Secretary-Treasurer

As you read this, Americans are or will be voting, or have voted, in the 2026 midterms. As I write this, the Trump administration is now making moves to block the decisions of US voters where Trump thinks a Republican candidate could lose. He is actively intimidating voters in districts suspected of not favoring Trump and sending armed, masked, jack-booted ICE-coated thugs into the streets to scare any less-than-white-skinned citizen into hiding until the sun sets on Election Day.

As a baby boomer growing up before White America “lost its innocence,” educated in a responsibly-funded public education system (with, by the way, a music program in every school), and schooled in the time-honored tradition of a functional, democratic election process, where it was considered rude to ask who one voted for, I always accepted that every election outcome was fair, proper, and true. I trusted the integrity of our election officials, and trusted that even the politicians, who benefit or suffer the results of an election, honor and respect the results of an election.

I always accepted that sometimes the US votes right, sometimes to the left of right, and usually slightly to one side or the other of the center. Sometimes the nakedly racist, misogynistic, extractive, blindly nationalistic segment of our society prevails in elections, and sometimes the other segment that neatly disguises those attributes prevails. We accept the results and move on. Those who vote are the ones who are heard.

Brought up in the belief that we are a nation of laws that favor no one person over another, it was therefore a tremendous shock to my understanding of things when the 2000 presidential election was decided by the US Supreme Court, rather than the voters. But that event was mild in comparison to that which is on display today. What I see today are elected leaders not only denying reality, but actually labeling reality as treasonous. Elections are reality, and if our government views the outcome of any election as treasonous, Americans are in big trouble.

That Americans can countenance a billionaire South African immigrant single-handedly eviscerating their federal bureaucracy or running American defense policy by controlling access to his satellites in our sky, or an unhappy Australian media mogul hijacking our once relatively-balanced new media, or embracing political leaders who emulate and admire the cocaine-maddened policies of Adolf Hitler, or a profoundly morally bankrupt head of state who wraps himself in the cloak of religious fervor, is a collection of realities around which I cannot get my head.

And then I think about my First Nations friends. They have been confronting these kinds of incomprehensible behaviors for over 500 years. Some will say, get over it and get used to it. But just today I stumbled over a video clip of the late American Indian Movement activist Russell Means reciting words of an early American lawyer and painter named George Catlin, who spent a considerable part of his life amongst the original citizens of this continent.

Catlin penned what become known as “George Catlin’s Creed,” which sets forth a standard of human behavior, learned from the indigenous people with whom he spent much time, that we should all aspire to and which we should expect from those who represent us.

Catlin’s Creed goes something like this:

• I love a people that have always made me welcome to the very best that they had.
• I love a people who are honest without laws, who have no jails and no poorhouses.
• I love a people who keep the commandments without ever having read or heard them preached from the pulpit.
• I love a people who never swear or take the name of the Creator in vain.
• I love a people “who love their neighbors as they love themselves.”
• I love a people who worship the Creator without a book, for I believe that the Creator loves them also.
• I love a people whose religion is all the same, and who are free from religious animosities.
• I love a people who have never raised a hand against me, or stolen my property, when there was no law to punish either.
• I love and don’t fear mankind where the Creator has made and left them, for they are the Creator’s children.
• I love a people who have never fought a battle with anyone, except on their own ground.
• I love a people who live and keep what is their own without lock and keys.
• I love a people who do the best they can. And, oh, how I love a people who don’t live for the love of money.

How many of these boxes could your candidate tick?

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Decades ago, the AFM was the first one out of the gate to get the ball rolling for affordable musical equipment insurance for professional musicians. Until we got into it, meaningful equipment insurance for working, gigging musicians was simply not available at realistic and affordable prices. Through the AFM’s group membership benefits insurance broker at the beginning, the then-administration of the AFM secured a commitment from New Hampshire Insurance to create an affordable all-risk worldwide replacement cost policy that AFM members could purchase.

And New Hampshire delivered—with affordable rates, starting with a $75 minimum premium, $2.20 per hundred dollars of value up to $1,500 (i.e., 2.2% on the first $1,500 of coverage), then $1.00 per hundred dollars of value thereafter (i.e., 1% on insured value above $1,500). That program remained unchanged through the decades without any increase in premiums­—right up until New Hampshire Insurance abruptly decided to get out of that part of the business entirely in 2023, leaving the Federation without a program for the members.

The Federation’s then-current broker, AMBA, worked for months to find a similar replacement program through other carriers without success until landing upon a company called Accelerant. Accelerant offered a solution that ostensibly replaced the New Hampshire program, but not quite exactly—a minimum premium of $249 at 80 cents per hundred dollars of value over $32,000, with coverage only in the US, Puerto Rico, and Canada, and excluding things like damage in shipment or in transit via common carriers. Not unexpectedly, the uptake by members hasn’t been enthusiastic, particularly in that there are now other carriers out there offering coverage similar to the old New Hampshire program, although at higher rates.

The good news now is that as of this writing, the finishing touches are being put on a new AFM-controlled equipment protection program, available only to AFM members, that will almost exactly duplicate the original New Hampshire program­—minimum premium of $100 with premium rates of 2.2% on the first $1,500 of value and 1% on value over $1,500, all-risk (fire, flood, earthquake, theft, damage, mysterious disappearance), worldwide (at home, on the road, in shipment, or as checked luggage—packed carefully, of course—in your locked car or van, on stage) with replacement cost coverage.

The new coverage program has been developed under the aegis of the AFM’s 30-year-old Mutual Benefit Trust Fund, which is under the sole control of the International Executive Board (IEB). A feasibility study was conducted in early 2025 demonstrating the viability of an AFM-controlled program, and legal work was done in the ensuing months to identify, and ensure compliance with, state regulations. With that completed, the necessary structural components have been put in place, and rollout should commence in the next couple of months.

With other insurance coverage options available, one may wonder what need is solved by yet another equipment coverage program. The answers are fairly simple:

1) The AFM controls this new program. It will not be subject to the business decision whims of an insurance corporation, to be discontinued when the corporation decides it’s no longer worth their trouble. The program will essentially belong to the membership.

2) As union-owned program, there is no profit motive. Insurance corporations must make a profit to pay executive salaries, commissions to brokers, and dividends to stockholders. The removal of salaries, commissions and dividends from the financial equations means that profits will be put to work for the participating members by keeping premium rates down and improving coverage benefits.

Keep your eyes alert to further announcements and updates about this exciting new members-only benefit.

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I write this month’s column from within the boundaries of a First Nations spiritual ceremony taking place on the traditional lands of the Cherokee Nation. Out of respect for the ceremony and traditions of the people who preserve and carry forward these kinds of ceremonies, I won’t go into detail about it, except to say that my involvement in these ways extends over a quarter century and has created a pathway in life that helps me maintain and strengthen a perspective about life that has been vital to my work in our union.

On many pages of this issue of International Musician, you will see repeated expressions from AFM officers and staff about the challenges that are presented to our profession and to our work at the bargaining table by the development and advancement of artificial intelligence and its evil offspring, generative artificial intelligence. Indeed, one of my earliest columns as secretary-treasurer likened the looming threat of artificial intelligence to the poisoning of our food supply by artificial sweeteners. I’ve also mused about the notion that an attempt to bargain with the recording industry over the impact of artificial intelligence on our profession would be little more than scratching the surface of the problems that AI would present to all musicians’ livelihoods.

As with the advent of synthesized music in the 1980s, artificial intelligence in the hands of a human being in the creative process represents a legitimate advancement of the tools that every artist can employ in the development of their art. In the hands of corporate interests, however, artificial intelligence becomes a catalyst of greed, disguised as progress.

And much has been foisted upon our world under the banner of progress and necessity, but with nothing more than the acquisition of wealth lurking beneath the surface.

Xi Jinping, the leader of China, has taken his country on a quiet mission to buy as much arable land as possible in other parts of the world so his country can control even more of the land that produces the world’s food supply. Much of that land is within the continent of Africa, with the result that the people who actually live on those lands will have less and less control over the production of food upon which those many millions of people’s lives will depend.

Benjamin Netanyahu, with the willing participation of the United States, has been laboring violently to deprive the right of his country’s neighbors to live peacefully on the land upon which they resided long before Netanyahu was born. Vladimir Putin has been waging a war for five years to deprive the right of Ukrainians to benefit from their access to the rare earth minerals below Ukraine’s surface.

Now turning our attention to the North American continent, the president of the United States has already hijacked oil-rich Venezuela, and has made a steady rumble of veiled threats to do the same with Greenland (lol), and even Canada (lol!). And here I stand now in the middle of the traditional lands of the Cherokee people, who US President Andrew Jackson violently pushed out of their homeland in the early 1800s in the name of US expansion and control.

The behavioral pattern is ingrained, it would seem. Throughout history, it’s always been about control of resources, to benefit the power and wealth of a few at the expense of the many. Closer to home, we see digital technology companies energetically working to develop massive artificial intelligence computing centers that will require an enormous amount of electricity and an enormous amount of water in order to function, pitting their narrow interests against the welfare of the people of the communities who would lose that water. But water is finite, and as people of the world, we will need to decide, hopefully in a peaceful way, whether we want water to sustain the exponential growth of artificial intelligence or the continuation of our lives as inhabitants of this planet.

Two generative AI platform companies have now scraped virtually every sound recording in the world that exists anywhere on the internet in order to sell services to so-called creators to make music virtually devoid of human creative juice. That is the potential musical Armageddon that we musicians now face. And you would think that our bargaining partners in the recording industry across the table from us would be allies in a fight against what for them is a similar existential threat. But the almighty dollar apparently outweighs the creative process and overshadows the natural human instinct to produce something good and valuable for posterity, leaving only a corporate exoskeleton operated by lawyers and bean counters who exist to create unearned wealth for stockholders, thus eviscerating what could otherwise be a bright and healthy future for our art.

We work with the tools and resources that we have at our disposal, however, and if the recording industry is insistent on selling its soul to the devil, our place of last refuge resides with those who make the laws of the land, and it will be imperative to put all of our strength behind persuading the governments of our countries to recognize the value of human created music over machine generated music.

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The 103rd Convention has spoken and set the Federation stage for the next three years. I’m looking forward to working with the 2026 iteration of the International Executive Board.

As of August 1, Karen Suarez Flint, secretary-treasurer of Local 10-208 (Chicago, IL), will be joining as the Federation’s next international vice president, replacing Dave Pomeroy, president of Local 257 (Nashville, TN). Pomeroy held the position since 2023, following his service as an Executive Committee member for the preceding 13 years.

Vice President Suarez Flint follows a succession of women in leadership roles at the international level: Tammy Kirk, from Local 94 (Tulsa, OK) in 1999, was the first woman ever elected to the IEB. Florence Nelson, former treasurer of Local 802 (New York City) and AFM Symphonic Services director, was elected AFM secretary-treasurer in 2001, becoming the first woman elected to a full-time leadership position in the AFM. Tina Morrison, from Local 105 (Spokane, WA), was elected to the IEB in 2010 and served for 16 years. Local 149 (Toronto, ON) Executive Director Dusty Kelly was first elected to the IEB in 2023 and was re-elected at this past convention.

In addition to President Tino Gagliardi, Vice President from Canada Allistair Elliott, Executive Committee member Kelly and myself, Vice President Suarez Flint will be joined by the new incoming board members Marta Bradley, currently secretary-treasurer of Local 40-543 (Baltimore, MD) and past secretary-treasurer of Local 161-710 (Washington, DC); Kale Cumings, president of Local 6 (San Francisco, CA); Leonard DiCosimo, president of Local 4 (Cleveland, OH); and Edmund Velasco, president of Local 7 (Orange County/Long Beach, CA). Most of these talented individuals I have known for a number of years, and together with those who I have known for a shorter time, I look forward to an energetic and collaborative three years ahead.

Fresh faces are always good for an organization, but I would be remiss for failing to acknowledge those officers who will not be returning to the IEB table. Outgoing International Vice President Pomeroy was an unrestrainable bundle of energy on the IEB, available for any assignment for which his talents were requested, and was the most energetically consistent in reminding each board member of our roots—those of gigging musicians.

Morrison, as the executive secretary of the Spokane Regional Labor Council (in addition to her service as an officer of Local 105), brought a unique perspective to IEB deliberations, drawing on her extensive work with the other trade unions and the AFL-CIO. IEB member Ed Malaga, from Washington, DC, lent a philosophical passion to every debate on the board, elevating him—in my view, anyway—to the level of “the conscience of the IEB.”

John Acosta, who chose not to run for re-election, drew on his experience as an officer of Local 47 (Los Angeles, CA) to ensure that every action of the IEB was firmly based on the facts of a matter and not on the political winds. Finally, Luc Fortin, former president of Local 406 (Montreal, PQ), contributed a valuable and unique perspective to the IEB as the first voice on the IEB from the AFM’s sole French-speaking local in Quebec, with Quebec’s labor laws and industry, which are unique and distinct from the rest of the US and Canada. I will miss all their voices and contributions.

The incoming IEB will have some serious choices to make. The previous board had devoted the better part of two years considering the future of our union, devising a roadmap to execute an organizing plan to move the AFM and its locals squarely into the 21st century and more effectively cover the vast gig-worker sector of the industry, and had requested funding from the convention to put that plan into full effect.

The convention delegates approved a portion of the requested funding, to be metered out over a three-year period, while attaching some additional expense obligations that were over and above those proposed by the IEB. In the first year, the revised new funding is projected to produce approximately $230,000. The delegates, however, also mandated new expenditure initiatives that will potentially reach a total of approximately $375,000 in the first year.

That deficit calculation will necessarily require the new IEB to consider how best to utilize the unobligated finite reserve funds if the plan for building power and growth is to go forward.

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Federation officers generally come into their positions after having served for a good while as officers of their locals, and in the old days—the really old days—Federation officers’ columns in this paper seemed to be speaking more to local officers than to the general membership. As the baby boomers started taking office in the 1990s, however, the officers’ columns shifted noticeably toward the rank and file membership as their intended audience, and
I have endeavored to maintain that perspective in my own columns.

This month’s column is different—I am speaking directly to local officers and delegates who will be attending the 103rd AFM Convention later this month and deciding the future direction of this union, now 130 years old. I invite rank and file members to read along and perhaps engage their local officers and delegates in a discussion about the choices to make at this June’s convention.

The Basis

Every decision made by the International Executive Board (IEB) has as its basis the following commitment, which affirms that if we are to have a union that effectively represents more than just symphonic and touring musicians, we must:

Organize to build power to enable members to attain fairness in the labor market and justice in the political realm by building membership in touring, freelance, recording, and local gig markets and developing power to achieve strong contracts.

When I joined this union, the AFM had 360,000 members. Today it’s around 60,000. It’s not because there are 300,000 fewer musicians in North America. They’re out there, just not with us. And why is that?

A smart member of my home Local 99 in Portland, Oregon, boiled it down to one simple, practical concept:

Musicians will join the union when they perceive that union membership will improve their economic bottom line.

Apparently, 300,000 musicians—most of them freelance/indie/general business players—concluded that union membership would not improve their income. Those of us who have spent time in this union know that’s an erroneous conclusion. But perception is everything. And perception must change if we’re to increase our strength. Refer back to the previously stated IEB’s guiding concept.

What’s in Front of the Convention

The International Executive Board has made two primary recommendations for the convention delegates’ vote, setting forth what we must do to find 300,000 musicians again. The first recommendation is to increase funding to the Federation via an increase in the per capita dues. Per capita dues are what each local pays the Federation each quarter based on a head count of each local’s membership. The IEB’s second recommendation is to set a realistic standard to which locals must adhere in order to approach effectively the job of representing musicians in their jurisdictions.

Recommendation No. 2

If we’re going to build power for better pay and a responsive government, we must engage in actual labor and community-based organizing, all across the Federation. For the last several decades, we’ve tried everything else besides organizing, and 300,000 musicians have shown us how well we did. It’s past time for us to do what every other successful union does: grow through organizing.

To that end, Recommendation No. 2 proposes that, as a baseline, every local must:

• Meet with the membership eight times a year
• Have an up-to-date website and an active social media presence
• Keep a list of venues, clubs, and lounges in its jurisdiction
• Keep a list of music education programs in its jurisdiction
• Do an annual workshop for musicians on indie and freelance musicians’ rights
• Participate in designing a Federation-
  coordinated multi-local regional organizing plan
• Utilize funding from the AFM and Music Performance Trust Fund to benefit the members
• Participate with their central labor council
• Budget 10% for organizing
• Send a newsletter or “e-zine” once a month to the membership
• Pay at least one officer at least the required minimum wage

None of the above is particularly radical nor out of reach for any local, but the list does set forth in writing what any local that wants to be a recognized voice for musicians in its area should do. That these basic things should even need to be set forth in bylaws at all is an indicator of the philosophical gap between us and those 300,000 musicians.

Recommendation No. 1

Raises dues—per capita dues specifically. For regular members, the IEB’s proposal would increase dues by $20 per year (or $5/quarter or $1.67/month).

Federation per capita hasn’t been raised since 2013. Judicious administration by the previous Federation officers made that possible by keeping expenses—particularly staff expense—down. The accumulated surpluses since 2013 may leave some wondering why an increase is even requested.

Those 300,000 absent musicians is why.

These two charts, covering the last 12 years, illustrate the relationship between economizing on staff and membership growth:

It’s a plain picture: investments in staff (the dotted line) remained relatively flat—which means staff was actually reduced after accounting for cost-of-living increases—and membership dropped by 20,000 in the same period (the solid line).

It takes people to make a union work.

The IEB’s commitment with Recommendation No. 1 is to:

• Build up the Organizing Department
• Deploy a unified Federation-wide master organizing plan, with emphasis on those 300,000 musicians
• Build the Freelance Services Department
• Develop the Communications Department
• Ramp up our lobbying in DC and Ottawa

There’s a piece in this recommendation for everyone, whether you’re a local officer or a local member.

Recommendations No. 1 and No. 2 Go Hand-in-Hand

Both these recommendations are about planning for the future, not reacting to the present. Reacting as we have for the last 130 years is a bad habit, particularly because it signifies not being in control of our destiny. Labor and community organizing is all about planning and taking action for the future, not doing damage control in the present.

Real organizing, however, requires people—organizers, supporting resources, lawyers, communications, and public relations—and all of that requires funding. Most AFM locals do not have the financial resources to deploy fully-functioning organizing programs in their areas. So, the IEB has determined to develop and deploy regionally-based multi-
local-coordinated organizing programs, initially in the five main regions of the US and Canada. They will work to the benefit of locals in each region—pooling and centralizing resources to achieve economies of scale.

That takes funding. At present, the Federation’s cash reserves are such that the IEB was able to initiate the program without new revenue. For 2026, the IEB plans to expend $1 million more than the projected income, all of it in support of organizing, and most of that for organizing staff salaries. That $1 million will repeat each year since it’s for ongoing salaries. But the staffing needs will increase as we get more active and engaged, so that $1 million deficit in 2026 will probably be $1.6 million in 2027 and over $2 million in 2028. That means by 2028, the Federation will have dipped into the reserves by almost $5 million without any new revenue. And make no mistake—organizing for any union is not an instant reward; it takes a lot of time and a lot of work.

The Federation can maintain that for a while, but not indefinitely—that’s where these two recommendations come into play. Ultimately, the 2026 Convention will be about choosing our future.

Delegates must be prepared to decide whether the status quo is satisfactory or whether together we take the first steps toward reimagining the AFM as something that 300,000 musicians will want to be a part of.

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