The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) has announced that it has reached an agreement to meet for a week of “intensive bargaining” with the Metropolitan Opera.

Per a press release, IATSE Local One asserts that the Met Opera has stated that without stagehands working in the opera house by June 14, the company’s 2021-22 season, which is set to start in late September, would be in major jeopardy.

Stagehands have been locked out since December 2020 and the union has stated that no labor will resume until there is a new contract in place.

“We have explained to the Met Opera that a lockout is not a light switch that you can turn on and turn off,” said IATSE Local One President James J. Claffey Jr. in a press release. “The Met would like 250 or more of our members to return to work next week to ready the opera house and move sets. However, the Met’s take-it-or-leave-it demands at the bargaining table last year, the heartless lockout of workers during a pandemic, and their outsourcing of work overseas at a time when there was little work to begin with, has created a complete lack of trust.”

In the press release, which was released by IATSE, the Met Opera’s management has locked out roughly 350 stagehands represented by IATSE Local One. Moreover, the press release emphasized that the Met has sent productions of “Rigoletto” and “Don Carlos” overseas to be built in Wales while its season-opening “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” has been “sent to a non-union production operation on the west coast.”