn't translated into a base salary increase.

"More and more people are coming to concerts," says Langille. "We feel that we're doing our job. Our job is to sit on stage and perform symphonic music to the best of our ability. And we are doing that. We have excellent reviews. More people are coming. So the big question is: Why in 2012, after we have done such a great job, are we being offered a contract which is less than what we were offered four years ago?”

For Langille, the permanent solution to the current financial model, in which some of Halifax's most wealthy determine how to allocate funds and which does little to remedy the inequality inherent in the master/performer relationship, is to allow the general public more say in where their donations to SNS go.

“In the entire 30 years of this organization, a mechanism has never been put in place for people to be able to make donations to the symphony to be earmarked for musicians' salaries,” says Langille. “Also there has never been a mechanism put in place by which the board consistently contributes money to be used for upcoming negotiations. So every time we enter negotiations it's like re-inventing the wheel. It's like starting all over again, hearing the same story, 'There is no money.' And the fact is, there is money. The board is just choosing to spend it elsewhere.”