This September, after several months of bargaining, the Musicians of New York City Ballet ratified a new three-year agreement.

We are proud of the agreement we reached. We are also proud of the process that got us there.

From the beginning, we wanted the negotiation to reflect what we believe about our orchestra and its place within New York City Ballet. NYCB has an extraordinarily rich and artistic history, and live music has always been an essential part of it. Our orchestra includes musicians with decades of institutional knowledge alongside remarkable colleagues who have joined more recently, and we wanted to begin the negotiation from that shared sense of investment in the institution and its future.

At our first bargaining session on May 27, we gave a presentation about the orchestra: who we are, where we had come from since the pandemic, and what we hoped to accomplish in this contract.

In our official press release, Local 802 President Dan Point said: “Our members stood together through every stage of this negotiation, and that solidarity is what produced a contract worthy of the NYCB musicians who bring the company’s musical repertoire to life. The agreement recognizes the artistry and dedication our members carry into the pit every night, and we look forward to a great season at Lincoln Center with a full orchestra playing music that matches the brilliance of New York City Ballet’s dancers on stage. I would also like to thank our negotiating committee for the long hours behind this deal.”

Economically, our primary goal was to continue to catch up from the losses we took during the pandemic. We made this our “thesis statement” in a Powerpoint presentation to our management at our first bargaining session. We illustrated rising costs of living in New York City, as well as how much our wages had stagnated relative to inflation. While we are pleased with the progress we made in this regard, we will continue to fight for this in future bargaining.

In addition to fighting for wage increases, we successfully achieved economic gains from other compensation-related areas of our contract like premiums and exit pay.

Healthcare was another major priority. We were negotiating at a time of extraordinary volatility in the health insurance market, with costs rising rapidly and significant uncertainty about what future plan years might bring. For us, the goal was not simply to address the cost of healthcare in a single year, but to protect as much stability and predictability as possible for our members over the life of the contract. The agreement we reached maintains important protections around our health coverage while creating a more predictable framework for how future changes will be handled. In an environment where neither side can control what happens to healthcare costs, we felt that predictability was especially important.

Our legal counsel, Susan Davis, and representatives from Local 802 (like Dan Point, Sally Weathers and Rush Perez) were with us every step of the way.

None of these wins would have been possible without the staunch unity displayed by our members, whose show of strength in crucial moments was critical to moving the needle on very important issues.

The NYC Ballet Musicians Committee is Julia DeRosa, Ethan Silverman, Ian Sullivan, Hannah Holman and Rachel Blumenthal.