Secretary-Treasurer’s Message

August 1, 2024

Ken Shirk  -  AFM International Secretary-Treasurer

Feedback: Reader Calls for Contrition Over Condescending “Crazies” Comment

I thank member Lang for his feedback to my July column, see Feedback letter below. (Full disclosure: Portions of member Lang’s letter that referred to President Biden’s mental health, Trump’s felony conviction, past reportage on COVID remediation policies, and the 2016 Russian election collusion were omitted for publication.) I regret that member Lang perceived as condescending my call to the membership to seriously investigate the candidates, and as name-calling my referring to as “crazies” those members of Congress who are holding it hostage in an attempt to achieve ideologically narrow political objectives.

---

---

To “condescend” generally means to lower one’s level of engagement with another party in a patronizing manner­—in essence, verbally punching down from above. To the contrary, my July column calls for us to punch up. As musicians and as a labor union, that’s what we must always do just to hold our own with our employers, with lawmakers, and society in general. We are musicians belonging to a labor union dedicated to performing music for a living—three strikes in mainstream society before we even get off the home plate.

In society’s eyes, we “play” for money (everybody else works for it), symphonic musicians perform “services” (think of that word in context of the servants in a royal household) to produce a product—music—that is ephemeral in live performance (an experience that can’t be packaged and taken home) and even more so in the market (broadcast or streamed from the cloud). In fact, in the world of popular music concerts, a higher value is placed on the venues and branded hats or t-shirts than on the performances or the performers themselves.

So we aggregate our strength as individuals by forming a union in order to push back against the societal misperception of just who we are and the gifts, benefits, and value that we bring to human existence, both spiritually and economically. But unions are not a welcome component in a nakedly capitalistic economy. The engines of industry and capital do not respond well to being pressured by a union how much and when to pay, and accordingly they work the political and legal system to thwart us at every turn possible. Even President Franklin Roosevelt—one of the most union-friendly US presidents ever—was unwilling to buck the system and champion labor rights until the unions first conjured up a theater of nationwide mass labor protests to give Roosevelt the political cover he needed to advance favorable labor legislation.

When we approach federal elections, those are things we must keep in mind when deciding how to cast our votes, particularly when even our friends in government tell us that we have to stage a fight to “force” them to respond to our needs positively.

Historically, without exception, when conservative governments are in power, the arts and organized labor suffer. Ministries and federal agencies get staffed with unfriendlies, labor protections are weakened, funding for the arts diminishes, regulations to protect creators’ intellectual property are reversed, and treaties are negotiated under cover of darkness with foreign governments and agencies that threaten copyright security. The concerns of labor, and particularly of musicians, are unabashedly disregarded by conservative governments.

When liberal governments are in power, it has always been better for musicians. Moves are taken to fund the arts, honest efforts are undertaken to staff the regulatory agencies properly, and—most importantly—we get listened to by those vested with the power to improve our economic lives.

The last 3½ years of government in the US and the last nine years of government in Canada have been generally good for labor and good for musicians.

Our musical livelihoods do not rely upon 1) whether or not a candidate’s or child’s felony conviction is fair, 2) the candidates’ ages or speech impediments, 3) whether a political personality disrupts a state of the union address, 4) a never-ending PR war about whether or not elections were stolen, 5) politically-motivated ethics investigations, or 6) if the boy-wonder of national politics has lost his lustre in the public eye.

So, yes, indeed, I do call upon all of us musicians to think about these things and how our votes will affect our wallets and our families. Be not distracted by memes and feeds on social media. Do the homework before exercising our civic franchise. That’s not an easy assignment. Neither Fox, CBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, Newsmax, Breitbart, Facebook, X, TruthSocial, USA Today, True North nor Reddit will tell us. Look behind the reportage that floods our daily awareness and find the facts about what matters to musicians’ livelihoods.

What matters is what the next governments of Canada and the US will do to preserve and advance our chances as musicians, banded together in one union, to rely upon our chosen field of work in which to earn a living. The answer to that question must be the homing beacon for our next vote.

---