Liceo theater retracts redundancy plan to avoid 18-day strike

Barcelona’s Liceo opera theater has abandoned cost-cutting plans to close its doors, cancel part of its program and make 92 percent of staff redundant over a two-month period after workers threatened to hold an 18-day strike.

The 160-year-old theater announced the move on February 1 as part of measures to save 3.7 million euros in order to avoid a budget shortfall. But on Wednesday it retracted the plan following a threat by staff to strike for the entire 18-day run of La Bohème, the last opera programmed before the shutdown. The decision comes just 20 days after the Liceo had started returning money to ticket-holders due to the canceled performances. The theater will now try to recover the majority of the canceled program, but its image has been seriously damaged.

The board’s unshakeable refusal to negotiate over the redundancy was met with stiff opposition on Wednesday, although it did accept the employee committee’s proposal that theater staff would temporarily give up their summer bonus payment to cover a 17-percent reduction in the subsidy provided by the Catalan regional government in 2012. The move will save the theater 1.5 million euros.

The committee has promised to negotiate, starting March 1, the flexibility of working conditions and claims that there has been “a writing off of responsibilities” by the public administrations with a stake in the theater: the Education and Culture Ministry (45 percent), the regional government (40 percent), Barcelona City Hall (10 percent) and the provincial delegation (five percent).

The public administrations are finalizing the design of a new theater management model with which they hope to begin a new era to coincide with the start of the new season at the beginning of September. Regional culture chief Ferran Mascarell said it would be a model adjusted to “the current economic climate.” The Liceo “has not detected the crisis in time,” he said, adding it was now doing things “thoroughly, albeit late.”

The damage done to the theater is by no means negligible. Theater-goers have asked for their money back on season passes for the shows yet to be premiered, believing that the cancelation is a break of the theater’s unilateral agreement.

Patrons and sponsors have also shown their disgust, especially at the lack of tact with which the cancelations and closure were made public. On February 1, the Liceo released the news via a letter to the media with a preprinted signature.