Union members at the New York City Opera are offering the previously unthinkable—to work for free. From the Wall Street Journal:

New York City Opera choristers and orchestra members have offered to perform for free this season in exchange for health care and power over future venues, in a bid to stop the opera from eliminating their guaranteed employment.

The offer comes in the midst of volatile contract negotiations between City Opera and its unions. The company, facing recurring deficits and a shrinking endowment, launched a plan earlier this year to leave its Lincoln Center home and slash its budget from $31 million to $13 million.

Back in 2008, I wrote in "Ten Things Theater Need to Do Right Now to Save Themselves":

9. Expect poverty. Theater is a drowning man, and its unions—in their current state—are anvils disguised as life preservers. Theater might drown without its unions, but it will certainly drown with them. And actors have to jettison the living-wage argument. Nobody deserves a living wage for having talent and a mountain of grad-school debt. Sorry.

Union defenders were outraged, of course. They laid into me and laid out their arguments: everyone deserves a living wage (sure, in a perfect world), union houses make higher-quality theater than non-union houses (demonstrably untrue), it's the bureaucracies and not the unions that are bankrupting theaters (they're both guilty), and so on.

Theaters still need a structural overhaul. They need it worse than ever. Unions and theaters could start hammering out solutions now—or they can wait until things get so bad that union members are offering to work for free.