Reflections

September 1, 2025

Ken Shirk  -  AFM International Secretary-Treasurer

The Muse Collective has taken another unauthorized vacation.

When, in 1983 at age 27, I assumed my first union post of Secretary-Treasurer of Local 76 (now 76-493) in Seattle, I walked into an office steeped in tradition, history, and habits. The office secretary had been there ten years and knew everything inside and out about the local, the Federation, and the membership. She taught me the first half of everything I know about our union.

The union office had a peculiar not-quite-musty-but-very-pervasive smell—sort of a combination of stale cigarette smoke and damp wood. I later learned that the secretary had saved every bit of paper that came into the office if it had a blank side, just in case the local fell on hard times and couldn’t buy paper anymore. Reams and reams of this scrap paper had quietly absorbed years and years of cigarette smoke from the local’s boardroom, creating a near-permanent aroma that had found its way into every nook and cranny of the building.

The local’s accounts receivable system was carried out on an electro-mechanical behemoth of a greyish-tan machine manufactured by NCR, from which we’d close out the day’s receipts with a series of button pushes and rhythmic electro-mechanical clicks and clacks as it dutifully stamped the day’s totals on a special ledger card. That machine was the first thing every member would see upon entering the local to file a contract or settle up on work dues. It sat in the middle of the office counter, like a troll guarding a bridge. I learned how to run it, and I also learned that the last transaction of the day could not be a credit to someone’s account because that would, for some reason, prevent the daily close-out procedure. Other than that, the troll never failed.

The PC was new to our society in that first half of the decade, and I determined that we could replace our counter-guarding NCR machine-troll with a computerized membership management program that would streamline our operation. All we needed was a PC. And some software. I persuaded the executive board to go whole hog—we purchased the most powerful machine available—for $2,000, we got a Leading Edge XT system with an 8088 processor, 512KB of RAM, a 20MB hard drive, running MS-DOS, and two floppy drives, along with a dot matrix printer and a letter-quality printer. And the software—the Leading Edge word processor and an off-the-shelf accounting program called BPI. I hired one of our programming-savvy members to write a membership program, and in two years’ time, we almost had everything working half-way. The ever-present counter troll dutifully worked alongside us all that time, probably chuckling silently to itself as it observed my nearly vain efforts to move into the modern technological age.

In 1987, I was offered the job of AFM Assistant Secretary, and decamped to New York to assume my post in the AFM’s headquarters office. Other than a pseudo-mainframe computer system for the master membership roster system and finance department, I found an AFM office that was still running on IBM Selectric typewriters. And it had the same smell as the Seattle office. There was one PC in the AFM—tucked away in a dark corner of the Symphony Department on which ran the department’s Bulletin Board System—the BBS—allowing any member who had a computer and a modem to dial up and access the department’s chat forum.

What I remember about those early years was that at the end of the day, we went home and spent after-hours with friends and family. And maybe read the newspaper. There was no expectation of after-hours availability for the boss or the membership. There was no email with an expectation that it be answered within the hour; there was no texting; there was no 24/7 assumption that employees were available to jump at someone’s beck and call. Faxing was the fastest mode of communication then, but long-distance phone charges to reach the fax machine meant that it was used only in emergencies.

I compare that measured pace of work and private life back then to the never-ending and distracting stream of communications, news, and social media to which we subject ourselves today (voluntarily, mind you), and I wonder at the life we have created for ourselves.

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