The Only Union in the Room

Andrew Stenson is a tenor from Rochester, Minnesota. He joined the American Guild of Musical Artists in 2009, and his first union job came through the apprentice program at the Santa Fe Opera. In 2024 he was elected the union's soloists' vice president. Asked by his own union what he intended to do with the job, he gave an answer that explains almost everything about how his half of the membership lives.

"My top priority is advocating for financial guarantees for independent contractors," he said. "This mostly affects soloists, who typically aren't paid until performances."^[1]

Not on signing. Not during the four or five weeks of rehearsal. Not while you are paying rent in the city you live in and rent in the city you are working in, and paying the coach who prepared the role. You get paid when you walk out and sing, and if you don't sing, in most cases you don't get paid. Stenson had watched what that meant when the work stopped: during the pandemic, he said, "we saw countless people left high and dry, left to foot the bill for temporary housing, role preparation, and countless other expenses."^[1]

Hold that in mind, because three years before he was elected, the soloists at the Metropolitan Opera tried to say so with a ballot, and lost.

The vote

On May 26, 2021, AGMA asked its members at the Met to ratify a four-year contract. Four hundred and fifty-eight of them voted. It passed, 334 to 124.^[2]

Then look at the tally the union published, broken out by work group:

• Regular Chorus: 61 yes, 9 no
• Extra Chorus: 55 yes, 1 no
• Dancers: 88 yes, 0 no
• Staff Performers: 8 yes, 0 no
• Stage Directors: 26 yes, 1 no
• Stage Managers: 7 yes, 0 no
• Soloists: 89 yes, 113 no

Six work groups cast 245 votes in favor and eleven against. The seventh rejected the contract outright and supplied 113 of the 124 no votes in the entire shop.^[2]

That is not a union divided. That is a union in which one group of workers has an entirely different job from everyone else, discovered it at a ballot box, and was outnumbered. This piece is about why that happens by design, and what could be done about it. It is not a case that AGMA is corrupt or incompetent. The evidence doesn't support that, and a good deal of the evidence cuts the other way.

What they were voting on

Two provisions, mainly.

The first cut per-performance soloist fees on a sliding scale, from six percent on fees under $6,000 up to 12.65 percent at the top.^[3] On a $14,000 engagement that is about $1,770. The cuts were temporary and sunset on July 31, 2025.^[3]

The second was a sentence about health insurance, and it is worth quoting exactly because the exact words are the point. Per-performance soloists working at the Met "for a period encompassing four weeks or more shall be entitled to elect to divert a portion of their total compensation, on a pre-tax basis (if permissible), to cover the cost of AGMA Plan A for an individual."^[3]

Not "the employer will contribute." Divert. You may redirect a slice of your own fee, the fee that was just cut, to buy your own coverage. And only if the engagement runs four weeks or longer. Shorter than that and you reach neither the contribution nor the option.

Now put Stenson's sentence back on top of it. Soloists typically aren't paid until performances. So the money that is supposed to buy the insurance arrives at the end, out of a fee that has already been reduced, after the manager's commission, after self-employment tax, after the airfare and the sublet and the coach. The chorister singing behind that soloist has coverage supplied and a pension behind it, and did not have to do any of this arithmetic.

What is left of the fee

The number in the contract is not the money. It is the number the money starts at.

Begin with what the union has already won, because it is real and it is the part critics skip. Travel is largely not the singer's problem. Washington National Opera's agreement makes it "MANAGEMENT's responsibility to provide transportation on behalf of ARTISTS," and the company pays the airfare and two checked bags.^[4] Detroit Opera's individual artist agreement has the employer "pay or provide ARTIST with round-trip transportation" plus per diem or a housing allowance, and says in capital letters that none of it counts as part of the gross fee.^[5] The Met books a soloist's travel and reimburses on receipts when it cannot book.^[3] Principal per diems at Washington and Detroit run roughly $145 to $155 a day away from home.^[4][5] And under the 2021 Met agreement, weekly and per-performance soloists "receive all weekly rehearsal pay upon arrival," which is better than waiting for opening night.^[3]

That is bargaining working. The flights and the hotel, at the better houses, are handled.

What is not handled is nearly everything that makes the singer able to walk through the door in the first place.

Start with the manager. Classical artist managers take a standard commission of twenty percent of the fee, higher than the ten to fifteen percent normal in jazz and most other genres. And the commission is not the end of it: the artist is separately billed for a share of the management company's advertising, brochures and promotional materials, and for the manager's own travel to booking conferences, invoiced monthly or quarterly.^[6] On a $14,000 engagement the commission alone is $2,800.

Then the preparation. A principal role is learned over months, with a coach and often an accompanist, paid by the singer, long before any fee arrives. No agreement here reimburses that. The 2021 Met contract does not resolve it either; it says only that "AGMA may refer issues of coaching for soloists to the Artistic Advisory Committee for further consideration."^[3] Add the scores, the audition travel that leads to engagements rather than following them, the headshots, the website, the lessons that keep the instrument working.

None of it is reimbursed. And then the tax code takes its turn, in a way that depends on something most singers never chose and many could not tell you: whether they are an employee or a business.

The Met does not carry its per-performance soloists on payroll. They are engaged on Individual Artist Agreements and paid as independent contractors, on a 1099. The company publishes nothing about this, and the collective bargaining agreement does not address it, but the agreement is built around it: the health diversion is offered "on a pre-tax basis (if permissible)," a hedge that would be unnecessary for an ordinary employee.^[3] AGMA's own soloists' vice president describes the artists he represents as independent contractors.^[1] And the Met will say the opposite, in writing, about the singers standing upstage of them: "all Chorus positions are hired as W2 employees."^[7] The chorister is an employee of the Metropolitan Opera. The soloist beside them is a small business.

Being a business carries exactly one advantage here. The commission, the management invoice, the coach, the accompanist, the scores all become deductible expenses on a Schedule C. That is real, and it should be said.

Everything else is a cost. They owe self-employment tax, generally 15.3 percent, covering both halves of Social Security and Medicare where an employee pays one half and the employer pays the other.^[8] Half of it comes back as a deduction and the Social Security portion stops at the annual wage base, so the true bite turns on other income and individual circumstances. The shape does not change: the singer pays the employer's share because there is no employer. Nobody withholds, so it is set aside and paid quarterly out of money that has usually already gone. Nobody contributes to a retirement plan. Nobody pays into unemployment insurance on their behalf, which is what a great many of them discovered when the houses went dark in 2020. And nobody contributes anything toward health coverage, which is not an oversight. It is why the only thing the contract offers is the right to divert their own money.

The other half of the profession has the opposite problem. Choristers, staff performers and weekly soloists are employees, and employees lost the ability to deduct unreimbursed business expenses when the 2017 tax law suspended it; in 2025 the One Big Beautiful Bill Act made that permanent.^[9] There is a carve-out written for exactly these people. Section 62 of the Internal Revenue Code lets a "qualified performing artist" deduct above the line, where the suspension cannot reach, provided they worked for at least two employers, were paid at least $200 by each, spent more than ten percent of their performing-arts income on the work, and had adjusted gross income of no more than $16,000.^[10]

That ceiling was set in 1986 and has never been indexed. The federal poverty guideline for a single person in 2026 is $15,960.^[11] So the provision written for performing artists reaches performing artists earning forty dollars more than the poverty line, and vanishes the moment anyone makes a living. A bipartisan bill to raise it to $100,000 for individuals and $200,000 for joint filers was introduced in both chambers in 2025, by Representatives Vern Buchanan and Judy Chu in January and Senators Mark Warner and Thom Tillis in March. Both are still in committee, which is where the performing-arts unions have been trying to move them for years.^[12]

Put the two halves together and the shape of it is clear enough. Work as an employee and you cannot deduct what the job costs you. Work as a contractor, as the Met's per-performance soloists do, and you can deduct it, but you carry the whole payroll tax and no employer contributes to anything. There is no version of this in which the singer comes out whole. The code was not built with them in mind, and the one provision that was has not been touched since 1986.

Now read the Met's health clause again with all of that underneath it. Per-performance soloists at four weeks or more "shall be entitled to elect to divert a portion of their total compensation" to buy AGMA Plan A.^[3]

A portion of their total compensation. Which is the fee, minus the 12.65 percent the same contract took off the top while the cuts ran, minus the manager's twenty percent, minus the management invoice, minus the coach and the accompanist, minus both halves of the payroll tax, and then insurance out of whatever is left of it. The chorister standing behind them on the same stage has the coverage supplied, a pension behind it, and fifty-two weeks of salary underneath the whole arrangement.

Two kinds of member

AGMA holds two economically different workforces under one roof, and everything follows from that.

Company-employed artists are employees: the permanent chorus, staff performers, stage managers. Continuing contracts. Employer-funded health coverage above modest thresholds. Wages protected across a season. When they need the union against management, they need it against an employer they will see again in September.

Per-performance soloists have none of that. They are engaged production by production, each booking its own negotiation, the money arriving in lumps rather than paychecks, no guarantee of a next one, no employer plan standing behind them. When they need the union it is usually after the job has ended, often over a sum too small to make a fight rational.

Both groups pay into the same treasury. Both vote in the same ratification ballots. One brings far more bodies to a vote and the other carries far more risk, and in 2021, on fees and health coverage, their interests came apart completely. The arithmetic had an answer ready.

The benefit that was retired

For years there was a second answer a company could point to. AGMA's Plan B covered artists who never reached Plan A's thresholds. It is not an answer any more. AGMA closed Plan B to new members in January 2018, and the fund's own materials now call it a "Reimbursement Plan" and state that it "is no longer open for new members to elect into."^[13] It reimburses some out-of-pocket costs. It is not insurance, and for anyone who joined after 2018 it does not exist.

The employer money that used to sit behind it went somewhere. In at least some agreements it went into the AGMA Retirement Plan, and the Wolf Trap Opera contract says so without embarrassment: "because the ACA no longer makes the Health Plan B a viable...option, these contributions are now being made to the AGMA Retirement Fund."^[14] The dollars still move through a bargained structure. They stopped buying a doctor.

For a soloist who does not clear the bar for primary coverage, that leaves very little in between. And the newest contracts have not closed it. AGMA's summaries of its recent deals show real gains: Los Angeles Opera's four-year agreement, ratified in June 2026, raises pay and lifts the principal retirement contribution from $75 to $80 a performance; San Francisco Opera's two-year deal adds sick leave for weekly soloists; Houston's five-year deal increases principal health-and-retirement contributions.^[15][16][17] Good, all of it. None of it, on its face, fixes the singer who works across six companies in a year and clears the threshold at none of them.

What a grievance actually gets you

Say a company breaks the contract. A fee withheld, a cancellation term breached. What happens next depends on where you are, and the machinery varies more than the union's critics tend to admit.

Washington National Opera's 2022-2025 agreement was union-centered: a grievance was "communicated by AGMA to MANAGEMENT or by MANAGEMENT to AGMA," and unresolved grievances could go to arbitration at the instance of "either party."^[4] Detroit Opera's prior publicly available agreement expressly contemplated arbitration "between the COMPANY and any ARTIST," and Houston Grand Opera's used similar artist-facing language.^[5][18] Successor agreements have since been ratified at several of these companies and should be checked as they become public.

So the honest version is not that an individual artist can never act. It is that the ordinary enforcement machinery is union-centered, expensive and time-sensitive, and hard for a short-engagement artist to use once the job is over. Where the artist has to rely on the union to pursue the claim, the union decides which claims are worth its resources. For a salaried chorister with a continuing relationship to the house, that design makes sense. For a guest soloist owed four thousand dollars who is already in another city learning another role, it is often the difference between a remedy and writing it off.

What the law allows

There is a legal answer to all of this, and it is not the one most singers expect.

A union owes its members a duty of fair representation. The Supreme Court set the standard in Vaca v. Sipes in 1967: a union breaches that duty only when its conduct toward a member is "arbitrary, discriminatory, or in bad faith."^[19] In 1991, in Air Line Pilots Association v. O'Neill, the Court confirmed the same standard governs how a union negotiates a contract, not merely how it handles grievances, and then drew the outer boundary with real candor. A union's actions are arbitrary only if, given the landscape at the time, they fall "so far outside a wide range of reasonableness" as to be irrational.^[20]

That is a highly deferential standard, and deliberately so. Bargaining means trading one group's interests against another's, and courts have been unwilling to sit in judgment on those trades. A contract that cuts one work group's fees by 12.65 percent and another's by less is not, without more, a breach of anything.

Which means the 2021 outcome should be read correctly. It was not unlawful. It was not a scandal, and nobody hid anything: the union published the tally. It was the machine running exactly as built. The question this piece puts is whether a machine built that way is the right one for a membership this economically split.

The two contracts, side by side

One membership, two very different deals under the same ballot:

• Vote power (Met, 2021): the salaried categories carried the contract; the roughly 200 voting soloists could be, and were, outvoted.
• Health coverage: salaried members receive employer-funded coverage above modest thresholds; a per-performance soloist gets only the right to divert their own fee, and only after four weeks at one house.
• Work continuity: a season-to-season relationship, versus a production-by-production engagement.
• Enforcement leverage: the salaried member still works there next year; the guest soloist is usually gone before a grievance could resolve.
• What the contract protects: for one, a stable job; for the other, the terms of the next individual engagement.

Who decides

AGMA members pay for their representation on a published schedule: $100 in basic annual dues plus working dues of two percent of AGMA-covered income, capped at $2,000 a year.^[21] What those dues buy is governed by a structure worth stating plainly. Members elect officers who serve unpaid. The day-to-day bargaining and administration are run by paid professional staff who do not stand for a member vote. That is ordinary in labor organizations. It matters here because the sharpest conflict at AGMA is not between the union and an employer. It is internal, between categories of the same membership, and it is settled in part by people the most exposed category does not elect.

The clearest illustration of that gap was not a bargaining decision at all. In September 2020, public-radio reporting revealed that AGMA had committed to buy a Manhattan headquarters, contracted at roughly $9.4 million by the account of the journalists who broke the story, or close to two-thirds of the union's net assets, then about $15 million.^[22] The membership found out from the press. Leonard Egert, then the national executive director, said allegations of financial mismanagement were "wildly off the mark," and the purchase was later renegotiated for fewer square feet at a lower price.^[22] On the money, the alarm was overdrawn: AGMA's net assets have held roughly steady since, at about $15.8 million in its most recent public filing.^[23] The question was never whether it was a good building. It was who got to decide, and the answer was not the people whose dues paid for it.

A second episode gets raised in the same breath, and belongs here for completeness rather than as proof of anything. In 2020, over the union's handling of allegations involving Placido Domingo, AGMA was reported to have negotiated toward a roughly $500,000 settlement with the tenor: a fine and a public apology in exchange for the union's findings staying private. Samuel Schultz, a baritone and an elected AGMA vice president who had confirmed to reporters that he was a source for the investigation, called it "a quid pro quo: silence in exchange for money," and resigned, unable, he wrote, to reform from within what he called "an immovable institution."^[24] AGMA disputes the characterization, saying the proposed fine was not secret and would have funded legal costs and anti-harassment work.^[25] Both accounts belong in the record. Neither is settled, and the episode concerns a powerful member rather than an exposed one.

Why you can't easily leave

Suppose a singer decides the union isn't serving them. Where do they go?

Nowhere, in practice. Article XX of the AFL-CIO Constitution provides that "each affiliate shall respect the established collective bargaining relationship of every other affiliate," and that "no affiliate shall organize or attempt to represent employees as to whom an established collective bargaining relationship exists with any other affiliate." Section 20 makes the Article's own procedures "the sole and exclusive method" for settling disputes of that kind between affiliates, and bars affiliates from taking them to court.^[26] AGMA holds that relationship at nearly every major American opera house.

The formal exits exist and are hard. Decertify the union at an entire company, which is a collective act the union will fight. Build an independent, non-AFL-CIO union, which is slow and unlikely. Or, in a right-to-work state such as Texas, decline membership and take the contract's terms anyway. The limits bite hardest in the markets where AGMA work is worth the most, New York and Washington and much of the East Coast, and loosen where it is worth least. Practical monopoly, not metaphysical impossibility.

What the record shows, and what it doesn't

If soloists were routinely failed by union-centered enforcement, one place it might show up is the National Labor Relations Board's docket of charges naming AGMA. That record is thin. A search of the NLRB's public case records locates three charges naming AGMA as respondent: 16-CB-350404, tied to the Dallas Black Dance Theatre dispute; 27-CB-308986, filed by Central City Opera; and 02-CB-126560, filed by the Met in 2014. All three were withdrawn before any ruling.^[27]

That absence cuts two ways and honesty requires saying both. It may mean members are served well enough that few bring charges. It may also mean that, under Vaca and O'Neill, the bar is so high and the expense so great that a soloist owed a few thousand dollars simply never files. The docket cannot choose between those readings. It can only show the structure that produces them.

The counterpoint, taken seriously

Here is what AGMA does when it is at its best, and it deserves to be told properly rather than conceded in a sentence.

In May 2024 the dancers of Dallas Black Dance Theatre voted unanimously to unionize. The company would not recognize them. In July it fired Sean J. Smith, a main company dancer and rehearsal director of fourteen seasons. In August it fired the rest of the main company, nine dancers, and put up an audition notice on Instagram. The stated reason was a video the dancers had made after rehearsal in June: a short introduce-yourselves reel, names appearing on screen, set to the theme from Family Matters.^[28]

Three of the fired dancers were earning $25,300, $30,800 and $33,000 before taxes, on eleven-month contracts.^[28]

AGMA fought it. In December 2024 the NLRB's Fort Worth region announced a settlement of roughly $565,000 covering thirteen dancers who had been fired or had offers pulled.^[29] Then a year went by with no contract. Then, on August 10, 2026, as the company opened its fiftieth season, AGMA's Board of Governors ratified one. Three years. At least twelve dancers guaranteed and at least 41 weeks of pay, three weeks of it vacation. A seniority wage scale raising current dancers 5.5, 7 and 7 percent, a 20 percent cumulative increase. Ninety percent of health premiums paid by the company. A retirement match up to three percent. Enforceable limits on hours with penalty pay for violations. Job-protected parental leave.^[30]

Twenty-five thousand three hundred dollars for eleven months of work, and then that. Whatever else is true about AGMA, it did that, and it did it for people who had been fired over an Instagram video.

The union has answered some of the specific criticisms here, too. The 2025 Met agreement closed a hole the 2021 deal had left, guaranteeing a cover the full fee if bypassed at the last minute for an outside principal.^[31] AGMA launched a contract-summary site so opera soloists can see, company by company, what was bargained for them, and created a Solo Principal Artists Caucus to give soloists a standing voice.^[32]

And the loyalty these houses inspire is not manufactured. The tenor Gaston Rivero came to the United States nearly thirty years ago and won more than thirty vocal competitions and scholarships in his first five years here. Baz Luhrmann cast him in La Bohème on Broadway in the 2002-2003 season, which gave him his Broadway and Carnegie Hall debuts on the same trip. He has since sung more than a thousand performances. Of working at the Met he says he feels "loved, supported, and embraced as part of the ensemble."^[33]

All of that is true. It makes the structural critique more credible, not less. Nobody is arguing that these are bad institutions full of bad people. The argument is that good institutions full of good people have built a voting structure that reliably produces one result, and it is worth asking whether they meant to.

What reform would look like

Design problems have design solutions. Three would address what the 2021 ballot exposed, and none requires anyone to leave AGMA.

Separate soloist approval for provisions that materially affect soloists. A term that materially reduces principal-soloist compensation, or changes soloist health, retirement or enforcement rights, could require either majority approval from the affected soloists or a written explanation from the Board of why it is necessary for the unit as a whole. AGMA already recognizes soloists as a distinct group through the Solo Principal Artists Caucus. This would give that recognition teeth, and it would prevent the exact 2021 result: a soloist majority overridden on terms aimed at soloists.

A portable, employer-funded soloist benefit bank. The deepest problem is that a singer can work a great deal across many companies and qualify for meaningful coverage at none of them, because eligibility resets at every employer. This is not a fantasy architecture. AGMA already operates a multiemployer retirement plan into which signatory companies contribute across the whole field, and the Wolf Trap language quoted earlier shows employer health money being routed into exactly that structure.^[14] The machinery for crediting a singer's work across every signatory employer already exists. It is simply not pointed at health. Every AGMA opera agreement could instead direct a per-service or percentage-of-fee employer contribution into a portable account, credited across all signatory employers, usable for premiums, marketplace or COBRA coverage, or qualified medical costs. The career is portable. The benefit should be too.

An expedited soloist enforcement track. For claims too small to justify a full institutional fight and too large for the artist to absorb, a late fee or a cancellation dispute or a cover payment, AGMA could build a fast track: short deadlines, a written decision requirement, a soloist ombudsperson, and a low-cost arbitration or mediation option the artist can pursue with the union's support or, if the union declines, with its notice and non-opposition. None of this requires abandoning the union. It requires admitting that a one-production singer and a full-season chorister do not experience the same contract the same way.

The negotiation that hasn't happened

The test was supposed to run again this summer.

The Met's one-year agreement with AGMA, which delivered 2.5 percent in permanent raises plus a temporary 2.5 percent tied to a $5 million line-item the union helped secure in the New York State budget, expired on July 31, 2026.^[31][34] AGMA itself had described that one-year deal as the runway to "a more expansive negotiation" to follow.^[31]

It has not visibly happened. Between late May and the end of August 2026, AGMA announced ratified agreements at Cincinnati Ballet, Los Angeles Opera, Opera Colorado, American Ballet Theatre, Houston Ballet, the New York Philharmonic, Oregon Ballet Theatre, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Ballet Austin, Dallas Black Dance Theatre, Opera Philadelphia and Chicago Opera Theater. Twelve agreements in three months.^[35] It announced nothing at the Metropolitan Opera. As of September 1, 2026, neither the Met nor AGMA had publicly announced a successor to the contract that lapsed on July 31.

The Met itself says as much, in the least likely place. Its chorus recruiting page, advertising Regular Chorus positions for the 2026-27 season, lists the weekly rates and then adds a parenthesis: the "2026-2027 season rates are contingent upon the outcome of upcoming contract negotiations."^[7] The company is hiring singers into a season whose pay it cannot yet state, and telling them so. That is not proof of what is happening in the room, and talks may well be underway unannounced. It is the Met's own confirmation that as of its writing the thing had not been settled.

A different Met bargaining unit did settle in that window. On July 13, 2026, after nine months of negotiating, AFM Local 802 reached a tentative one-year agreement covering the Met's more than 130 Associate Musicians, which Local 802's president said put them "on a path toward recovery and wage parity with their Met Orchestra colleagues."^[36] Different union, different unit, different cycle, so the comparison is not exact. It does establish that agreements at the Met were reachable in the summer of 2026.

And the house is in worse shape than it was in 2021. Moody's cut the Met's debt deeper into junk in March 2026, and a month later a $200 million Saudi partnership collapsed, leaving the company to find roughly $30 million by July 31 and to weigh selling the Chagall murals in its lobby and the naming rights to its own theater. Stage Door Society examined those finances in detail in Peter Gelb's Paycheck and the Risk That Runs Downstage.^[37]

A house in that condition comes to the table asking for concessions. And the same arithmetic that settled 2021 will be sitting there waiting: the soloists outnumbered by the salaried, in a room they cannot leave, voting on terms written mostly for someone else. Andrew Stenson will be somewhere in that building arguing for people who don't get paid until they sing.

What the institutions say

Stage Door Society did not seek comment from the American Guild of Musical Artists or the Metropolitan Opera before publishing this article. Both are invited to respond, and this article will be updated with any response, on the specific claims made here: the 2021 voting structure, soloist health coverage, grievance access, the union's handling of the Domingo allegations, and the status of the negotiation that followed the July 31, 2026 expiration.

This account draws on primary documents: the Metropolitan Opera-AGMA 2021-2025 agreement and AGMA's ratification materials, including the union's own tally by work group; the Washington National Opera, Detroit Opera, Houston Grand Opera and Wolf Trap Opera collective bargaining agreements (several now expired or superseded, and cited here as the most recent publicly available versions); AGMA's published dues schedule and health-fund plan descriptions; the AFL-CIO Constitution; AGMA's own summaries of its 2025 and 2026 agreements and its public news index; National Labor Relations Board case records; the union's IRS filings via ProPublica; Local 802's own statement on the Met Associate Musicians agreement; and contemporaneous reporting on the Dallas Black Dance Theatre dispute, the Domingo settlement, the headquarters purchase and the Met's 2026 finances. Where contract language is quoted, it is quoted verbatim from the agreement cited.

Quotations from Andrew Stenson and Gaston Rivero are drawn from AGMA's own published member profiles and are quoted verbatim. Neither was interviewed for this article, and neither was speaking about the 2021 ratification or about this analysis. The Dallas Black Dance Theatre dancer salary figures and termination details are as reported by KERA News.

The tax discussion describes general federal rules in force at the time of writing and is not tax advice. The Metropolitan Opera's collective bargaining agreement does not address tax classification and neither the Met nor AGMA publishes it. The statement that the Met engages its per-performance soloists as independent contractors, paid on Form 1099, rests on Stage Door Society's reporting rather than on a published document; it is corroborated by the structure of the Individual Artist Agreement, by the contract's "(if permissible)" hedge on pre-tax diversion, and by AGMA's elected soloists' vice president describing the artists he represents as independent contractors. Neither the Met nor AGMA was asked to confirm it. Classification is determined by the facts of each engagement and by applicable law, it varies by company and by category, and an individual singer's year may contain both employment and contracting. The manager's commission figure is the standard classical rate reported by the career authority Angela Myles Beeching, not a rate drawn from any individual artist's contract; commissions are privately negotiated and no house or union publishes them. Travel, per diem and housing provisions are quoted from the agreements themselves, and this article does not claim that soloists pay their own airfare: at the companies examined, transportation is provided or reimbursed by the employer. The out-of-pocket costs discussed are those no agreement reimburses, principally the manager's commission and billed management expenses, and the coaching and accompanying that prepare a role. Statutory requirements for the qualified performing artist deduction are quoted from 26 U.S.C. 62(b); the poverty guideline is the figure published by the Department of Health and Human Services for 2026.

The statement that no successor to the July 31, 2026 Met agreement has been announced is a statement about the public record as of the date of writing. It reflects the absence of any announcement on AGMA's news index, in the Met's public communications, or in trade coverage, and not any private knowledge of the state of negotiations. AGMA's specific federal labor-filing line items were not independently re-verified for this version and are not relied upon here. The duty-of-fair-representation discussion states the governing legal standard and is not legal advice.

1. [1]AGMA, “Get to Know AGMA's New Soloists Vice President Andrew Stenson”↗
2. [2]American Guild of Musical Artists, “AGMA Ratifies Contract with the Metropolitan Opera”↗
3. [3]Metropolitan Opera-AGMA Agreement Documents (Board-Approved) 2021-2025 (per-performance soloist health-diversion language; fee-reduction schedule in Met Principal Solo Artist Proposal 35)↗
4. [4]Washington National Opera-AGMA Collective Bargaining Agreement 2022-2025 (Article XX Transportation: management responsibility↗
5. [5]Detroit Opera-AGMA Collective Bargaining Agreement 2022-2025 (Schedule C rate classifications; per diem and Individual Artist Agreement transportation and housing allowance excluded from gross compensation; health article excludes choristers from "Artists Covered"; Para. 38 arbitration), “Artists Covered”↗
6. [6]Angela Myles Beeching, “5 Artist Management Myths”↗
7. [7]Metropolitan Opera, “Chorus Auditions”↗
8. [8]Internal Revenue Service, “Self-Employment Tax (Social Security and Medicare Taxes)”↗
9. [9]Center for Agricultural Law and Taxation, “One Big Beautiful Bill Act Implements Significant Tax Package”↗
10. [10]26 U.S.C. 62(a)(2)(B) and 62(b), “Qualified performing artist”↗
11. [11]U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “HHS Poverty Guidelines for 2026”↗
12. [12]Congress.gov, “H.R.721 - Performing Artist Tax Parity Act of 2025”↗
13. [13]AGMA Retirement & Health Fund, “Reimbursement Plan (formerly Plan B)”↗
14. [14]Wolf Trap Opera-AGMA Collective Bargaining Agreement 2023-2026↗
15. [15]AGMA, “AGMA Ratifies Four-Year Agreement with Los Angeles Opera”↗
16. [16]AGMA, “Highlights from AGMA's New Two-Year Agreement with San Francisco Opera”↗
17. [17]AGMA, “AGMA Ratifies 5-Year Agreement with Houston Grand Opera”↗
18. [18]Houston Grand Opera-AGMA Master Agreement 2022-2025 (Article XL: Arbitration; artist-facing arbitration language)↗
19. [19]Vaca v. Sipes, “arbitrary, discriminatory, or in bad faith”↗
20. [20]Air Line Pilots Association v. O'Neill, “so far outside a wide range of reasonableness”↗
21. [21]AGMA, “Union Dues”↗
22. [22]GPB/NPR (Anastasia Tsioulcas), “Whistleblowers Allege Culture Of Secrecy, Protection Of Powerful At Singers' Union”↗
23. [23]ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, “American Guild of Musical Artists (EIN 13-0431720), Form 990”↗
24. [24]NPR (Anastasia Tsioulcas), “Union Official Resigns Over Domingo Investigation, Confirms He Gave Media Information”↗
25. [25]AGMA, “AGMA Corrects Misleading Statements Relating to Proposed Settlement”↗
26. [26]AFL-CIO Constitution, “Article XX, Settlement of Internal Disputes, Sections 2 and 20”↗
27. [27]National Labor Relations Board case records↗
28. [28]KERA News, “How Dallas Black Dance Theatre fired dancers in the clash of old and new school”↗
29. [29]NLRB Region 16 (Fort Worth), “Region 16 Fort Worth secures settlement requiring Dallas Black Dance Theatre to pay dancers”↗
30. [30]AGMA, “Highlights from AGMA's First Contract with Dallas Black Dance Theatre”↗
31. [31]AGMA, “Highlights from AGMA's New One-Year Agreement with the Met”↗
32. [32]AGMA, “AGMA Launches Contract Summary Webpage for AGMA Opera Soloists”↗
33. [33]AGMA, “Immigrant Heritage Month Spotlight: Soloist Gaston Rivero on Finding Success and a Home in New York City”↗
34. [34]Associated Press (via ABC News), “Met singers' union gets 5% increase partly funded by $5M appropriation from New York state”↗
35. [35]American Guild of Musical Artists, “News”↗
36. [36]AFM Local 802, “Statement from Local 802 President Dan Point on the Metropolitan Opera Associate Musicians' New Contract”↗
37. [37]The Bond Buyer, “Moody's downgrades the Met and The New School”↗