Action vs. Reaction

October 1, 2025

Ken Shirk  -  AFM International Secretary-Treasurer

Despite the best of intentions, life for most of us amounts to a series of reactions, well-considered or otherwise. The organisms of nature, of which we humans are a subset, seek to exist in a place of comfort. If undisturbed, there we organisms remain, content. Only when that familiar contentment is disturbed do we react. It’s a rather passive way of moving through life, and anathema to smart activism, because a reaction is a response to a disturbance that we might have foreseen and taken action against before the disturbance arrived at our doorstep. But action takes planning.

Long range planning is a difficult process for almost everyone. It requires uninterrupted periods of thought and contemplation just to consider possible goals or objectives. Half the work is deciding on the end game. The other half of the work is making the plan to accomplish the objectives. But there are at least two additional halves—finding the means and the time to work the plan, and then avoiding the distractions that take us off-plan. Mashing four halves into one whole illustrates the pressure behind planning and execution, and it embodies the conflict between action and reaction.

The complexity of the foregoing increases exponentially when the long-range planning is for a constituency-based, collectively-governed, ostensibly democratic organization tasked with guarding and advancing the welfare of its constituency with only the resources that the constituency decides to make available—rather like our union.

In my lifetime, long-range planning as an operational concept for our union did not see daylight until around 1991, when my former IEB colleague and past Secretary-Treasurer Sam Folio introduced a bylaw proposal to the Convention requiring the IEB to formulate a three-year plan with quantifiable goals and objectives, which were to be evaluated, reviewed, and updated on an annual basis. 1991 brought in an almost completely new Federation administration and International Executive Board and seemed like the perfect moment to begin a long-range planning process.

But constituency demands (including a disaffiliation campaign led by the then-leaders of the Montreal local, several knotty national contract negotiations, and enhanced service demands from the union’s various industry sector representatives) together with insufficient funding conspired to capture the full attention of that leadership team, and three years went by before the IEB finally got around to beginning a planning process. And then the Federation leadership changed, effectively resetting the Federation’s nascent planning back to square one.

That cycle repeated again and again over the next few decades—planning started, only to be disrupted—internal political turmoil, a debilitating health crisis for one of the Federation officers, the 9/11 attacks, an internecine conflict between Federation leadership and the recording musicians, impact of the dot-com bubble burst followed by the Great Recession of 2007, which led to the pension fund crisis of the previous decade, bankruptcies in the symphonic sector, a second disaffiliation movement by the members of the Montreal local, the COVID pandemic, social upheaval, cyclical financial crises—and the list goes on and on—basically a DC al segno with never a coda jump to be seen on the horizon.

But there never is nothing going on with our union, which means that the planning and execution of a long-range plan will always require determination, focus, and commitment (and some degree of continuity) from the leadership that rises well above the norm.

I’m gratified to say that the present nine-member leadership team of the AFM has met that threshold. For the past year, under the guidance of a nationally respected facilitator, the International Executive Board has slowly, but methodically, taken the appropriate time and attention to peel away the outer layers of the “planning onion” and arrived at the core objectives that this union—any union, for that matter—must embrace to fulfill its mission, which is to build sufficient power to enable members to attain fairness in the workplace and justice in the political realm.

It’s too early for a rollout of details, but I can say with a large degree of enthusiasm and optimism that the Convention delegates who will assemble in Ottawa next June to chart the next phase of the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada will have their hands on the levers of some very exciting controls.

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