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A scheduled East Coast tour that was to start yesterday was canceled after striking San Francisco Symphony musicians rejected a federal mediators proposal to resume playing concerts during a "cooling off" period, according to symphony officials.

The three-city East Coast tour, scheduled to continue through Saturday, had included performances at Carnegie Hall, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

The symphony has already canceled four concerts in San Francisco since musicians announced the strike on Wednesday.

The musicians said recently that they were unhappy with a proposal by management that would include a pay freeze in the first year and 1% increases in the next two years.

Musicians say expensive instruments and the costs of living in the Bay Area hurt their ability to compete with other top orchestras.

Symphony officials said that their most recent proposal included a new minimum annual salary of $145,979 with annual increases of 1% and 2%.

The proposal also included a $74,000 maximum annual pension, 10 weeks paid vacation and full coverage health care plan options with no monthly premium contributions for most options. Additional compensation would include radio payments, over-scale and seniority pay, which raises the current average pay to more than $165,000, symphony officials said.

"We have negotiated in good faith since September, have shared volumes of financial information, and we have offered many different proposals that we had hoped would lead to a new agreement by this time," said Brent Assink, the symphony's executive director.

The symphony's operating expenses have outpaced income for the past four years, and the orchestra has incurred an operating deficit, officials said.

— Bay City News Service

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