Musicians walk out after London orchestra leaves them unpaid for months
Emergency backup is called to enable London Chamber Orchestra event at Cadogan Hall to go ahead after protest over payment delays
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They should have walked out when the first payment was missed.
The trouble, she said, stemmed from a decision by Barclays Bank to freeze the orchestra’s account – a problem that has also seriously affected the finances of charities and other cultural and religious groups, including the classical music venue, St John’s Smith Square. Under the bank’s obligation to help prevent financial crime it had requested further information from some customers in order to keep their accounts active.
Efforts to reopen the account, frozen by Barclays “with no prior warning”, said Lightfoot, took four months. “We kept the musicians informed during this period that their payment would go out as soon as the account was reopened, but as the timeline of the reopening was further delayed many times, it was difficult to provide musicians with a clear timeframe,” she said. Musicians have also been asked to come forward with any outstanding invoices.
I imagine the musicians were just trying to help the orchestra survive, and expecting it would be sorted out any day soon.
The article makes no mention of why the account was frozen in the first place.
Barclays don't need a reason, they are utter shits.
This is from a link in the main article ...
“Like the others you have featured, the bank asked us for directors’ details as part of their regulatory obligations to know their customers,” she says. “We believe that we complied with all their requests but despite that the account of 15 years was just frozen. No warning, and all our direct debits cancelled just like that.
A Barclays spokesperson says: “As part of our ongoing responsibility to help prevent financial crime, and to meet our regulatory obligations, we are required to keep up-to-date information regarding our customers’ accounts. We share a series of communications with our customers, including writing to them by post, through alert banners on our digitally active customers’ online and mobile banking, as well as reminder SMS text messages and emails, asking customers to supply us with some important information relating to their Barclays Business accounts.”
In my decades of working for software companies and dealing with clients, I have had many conversations that went something like...
Client: We need the software to do _____.
Me: No problem. That's a common request and can be set up in the configuration. I just need [ some specific information that only the client can provide ] from you to set it up. It'll only take me a few minutes.
... crickets ...
Several months later..
Client: WHY HAVEN'T YOU DONE THIS YET? MY BOSS IS SCREAMING AT ME! THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!
I can't help but imagine something like that happened here. They've probably been repeatedly requesting this information for months, and whomever is responsible for providing it for the orchestra is just incompetent.
No. There is a linked article in the main one that disproves your assumption.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/dec/09/charities-barclays-frozen-bank-accounts
Your absolutely right, people have a sense of family/community with their workplace co-workers which is why its so easy to "take one for the team" and skip a paycheck.
This is why its necessary to tell people to walk as soon as the money stops, so they don't fall deeper into the hole. A reasonable business will understand their people need to get paid, and if they sort out their finances will take back their employees even if they had to pursue other ventures during the insolvency.
It's extremely difficult to get a position playing in an orchestra - the competition is fierce. I imagine this is also a consideration: when you get a job like that, you really don't want to give it up lightly because you've spent your whole life training for it and you don't know when or whether you'll get another one.
Orchestra positions are often jobs that these people will keep for life or until a seat in a new orchestra opens up. There’s an extremely limited number of jobs. I had a fairly distant cousin audition for the Seattle Symphony, for the single open trumpet seat there were north of 200 applicants. It’s such an incredibly competitive field that if you walk out, you might just possibly never get back in.