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.

To Canadian members: I try to avoid US-centric writing in the International Musician, but sometimes events demand it, the presentation of which I hope might be useful perspective for any musician on this continent.

A smart person recently observed that a union’s main job is to build sufficient power to enable members to attain fairness in the labor market and justice in the political realm. These two imperatives have always been challenging, no matter the political party in power.

We get letters from member readers from time to time. They’re not always letters for inclusion in Feedback—some are just expressions of agreement or disagreement about the perceived political or social bent of the union.

The most recent letter fell into the latter category, in which the writer stated that he had “grown continually angry at the far left lean of everything coming out of my union.” He further inquired if we knew “what percentage of the membership leans so far left as to agree with the abolish ICE, No Kings Day, or the newly disclosed corruption about the FBI’s efforts to frame Trump.” His concluding remonstrations urged that the union stay out of politics and abandon the left-leaning propaganda, and concentrate on union business.

Parenthetically, his perception of what constitutes “left-leaning” was instructive for me, as I was unaware that the worries about the ramping up of race-baiting language in political discourse, the intimidation of the Fourth Estate, the blackmail of the legal profession, the corrupting of institutions of higher learning, and the dumbing-down of scientific inquiry were solely the province of left-leaning thinkers.

Growing up in a conservative family, I was taught that our leaders should set the standard and be the example of the best to which America aspires, that science was the pathway to better understanding, that fairness obliged journalists to report both sides of a story, and that we should treat others the way we wish to be treated. It never occurred to me that my conservative family was espousing left-leaning values. My bad.

I was also unaware that one had to be left-leaning in order to harbor concerns about the dismantling of government bureaucracy, the government’s use of private contractors to carry out quota-driven detainment of US citizens, the manifestation of an imperial presidency, or the transformation of three co-equal branches of government into two co-opted branches of government. Whether right, center, or left leaning, all thinking US citizens should share a concern when the long-standing checks and balances of the US government, which have sustained the country for more than 200 years, are upended in favor of a Unitary Executive on steroids.

Center- and left-leaning citizens may be howling with dismay now, but right-leaning citizens will be similarly howling when the next left-leaning president is elected and takes full advantage of all these new-found powers and immunities that the Congress and Supreme Court have so recently vested in the executive branch. The US Constitution is nothing more than a blueprint for a political balancing act designed to keep the peace between the citizenry and the government it elects. Citizens of any political persuasion who have the capacity to think across the arc of history should be alarmed when that balance is cast to the winds.

Beyond the parenthetical, however, is the reality. The reality is that the arts are under attack in ways never before experienced. Government agencies and private nonprofits that support the arts are similarly under attack. None of this is a surprise—it was well-published in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump administration. And that is union business, because the implementation of Project 2025 is economically impacting our active working members’ employment and the security of our retired members.

The National Endowment for the Arts—the agency upon which so many of our American members’ employers depend for growth—has been reduced to a moribund blob. The National Labor Relations Board—the only agency charged with maintaining a legal balance of power between musicians and their employers—has been converted into a corporate waterboy. The US Congress just recently tried to give carte blanche authority to big tech to use artificial intelligence technology without any intellectual property guardrails.

Each one of these moves by the government reaches directly into musicians’ pockets. Government must be a friend to musicians and the arts. If it isn’t, we take action. That’s not left-leaning; that’s the gig.

Yes it is, but sometimes this hallowed institution gets it wrong even with the best of intentions. The most recent occasion was on my watch as the AFM’s administrative officer overseeing the content of each month’s International Musician.

Over the past few months, IM has published information about the AFM’s newly expanded Code of Conduct, which addresses all forms of workplace harassment, including sexual harassment, discrimination, retaliation, intimidation, whether perpetrated by coworkers or by employers. As an adjunct to the expanded code, the Federation subscribed to the NotMe app, which offers a user-friendly process for a member to report a complaint. Reports received through the app are then confidentially triaged by one of the AFM’s legal staff members to assess the appropriate way to bring the concern or complaint to a good resolution.

Expanding the code and subscribing to the reporting app were two of six recommendations brought to the IEB last year by a group of local officers and musician representatives that had organized themselves under the banner of the Change the Culture Committee. The members of this committee invested a considerable amount of their personal time, drawing upon their own experiences and those of their colleagues. They offered suggestions for their union to develop meaningful policies, reporting structures, and preventative education in the realm of discrimination, harassment, and sexual assault to benefit all members, everywhere they work.

It took a few months to finalize the expanded Code of Conduct and vet the reporting app, both of which were introduced in the April issue of IM. However, in the months since that rollout, I have come to understand that the stage would have been better set with more introductory preparation and education for local officers and the membership. What followed over the next two issues of IM might therefore have had a very different trajectory.

Shortly after the April issue hit the streets, we received a Feedback letter critical of the fact that the committee members consisted of only women, that the Federation was unwittingly encouraging people to “inform” upon each other, and that it was fostering a culture of arbitrary enforcement. President Gagliardi authored a response to the Feedback letter in the May issue addressing the writer’s assertions and misassumptions.

After the May issue hit the streets, three more Feedback letters arrived criticizing Gagliardi’s reply, attacking the viability of the app—in particular, its anonymous reporting option—and implying that the union was sliding backward into communism. Guided by Feedback editorial policy, we dutifully printed those letters in the June issue.

That was my first mistake. Printing those letters, essentially variations on the same points made in the May issue, added little of substance to the discourse. Having made that first mistake, my second was in not producing a direct response to those three letters as had been done for the May issue. I relied on an erroneous assumption that the memory of Gagliardi’s reply in the May issue would carry over to the June issue. To counterbalance, we instead printed underneath those Feedback letters a simplified how-to-use the NotMe app to show members how to register with the app, see how it works, and understand its straightforward nature.

On a number of levels, that approach was inadequate. I like to think that I’m fairly adept at predicting how a thing will be received or perceived by another person. In this case, however, I completely blew it.

I failed to consider how printing the three letters with no direct response from the leadership would impact someone who had already been subjected to traumatic sexual harassment or retaliation, or how a new union member, upon receiving the June issue of IM as their first union publication, might see these three seemingly unchallenged letters as institutional disregard for the trauma, fear, and injury experienced by anyone subjected to sexual harassment, discrimination, and retaliation. For those failures, I am truly sorry.

There’s a reason the women of the Change the Culture Committee came together to address the IEB about this darker side of our industry’s culture: No one was visibly leading the way for change. For their determination and willingness to do so, they have the thanks and gratitude of every member of the IEB and its genuine commitment to tackle sexual harassment, assault, discrimination, and bullying throughout our industry.

So it must be that many years ago—perhaps decades or even centuries ago—an ill-tempered character, with a chip on their shoulder about the encroaching Industrial Age, must have bestowed upon us denizens of this century the tried-and-true curse that we may “live in interesting times.” So interesting are these times that I struggled all month to decide what to write for this month’s issue—there is so much from which to choose. I settled upon an expanded discussion of artificial intelligence (AI), only to discover that AI was also on the minds of International Executive Officer Luc Fortin and Director of Government Affairs Ben Kessler. Regardless, for the 11 members who faithfully read this monthly column, I shall now add my own spin to the AI discussion.

Why would anyone want AI?

Let’s start with a small discussion about capital, capitalism, and the capitalist economy. In a capitalist economy, the role of capitalism is to aggregate capital in the form of profits. Those profits are gained when the cost of the commodity, i.e., the cost of the raw material and the cost of the labor to transform it into something of value to others, is less than the price for which the thing of value can be sold.

In the time when our present-day curse was laid upon us by that ill-tempered character of yore, this was a fairly simple equation: $ales price minus ($raw material + $labor) equaled profit. Before companies existed, that profit flowed back to the laborer. When the laborer realized that they could step away from the actual labor and entice other laborers to produce the same thing—perhaps for less cost, or perhaps for the product to be sold at a higher price—the idea of a company was born, thus amplifying the profit motive and setting up the dynamic within which we all live today—produce a thing of value for less cost and sell it for a higher price.

And that goal feeds upon itself year after year. Indeed, when a corporation reports that it lost a billion dollars in sales, it’s not saying that $1 billion of its money went out the window, it’s only saying that it didn’t match or exceed the sales of the previous year. Capitalism exists only to grow capital.

That’s where AI comes in. AI is not neutral—it is built to serve capital, not people (no matter what your phone tells you).

Technological change under capitalism is never neutral. It’s driven by the profit motive, and moderated only by the balance of class power and the unruliness of labor. AI, with all its bells and whistles, is no different. It’s here not to expand democracy or improve social well-being, but to automate management, speed up surveillance, and hide exploitation behind the veil of innovation.

AI isn’t loved for its creativity; it’s loved because it replaces people—the perfect servant of capital in its purest form. AI isn’t just a system—it’s the embodiment of a future where labor is optional, cultural landscapes are flattened, and government is outsourced to Skynet.

Against this backdrop, read Kessler’s account of the firing of the head of the US Copyright Office right after having issued a report on generative artificial intelligence (GAI) vis a vis the fair use doctrine. Big tech wants to untether GAI completely from the limitations imposed by fair use—which is to say that your face, voice, instrumental sound, writing, composition, or improvisation would no longer be yours.

Then, put that together with Fortin’s examination of AI in today’s music industry to get a flavor of where the forces currently in control see the live, breathing musician’s role in the music industry.

And then, think about whether the picture that those two columns paint matches your professional and artistic vision of the future of music.

Stories abound about the future health of the labor movement. The US presidential election and the complete domination of the US Congress and Supreme Court by the MAGA elements have taken organized labor’s inconvenient-but-familiar laws and norms in America and stood them on their heads. What was true and dependable at 11:59 a.m. on January 20 was replaced at 12:01 p.m. by vamps and C-flat head charts from the Project 2025 fakebook. The Canadian national elections will soon tell us whether this was only a US-specific development or portends a new North American societal phenomenon where everyone who depends on an hourly wage will be officially marginalized by their governments. I hope and trust that the former is the case.

With that introductory opening paragraph now taken care of, I’d like to offer a little bit on how things shaped up for musicians in 2024, using Federation statistics as the standard of measure. The Federation’s financial and structural health is dependent upon and derived from local unions’ financial and structural health, which is dependent upon and derived from members’ financial health.

AFM membership in 2024 was up a few thousand from 2023. Musicians join locals, not the Federation, so we can conclude that in a post-pandemic world, more musicians in 2024 perceived value in joining with their colleagues under the umbrella of their local unions. We predicted an uptick in membership at the beginning of 2024, and that is, in fact, what manifested. There is work to be had out there, and members are getting the gigs.

Symphonic employment has continued on a generally steady recovery path since the depths of the pandemic, again resulting in meeting symphonic work dues revenue predictions. The Symphonic Service Division’s intrepid band of roving negotiators are as busy as they’ve ever been, working with orchestra committees and local union officers in their continuing quest for ever-better pay by bargaining with symphonic employers. Where there’s bargaining, there must be work, and work is a good thing.

The actors’ and writers’ 2023 strike against the movie producers, however, sent delayed shock waves into the musicians’ world in 2024. Underscoring for movies gets recorded only after the main production, i.e., filming, has been completed. With very few movies made in 2023 due to the strike, the diminished number of scoring sessions in 2024 accordingly hit AFM members in their pocketbooks. Members and locals representing them in major production centers particularly felt the effects of the 2023 strike, and the resulting decrease of 2024 movie work dues in their areas rippled through their books to the Federation’s bottom line.

The Federation’s visa and immigration department, which produces advisory letters for the USCIS in connection with overseas musicians seeking visas to perform in the US, experienced a surge in advisory letter requests in mid-2024 (probably a reaction to the then-rumored understanding that the USCIS was about to impose a significant visa fee increase). The advisory letter fees, together with a miscellaneous insurance claim payout from an old lawsuit, contributed to an expected approximate $1 million surplus for the Federation at year’s end.

Surpluses like that, combined with the surpluses accumulated by the Federation’s previous administration, are good. They mean that the Federation is in a better-than-ever position to support local unions in aggregating the power and influence that we musicians can all make together to foment change, for ourselves, our families and our communities.