Musicians, fearful that a result will be cuts in pay, are organizing free concerts in support of themselves and other opera house workers.
Because the theater is on the fourth floor of the opera house, workers must hoist scenery up a 40-foot shaft to deliver it onstage.
PAGE B1 Backstage Drama at La Scala With a crisis engulfing the Milan opera house, union workers voted to call for the resignation of their music director, Riccardo Muti.
In June, Judge Loretta A. Preska of Federal District Court in Manhattan issued an injunction that prohibited Local 100 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union from threatening or harassing the Met during the union's campaign to organize the opera's restaurant workers.
Speaking at a community forum four blocks from the opera house, the workers said they earned barely enough to support their families, and they called on the Met to pressure the contractor that runs its restaurants, Restaurant Associates, to agree to a streamlined way for them to unionize.
Orchestra members from the nearby opera house and dock workers alike frequent this no-frills trattoria.
It must be neutral between different views of what makes life good or worthwhile, between, say, charity workers and opera lovers.
Instead, she took dead-end jobs as a clerk in a milk depot, a shop assistant, an usherette at Manchester opera house and a worker in the research photography department of the electrical engineering company Metropolitan-Vickers.
Nevertheless, Lunacharsky insisted that the workers "ceaselessly demand opera and ballet".
The economists behind the study, Oliver Falck, Michael Fritsch and Stephan Heblich, argued that Baroque opera houses attract well-educated workers who prefer to live near cultural amenities.
