Regulation vs Deregulation; Rules vs No Rules; Rights vs Laws

April 1, 2026

Ken Shirk  -  AFM International Secretary-Treasurer

My late father was born in 1906 into the atmosphere of the central Pennsylvania Mennonites. In his mid-70s, he once remarked to me about the incredible pace of technological change that he had witnessed within his lifetime­—ice blocks to refrigeration; outhouses to indoor plumbing; telegraph to telephone to radio wave broadcast; the horse and buggy to automobiles to air travel to space travel—the list goes on.

I’ve often reflected on his perspective—the fast pace of change within one century compared to all the centuries that preceded­—and lately find myself considering whether my occupancy of the latter part of the previous century and the current one presents any parallels to my father’s experience. It does, although given my many years of involvement with the labor movement, my attention is more drawn toward the societal, political, and economic pace of change rather than the technological.

As a baby boomer, I grew up in the midst of the civil rights movement, environmental activism, the war on poverty, and the emergence of consumer protection laws—all of which was a logical extension of the rewiring of society following the Great Depression of the 1930s. That same era was marked by the Vietnam war protests, the generation gap, the “war on drugs,” and duplicity in political leadership, all of which imbued in some of us of that generation a strong sense of both what is right and wrong for the people. We saw Richard Nixon forced from office for abuse of power and the subsequent election of Jimmy Carter as a harbinger of a better, more just society to come, all held together by a government truly of the people.

That didn’t last. The movement that brought Ronald Reagan into office persuaded society that virtue was embodied by unbridled aggregation of wealth, that government was the problem and big business was our salvation, that rugged individualism and “pulling one’s self up by one’s bootstraps” was the sacred center of Western civilization. (Note to self: I must have been doing it wrong, because when I tried pulling myself up from my bootstraps I didn’t get any taller, but as I leaned down to do so someone did kick me from behind …)

Regulation was the enemy, we were told, and we swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, which ingestion defines the fabric of our society still to this day.

Organized labor took a parallel hit during this era of deregulation persuasion, as did our own industry, as did our union. When I entered this profession, all across the US and Canada our union regulated bandleaders and contractors, booking agents and management companies, clubs and venues, record labels and movie producers, and accordingly stabilized and enhanced what we all got paid. Such was the professional environment that a musician could actually plan the trajectory of their career. In parallel, so, too, could managers, agents, clubs, labels, and producers plan their trajectories.

As the flood of deregulation washed across our land, however, the supports of our industry’s infrastructure got knocked out, one by one. A dependable, internally-regulated system of fair compensation for work fairly performed evaporated, and what remains is a patchwork of union-bargained contracts with individual employers, with the remainder infilled by those of us shoehorned into the gig-worker economy.

Regulation is not a bad word. Regulation once meant that we could enjoy a crystal-clear telephone conversation; that news reportage was balanced; that common carriers (buses and airlines) served all our communities; that we could depend on clean air and water; that we’d know the ingredients of our food; that we’d know the country of manufacture of our consumer goods; that we could fly across the country without our knees jammed into our nostrils and land at an airport without fear of a collision.

Organized labor and unions are all about regulation­—regulation not for the institutions, but for the people who are represented by the unions. Union regulation provides economic stability, economic parity, and fairness in the workplace. Union regulation removes our pay from the equation of competition between producers – if we’re all paid fairly, producers’ success depends on how well they do their business and not who gets away with paying their employees the least.

Government is not the reliable backstop that it once was, however, so we musicians must undertake to redesign what we once had in order for what we do to remain a viable career choice. I look forward to taking the first steps for creating that new blueprint when all our union delegates come together at the AFM’s 103rd international convention in Ottawa next June.

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