On Monday, June 30, San Francisco Opera announced that a new collective bargaining agreement had been signed by the company’s orchestra on Thursday, June 26, just a day before the Pride Concert closing out the 2025 summer season at the War Memorial Opera House.
The two-year contract with the American Federation of Musicians Local 6 is set to run through July 31, 2026, assuring labor peace for next season. The agreement is retroactive to Aug. 1, 2024, the date the last contract expired; between then and now, the parties had agreed to temporary extensions to prevent a strike.
The official announcement from SF Opera mentioned “a commitment between the orchestra and the company to negotiate a multiyear contract in the next round of negotiations” — presumably referring to the three-year agreements customary before the interruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The announcement didn’t go into specifics but described the contract as including “wage increases in each of the years and enhanced retirement packages. The new agreement also includes a collaboration between the orchestra and the company to realize a major change to its healthcare plans, resulting in transformational financial savings without reductions in benefits or increases in costs to participants.”
“We’re happy to have reached this agreement and are especially proud that our musicians, along with our healthcare consultant, identified and delivered major cost savings that will benefit the entire company,” said oboist Gabe Young, chair of the SF Opera Orchestra negotiating committee.
“I am very grateful to both the musicians and the staff who worked with great commitment, care, and thoughtfulness to reach this new agreement,” said General Director Matthew Shilvock. “We deeply value the extraordinary talents of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and the transcendent music-making they realize in both our theater and in the community. We look forward to a wonderful season ahead that will showcase music-making at the highest level.”
There is still no word from the San Francisco Symphony, where the musicians worked without a contract for over 300 days in 2022 and 2023 and then agreed to a short-term collective bargaining agreement, which expired on Nov. 23, 2024, and was then extended twice to run through April 26 of this year — but not beyond that date.
The SF Opera Orchestra’s contract for the 2018–2019 season called for a base minimum salary of $95,284, which was set to rise to $107,243 by 2022–2023. But musician wages were cut by 44 percent in fall 2020, when the opera house and other performance venues were closed because of COVID-19. Gradual pay increases followed, and the base salary was back to $110,467 by the 2023–2024 season, according to the SF Opera administration.
Before the announcement of the new contract, a company spokesperson told SF Classical Voice that “the full guaranteed minimum has been restored, and the recent extensions included a wage increase.”
However, the musicians’ union spokesperson said in response that salary growth had been “below the rate of inflation.” The number of vacant seats within the orchestra and the annual decline in the number of productions being staged were just some of the union’s other ongoing concerns.
