The one thing I appreciate about the outcome of the US elections this year is that the results are unambiguous. This provides a heightened clarity of purpose for the next two years, if not the next four, for anyone who makes a living in the arts or who works in the labor movement.

Funding for the arts: As of this writing, all signals and projections indicate that Congress will be controlled by the Republican Party. Partnered with a Republican executive branch and its promises to reduce taxes, the new Congress can be expected to approve a significant reduction in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to help pay for those tax cuts. NEA funding is central to symphonies, opera companies, ballet companies, theater companies, and many other smaller performing arts organizations that employ musicians. Reduced funding will translate to reduced employment opportunities.

Trade tariffs: I try to “buy American” whenever possible. In these modern times, “buying American” for me means products made in the US, Canada, or Mexico. But today’s reality in the open market means that many, many products that we use in our daily lives as musicians come from overseas manufacturers—predominantly Asian countries that are likely targets for the next administration’s tariffs. We should brace for supply disruptions and price increases as tariffs are applied.

Artificial intelligence and intellectual property: The Biden administration issued an executive order to all executive branch federal agencies requiring that they take into consideration creators’ and performers’ rights with respect to any regulatory or administrative initiatives undertaken by those agencies in connection with AI and IP. The Democratic-led Senate issued a call to all the congressional subcommittees to do the same for any future legislative initiatives. It’s fair to expect the next US president to rescind that executive order and for Congress to rebalance its responsiveness to legislative lobbying in favor of Silicon Valley’s general view that the development of all things digital should not be impeded by regulatory barriers.

Unionizing: We’ve already been through this one. Freelance gigging musicians have always had the short end of the stick under US labor law rights. Notwithstanding that, however, federal support for bringing gig workers under the protective umbrella of labor rights was on the uptick in the last three years. We can expect that trend to slowly reverse as the federal judiciary and National Labor Relations Board are slowly remade in Project 2025’s image.

Tax reform and working across the border: Professional employees lost their right to deduct employee expenses under the 2017 tax reform legislation. Regaining that right was beginning to appear within reach with a responsive Congress in place, but it now appears that we will need to grow longer arms. Canadian members already have an unfairly difficult time securing visas to play gigs in the US; with the incoming administration’s intention to tighten US borders, it seems less likely that it will extend a welcoming hand to musicians north of the 49th parallel.

So what’s changed for US musicians? Actually, not much. All that is different is the degree of the incoming national leaders’ resistance to recognizing the need to foster and support a vibrant, healthy, and growing musical economy and ensure that the musicians who make it happen are given a fair shot at making a living in that economy. The resistance will be greater. The wisdom to recognize music as a necessary component to a healthy society and a healthy economy will be diminished. The work that we’ve only just begun under the DEI banner to address workplace sexism, ageism, harassment, discrimination, and bullying will no longer have the full-throated support of the federal government as grant and support programs gradually wink out for lack of funding.

But the work that will be ahead of us next year is the same work that was ahead of us last year. Arm in arm, we will keep on keeping on.

With a fully-equipped organizing department, a well-connected director of government affairs in our DC office, a professional and highly-motivated staff, dedicated local officers, and, most importantly, a motivated and engaged membership, we are well-positioned and firmly committed to get done what needs doing.

As of this writing, the US presidential elections have not yet been held, although I suspect that as this paper hits the membership’s mailboxes, the votes will have been counted, the networks will have announced a winner, and the promised lawsuits challenging the outcome will have been filed. Can American musicians look forward to a supportive federal government? Which parties control the houses of Congress? Which parties control your state’s executive and legislative branches?

As I write this column in mid-October, those questions are live, sparking wires, indeed. By the time you read this, those questions will probably be answered. Canadian members, it will be your turn next. What examples can you take from the American elections to help you shape the outcome you desire for your national political and legislative leaders?

Whatever the outcome for either country, the main task in front of us as musicians and union members will be to remain strong, determined, and focused. We get only what we demand. No one will give it to us out of the goodness of their hearts; capitalism doesn’t work that way, regardless of whether liberal- or conservative-leaning politicians are in power. Our National Legislative Office will be carefully curating a list for 2025 of who are our friends, who are our enemy combatants, and who needs to become our friends—the first step in what will be a long-game campaign to fix the 2017 tax reform, pass the American Music Fairness Act, secure guardrails for musicians as the development of artificial intelligence continues its inexorable forward roll, work for a more equitable visa program for Canadian members working in the US, and develop a better system for carrying instruments through our airports.

Group Membership Insurance Programs Update

We are two months behind schedule, but our fervent wish and intention is that the AFM’s group insurance administrators, HUB/Insureon/VIU, will have all our new and improved group membership insurance programs in place. A few kinks and details are being hammered out, but as program completion draws near, we anticipate a new benefits program that will offer members more options and more individually tailored types of policy offerings. AFM Assistant Secretary Wages Argott and AFM Communications Director Antoinette Follett have been steadily and energetically working with the insurance representatives for the past two-and-a-half months, refining the scope of coverages and developing pathways to update and inform the membership and position local union officers with the information and tools to assist members in obtaining the coverages they need. Learn more about the policies offered in this article.

Emergency Relief Fund Available for Members Impacted by the Hurricanes

Emails, along with web and print articles, abound but it bears repeating at every juncture: AFM members in good standing who live or were employed as musicians in the areas designated by FEMA as “Federal Disaster Areas for individual assistance” and who suffered losses from the hurricanes and storms not covered by insurance can apply to the AFM Emergency Relief Fund to help in their recovery from such losses.

The application form, policy guidelines, and instructions can be downloaded from the AFM website at www.afm.org/emergency-assistance.

Additionally, financial assistance is available from the Entertainment Community Fund (formerly The Actors Fund). For information and eligibility of other resources available for musicians affected by natural disasters and public health crises, such as COVID, visit: www.entertainmentcommunity.org/am-i-eligible-help.

Union members who participate in Union Plus programs may be eligible for additional financial assistance through the Union Plus Disaster Relief program. To date, this fund has provided over $1 million in assistance to union members facing hardships. To learn more about the benefits and eligibility requirements, go to: www.unionplus.org/hardship-help/disaster-relief-grants.

In the world of AFM policy wonks, the perception is that the AFM Secretary-Treasurer is in charge of International Musician. The reality, however, is that the AFM International Executive Board is the supervisor of the paper. My job is to make sure that we have the staff to produce it and get it into the mail to the membership—no small feat, and one that the staff accomplishes with aplomb.

As a full-time officer of the AFM, however, I contribute a regular monthly column. When I took this job, I determined that whatever I wrote in this column for the membership’s pleasure or irritation would be a reflection of who I am and what I believe, about things that I think warrant the membership’s active attention. That includes things of a political or societal nature.

I’m not a fan of writing pablum, blowing my own horn, or reciting dry financial statistics that can be easily found at the AFM website, the US Department of Labor, or the IRS. This column is, indeed, a bully pulpit, and I use it as such in as straightforward a manner as I am able. I write from 40-plus years’ experience as a freelance musician and union officer, which has shown me in excruciating detail, over and over, just how badly musicians get squeezed by government, industry, corporate influences, one-sided laws, fiscally and politically conservative politicians, paralyzed legislatures, market forces, and each other.

Not everyone will like what I say. Our membership is comprised of rabid liberals frothing at the mouth (like me), ultra conservative adherents to the farthest-right of thinking, and everything in between. I will not write for the middle ground simply to avoid exciting controversy on either side of the spectrum.

But I do respect that this union belongs to all the members and that members have a right to be heard—indeed, should expect that they will be heard. That is why any member who wants to contribute a cogent, on-point, and coherent response to anything printed in this paper will find a landing spot for their thoughts in the IM’s Feedback section.

One such response in last month’s Feedback section took issue with my unabashed doubling down on my call to members to vote liberal in the upcoming federal elections—primarily as a matter of survival of public funding for the arts, because conservative governments regularly try to slash or eliminate it. For example, President Biden this year submitted an increase for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) budget, and within weeks a Republican House member from the Midwest submitted an amendment to cut the budget by 25% (which together we all beat back, thankfully). The objecting reader implied that my viewpoint was pork-barrel thinking at the expense of all the other societal imperatives that our society faces today.

Pork barrel, or simply pork, is a metaphor for the appropriation of government spending for localized projects, secured solely or primarily to direct expenditures to a senator’s state or a representative’s district. Funding for the NEA’s budget clearly does not fall into that bucket. In fact, to double-check, I looked at Citizens Against Government Waste website (cagw.org), along with its periodical, the Congressional Pig Book. Nowhere within the Pig Book or the site does funding for the arts or the NEA appropriation get a mention.

Public funding for the arts is an important part of keeping musicians employed and earning a living. What we do is a cornerstone of our culture and society. I take the reader’s point—there are many existential issues confronting our world today, and I have very strong personal viewpoints about them. But my wages are paid by musicians to represent musicians’ interests, and I can attest that conservative legislatures in both our countries have always attacked arts funding. The age-old political policy of the AFL-CIO says it all: “Stand faithfully by your friends and elect them. Oppose your enemies and defeat them.”

When this administration stepped into office a year ago, one of the first messages awaiting me was a notice from the Federation’s group membership insurance broker that AIG/New Hampshire was pulling the plug on the AFM’s long-running musical instrument and band liability insurance programs for US members. That started what became a months-long scramble by our agent to find replacement coverage. They succeeded in working out a package with a carrier for equipment coverage, but did not locate a replacement for band liability coverage. Timing-wise, for those who participated in the AFM’s equipment program, the transition from AIG to the new carrier was a bit of a nail-biter as policy expiration dates came and went, and those who made use of the previous band liability program were left to the forces of the open market. Additionally, issues with the broker’s call-in service center added to members’ discomfiture.

The entire experience of the past 12 months revealed to the International Executive Board that the broker’s services and strengths, as measured against the AFM’s requirements as a labor union, were mismatched. By last spring, moves were underway to explore other options for meeting the membership’s insurance needs.

A survey of the landscape for a replacement agent eventually led to HUB International, a worldwide company with a wide and deep reach into the labyrinthian world of insurance carriers. The IEB met with HUB representatives in June, who laid out an approach for membership insurance services that promised a significant improvement and modernization for interfacing with AFM members. After careful consideration, the board concluded that HUB would be a good fit for the membership, the local unions, and the Federation. The newly-completed affiliation agreement went into effect on September 1.

Coincidentally, the Canadian Conference of the AFM, comprised of the AFM’s Canadian local unions, has had a relationship with HUB for several years, facilitating musical equipment insurance for members and liability insurance for local unions. Even more coincidentally, Scott Konrad, HUB’s North American Nonprofit practice leader, is the great grand-nephew of Joseph Weber, the AFM’s second and longest-serving president. Konrad and HUB also work with Lincoln Center orchestras and Carnegie Hall in New York City, drawing HUB’s connection to musicians full circle.

As of this writing, details and programs are being hammered out, guided by AFM Assistant Secretary Wages Argott. A new website interface is being designed to support program access, which will be enhanced by an up-to-date mobile device portal to access sales and individual account information on the fly. Complete information will be published when the program roll-out is complete.

NOTE: The AFM’s new relationship with HUB does not interfere with or disturb members’ instrument insurance coverage previously obtained or renewed through the previous broker, AMBA. Any policies secured through AMBA will remain in effect for the policy period for which the member paid.

The Legislative Front

Although matters of US Congressional legislation do not normally fall into the Secretary-Treasurer’s portfolio, a necessary division of labor at the start of this administration, together with my position as a board member of the AFL-CIO’s Department for Professional Employees, combined to drag me into the morass of congressional watchdogging on an interim basis, pending the restaffing of the AFM’s Legislative Office in DC. I can report without reservation that the skillsets and coded language required to navigate not just the halls of Congress but also the alleys and byways of the federal regulatory agencies are even more challenging than asking a bass trombone player to sight-read alto clef at an outdoor concert on a windy day.

During the past couple of years, AI legislation has been pouring into Capitol Hill from friends and foes of musicians alike, and sifting through them all to gain a firm understanding of which pieces will benefit or hurt musicians while simultaneously advancing our own interests, has been a daunting task. Add to that our ongoing imperatives to ensure that funding for the arts continue, secure musicians’ ability to carry their instruments on airplanes in the face of ever-changing TSA screening technology, address the inequities foisted upon musicians in the 2017 tax reform act, and find a regulatory or legislative solution to the USCIS-imposed barriers that severely impede AFM Canadian members’ ability to perform gigs in the US, and the need for a full-time force of nature in DC becomes ever more apparent.

It is therefore with considerable pleasure and anticipation, as announced in President Gagliardi’s column this month, that we welcome Ben Kessler to the staff as the AFM’s Executive Director of Government Affairs. Previously Director of Congressional Affairs for the National Endowment for the Arts, Ben brings an incredibly valuable blend of talents to the AFM for the benefit of the members, not the least of which is a real insider’s knowledge of the workings of DC and a treasure trove of pre-existing relationships with our union allies, federal agencies, and congressional staffers. When combined with his professional status as an intellectual property lawyer, with Ben, we will be well-positioned to reclaim our status as the tip of the spear in the legislative arena.

Feedback: Reader Calls for Contrition Over Condescending “Crazies” Comment

I thank member Lang for his feedback to my July column, see Feedback letter below. (Full disclosure: Portions of member Lang’s letter that referred to President Biden’s mental health, Trump’s felony conviction, past reportage on COVID remediation policies, and the 2016 Russian election collusion were omitted for publication.) I regret that member Lang perceived as condescending my call to the membership to seriously investigate the candidates, and as name-calling my referring to as “crazies” those members of Congress who are holding it hostage in an attempt to achieve ideologically narrow political objectives.

To “condescend” generally means to lower one’s level of engagement with another party in a patronizing manner­—in essence, verbally punching down from above. To the contrary, my July column calls for us to punch up. As musicians and as a labor union, that’s what we must always do just to hold our own with our employers, with lawmakers, and society in general. We are musicians belonging to a labor union dedicated to performing music for a living—three strikes in mainstream society before we even get off the home plate.

In society’s eyes, we “play” for money (everybody else works for it), symphonic musicians perform “services” (think of that word in context of the servants in a royal household) to produce a product—music—that is ephemeral in live performance (an experience that can’t be packaged and taken home) and even more so in the market (broadcast or streamed from the cloud). In fact, in the world of popular music concerts, a higher value is placed on the venues and branded hats or t-shirts than on the performances or the performers themselves.

So we aggregate our strength as individuals by forming a union in order to push back against the societal misperception of just who we are and the gifts, benefits, and value that we bring to human existence, both spiritually and economically. But unions are not a welcome component in a nakedly capitalistic economy. The engines of industry and capital do not respond well to being pressured by a union how much and when to pay, and accordingly they work the political and legal system to thwart us at every turn possible. Even President Franklin Roosevelt—one of the most union-friendly US presidents ever—was unwilling to buck the system and champion labor rights until the unions first conjured up a theater of nationwide mass labor protests to give Roosevelt the political cover he needed to advance favorable labor legislation.

When we approach federal elections, those are things we must keep in mind when deciding how to cast our votes, particularly when even our friends in government tell us that we have to stage a fight to “force” them to respond to our needs positively.

Historically, without exception, when conservative governments are in power, the arts and organized labor suffer. Ministries and federal agencies get staffed with unfriendlies, labor protections are weakened, funding for the arts diminishes, regulations to protect creators’ intellectual property are reversed, and treaties are negotiated under cover of darkness with foreign governments and agencies that threaten copyright security. The concerns of labor, and particularly of musicians, are unabashedly disregarded by conservative governments.

When liberal governments are in power, it has always been better for musicians. Moves are taken to fund the arts, honest efforts are undertaken to staff the regulatory agencies properly, and—most importantly—we get listened to by those vested with the power to improve our economic lives.

The last 3½ years of government in the US and the last nine years of government in Canada have been generally good for labor and good for musicians.

Our musical livelihoods do not rely upon 1) whether or not a candidate’s or child’s felony conviction is fair, 2) the candidates’ ages or speech impediments, 3) whether a political personality disrupts a state of the union address, 4) a never-ending PR war about whether or not elections were stolen, 5) politically-motivated ethics investigations, or 6) if the boy-wonder of national politics has lost his lustre in the public eye.

So, yes, indeed, I do call upon all of us musicians to think about these things and how our votes will affect our wallets and our families. Be not distracted by memes and feeds on social media. Do the homework before exercising our civic franchise. That’s not an easy assignment. Neither Fox, CBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, Newsmax, Breitbart, Facebook, X, TruthSocial, USA Today, True North nor Reddit will tell us. Look behind the reportage that floods our daily awareness and find the facts about what matters to musicians’ livelihoods.

What matters is what the next governments of Canada and the US will do to preserve and advance our chances as musicians, banded together in one union, to rely upon our chosen field of work in which to earn a living. The answer to that question must be the homing beacon for our next vote.