Extortion Broadway Style

Industrial unions are nothing more than legally privileged extortions schemes.  This central truth is usually obscured by Marxist rhetoric and lousy reporting but it is cleanly illustrated by the destruction that the theatrical union has inflicted on Broadway.

At Avery Fisher Hall and Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, the average stagehand salary and benefits package is $290,000 a year.

To repeat, that is the average compensation of all the workers who move musicians' chairs into place and hang lights, not the pay of the top five.

Across the plaza at the Metropolitan Opera, a spokesman said stagehands rarely broke into the top-five category. But a couple of years ago, one did. The props master, James Blumenfeld, got $334,000 at that time, including some vacation back pay.

How to account for all this munificence? The power of a union, Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. "Power," as in the capacity and willingness to close most Broadway theaters for 19 days two years ago when agreement on a new contract could not be reached.

The truly pathetic thing is that virtually all of the actors and many of the theater goers on Broadway routinely 'support' unions and the party hacks who enable them, thereby acting against their interest and crippling the art that they profess to 'love'.  Read the whole thing.