----- Original Message ----- From: Wolfley, Eric (wolfleel) To: caut at ptg.org Sent: Saturday, June 20, 2009 8:36 AM Subject: Re: [CAUT] Caut Certification Jeff, I am happy to be your friend and certainly don't want a war but I guess what it comes down to is that I remain optimistic about our chances of ultimately making a difference. I see evidence of progress on the salary front all around me and I truly believe it is because of the efforts of the CAUT technicians who came before us and the efforts we are making. I know that doesn't help you feed your family in the here and now but what should we do? Just give up? Certainly not! But I think there are ways to make a bigger difference sooner than later. I think there are other things we could be focusing on that WILL make a more immediate impact than education and training. We're already overqualified for the salaries we're earning! What is more education and training going to do for that? Education and training ain't the problem. It is apalling to me that your school up-graded the position after you left and then gave the job to an unproven tech...that tells me that they must be plain ignorant. First of all, he isn't actually unproven. You met him at a Steinway class. He's a good tech, 30 some odd years experience. But he's never been interested in joining PTG. He's attended some conventions as a non member, and finished all the Steinway training. I introduced him to the school of music when I had him come in and do a restringing job and some tuning work the year before. But, he hadn't put in the almost 10 years I had with the employer, and yes, that part of it is frustrating. (But no sympathy for me - I am loving the freedom of self-employment.) I actually got advice from some other techs who had done what I did. Israel Stein also fairly recently shared a similar story offlist of another tech (tech quit in a huff, and the salary and work conditions were improved for the person who took his place). I was basically advised, "be prepared to accept that you might not be the person who benefits from your effort, but this is how the process works." Faculty members at my school shared similar advice. Unfortunately, this is often how bureacracy works. The first lesson we need to teach techs looking for a CAUT job is this: Once you're hired, getting a raise literally requires an act of congress. Bargain for what you will need 10 years from now before you accept the job. The job classification infrastructure is NOT employee friendly and is NOT designed to reward effort or excellence. It is designed to save tax dollars. Period. (By the way, my "research" over the years does demonstrate that private schools are a bit less restrictive in this regard, but I never found that techs at private schools did any better salary wise as a whole than techs employed by state institutions.) Perhaps if my personal situation didn't require so much more than the U was paying, who knows? I might have been able to stay on through the process and benefit from it myself. On the other hand, it really was that financial chasm that was the catalyst, so without it, change may never have happened. If we don't try to educate them, who will? I don't think "they" are listening to us and never will. Our efforts are (or at least give the appearance of being) completely self-serving and for that reason have very little credibility. Let's face reality. We're not a diversified group. We are an organization of piano technicians. For the most part, pretty much all of us work on pianos. Our platform is pretty one-sided. They are more likely to regard some "independent" source with more credibility. Actually, it appears to me that Steinway factory training carries more weight with music faculty than does the PTG for the simple fact that a secondary sponsor is factored in. If I were on the other side of the fence, I think I would too. Hey, my dean is a fan of PTG, but he put value in the Steinway Guidelines and snubbed the PTG ones. I can understand why. Right now, with salaries being low it shows that schools don't value us very highly... Think about it Eric. It isn't them (they don't disrespect us any more than any of the other faculty who have not a lick of pride in the value of their education and training). It is US! We are the ones ourselves who don't value us very highly. We're the ones guilty of signing up to display our top of the line skills and be willing to work all hours and weekends for peanuts! Guys, we should be in the driver's seat here. All you gotta do is just say "No. Basic piano tech skills are worth twice or more than that in the private sector and you're looking for concert level qualifications and proven high performance level rebuilding abilities. No matter how much I loathe tuning spinets and consoles (and I don't particulary), I OWE IT TO THE OTHERS LIKE ME IN MY PROFESSION WHO HAVE THESE HIGHER SKILLS TO SAY "NO". If you want my skills, your going to have to find a way to get closer to the market value for them." If they decide to go for the cheap guy, that's his stupid mistake. (It was mine.) You gotta have a backbone up front. (Do I ever wish I could have read internet postings like mine BEFORE I took that job!!!) as salaries are eventually brought up I believe we need to have an infrastructure in place to show academia "value" for their investment. Here again, we might well be looking at another self-serving infrastructure that will have little credibility as any sort of independent evaluation. On the other hand, what WOULD work is providing academia some sort of real data that demonstrates the earnings potential for that individual were he/she not employed by the university. Here's an example. The last year I was there, they had two different harpsichord techs come in for a couple hours each to do some harpsichord work. The charge each time was almost as much as my weekly salary (actually between gross and take home). Now, I admit, most of that was for transportation. Both techs came from over 100 miles away. But they were willing to fork out about $750 each for what amounted to 2 hours each of service time on the harpsichord. Could I have done the work? Yep. Most likely. Why didn't I? Because that skill is worth something I wasn't being paid for. Did the two harpsichord techs apologize for charging a week's worth of my salary for a day of their time? Nope. Were they going to adjust my salary if they found out I could save them $1500 for 4 hours of harpsichord work? Nope. They would just be happy they were getting two skills for the price of one! And besides, if I let them know I knew how to do harpsichord work, do you realize how much time that would have taken away from the 127 pianos I was responsible for? Harpsichords and fortepianos, like my 6 year old daughter, are HIGH maintenance. I fixed sticking keys on the organ a couple times, too. Took about 20 - 30 minutes each and saved two $500 organ service calls (so said the organ prof). Did I mention it at evaluation time? Yep. Did it affect my salary? Nope. Look. If you want a good Steinway (with any kind of life left in it), you can't get one for the price of a Story & Clark. They are well aware of that. It is the same scenario, just applied to personnel. All it would take from us is some kind of effort on our part to price our Steinway skills above our Story & Clark skills (ironically, the Story & Clark price is typically higher than the Steinway price because of CAUT!). It's gotta start with us. Take a little pride in the value of our work, that's all. The committee has never operated on the illusion that waving a diploma around would get everybody a raise...we can thank you for that! Your input has been valuable in keeping us grounded in the reality of the situation. It is my opinion that when we look back 10 years from now, the CAUT endoresement and academy initiatives will have made a difference. All the Best, Eric And a difference may be made indeed. But it won't be just because of the CAUT endorsement anymore than 30 years of RPT has affected salary. Salary improvements over the years have come about because good techs took a little pride in the market value of their work and took regard to their peers and just said, "No. OUR skills are worth more than this. I am not the only person who will be affected if I accept this salary, and I owe it to the market value of OUR craft to reject this salary as an insult to OUR profession." Look at your own situation. It is a case in point! You've described improvement that was made there, (boasted about it!) and you did it without any kind of PTG credential to support you. You did it by initiating the process on your own initiative! Would the PTG credential have helped? I'm afraid I don't think it would have made a hill of beans difference. Change isn't going to happen as long as we continue to let them think we're happy with things as they are, and a CAUT endorsement isn't going to affect that. The last two and a half years I spent at SC were contentious between me and the dean. I let him know when he came there I wasn't happy and he didn't take me seriously (or seriously enough). Oh, he made some small improvements over a couple years, which I sheepishly conceeded to thinking he was making an effort, but not the significant changes that needed to happen for me to be able to stay on for any length of time. The last year, he grew unhappy with how much moonlighting I was forced to do to avoid bankruptcy and he gave me nothing. I had to finally show him I was serious, and change happened. It isn't more training we need. It's guts. With ALL due respect to the hard work of the CAUT committee on this, and my best regards to my friends, Jeff -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20090620/ede732b1/attachment.htm>
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