This is from the Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro, North Carolina:
Dear EMF Alumni,
Earlier today, Eastern Music Festival’s Board of Directors announced the cancellation of our 2025 season which was to have run from June 28 through August 2.
The decision to cancel this year’s Festival does not come lightly. For more than six decades, Eastern Music Festival has made summer in Greensboro a place of intense educational and artistic growth, beautiful music, and memories. We are taking this pause to better serve our future students and audiences and to address the festival’s long-term sustainability, fully understanding the short-term disappointments the pause brings.
What brings us to this decision? An unresolved labor dispute.
On the final day of our 2023 festival, union representatives from the American Federation of Musicians’ Local 342 (Charlotte) notified EMF of their intention to organize our festival faculty.
In November 2023, the AFM’s unionization effort was recognized by the National Labor Relations Board.
Face-to-face negotiations between the union’s faculty representatives and the EMF Board began in January 2024.
Supported by Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service professionals, the two sides have met and negotiated for more than 80 hours since those first January 2024 discussions. Since early in the negotiation process, EMF has proposed a number of meaningful conciliatory offers to address the faculty’s needs. The union has rejected all of them with little to no concession.
Last week, EMF presented our last, best, and final offer to the union. This offer included substantial faculty pay raises, new and generous housing allowances, and other benefits while standing firm in our commitment to the festival’s charter-driven educational goals and sustainability mandates. Our proposal was rejected by the AFM.
Without an AFM collective bargaining agreement in place and recognizing the short time frame left available to us to complete festival planning and implementation, EMF is unable to confirm student enrollment, guest artist participation, or contracts for staff and operational/organizational needs.
We make this move now in order to allow for a smooth and controlled transition into a planning phase that permits careful consideration to our educational objectives, operational and organizational processes, revenue streams, and programming goals.
… This summer is not a vacation, nor is this pause the end for EMF. A refocused, reinvigorated and sustainable EMF is possible. Thoughtful, collaborative and innovative work is already underway, and, thanks to the support of EMF’s friends, alumni, patrons, faculty, and family, we will continue to serve our students and their educational advancement with professionalism and confidence.
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