Big events at Musicians international convention

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By Robert Levine

[The issues at the heart of his report were foreshadowed in UDR Nos. 177 and 179 of 2009 in which Levine and then president Lee debated their opposing positions. AFM members are encouraged to submit their own opinions. - ed.]

The contemporary era of the American Federation of Musicians began with two events, both related to the fact that only a minority of the union's members are actually full time musicians. One was the revolutionary Roehl Report of the late 1980s which proposed to strengthen the independent role and power of the player conferences, the caucuses that represent musicians covered by union collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). The other was a financial "reform" plan submitted by a Blue Ribbon Committee and adopted by the 1991 convention; it proposed to alleviate the union's budgetary problems by increasing basic membership dues and thereby allowing more of the work dues to support administation of the CBAs. The June 2010 AFM convention in Las Vegas, its 98th, will be remembered for its unambiguous reaffirmation of the Roehl report and its first step toward ending the current financial model.

The headline event at the recent convention was the defeat of the incumbent president Tom Lee and four of his allies on the International Executive Board by a group led by Ray Hair, president of the Dallas-Ft. Worth local. Incumbent officers in the AFM rarely lose bids for re-election, and almost never by the kind of margins won by Hair's group. This electoral earthquake had many causes, but the chief reason was the delegates' desire to end the war between Tom Lee and the player conferences, the internal AFM caucuses that represent the interests of AFM members working under union contract in the recording, symphonic, and musical theater workplaces.

Lee, who had been elected in 2001 and reelected in 2007, the longest-serving AFM president in almost 40 years, strongly believed that locals were the only legitimate representatives of members within the AFM. This concept had been supplanted in the past few decades by the rise of the player conferences and their critical, albeit semi-official, consultative role in setting AFM policy, as proposed by Bill Roehl in 1989. Lee's relationship with the Recording Musicians Association, one of the player conferences, began to deteriorate shortly after his election in 2001 and, within a few years, had turned into open warfare. After his re-election in 2007, the war began to spread to the symphonic conferences as well, a conflict dramatically escalated by his refusal early this year to hire the symphonic conferences' recommended candidate for the position of Director of the Symphonic Services Division, even though the recommended candidate met the criteria he himself had laid down -- which his eventual hire didn't.

At the same time, Lee's allies in the Nashville and New York City locals (both major centers of CBA activity within the AFM) were defeated by local insurgent groups, at least in part due to their alliances with Lee. These defeats guaranteed that a major bloc of votes that had supported Lee in previous re-election bids would go against him this time. Dissatisfaction with Lee amongst sufficient additional local officers and the war with recording musicians gave Hair and his allies more than enough votes for a clear mandate to end the war and Lee's counter-revolution against the role of the player conferences.

But almost as important was what the convention refused to do, which was to simply provide the AFM more revenue from locals and musicians in the form of increased per capita dues and work dues on recording work. The International Executive Board's recommendations for substantial increases in both revenue streams met an avalanche of opposition from both large and small locals; an unusual alliance in recent AFM history.

What passed instead was a resolution directing the IEB to propose to the next convention substantive structural changes in how the AFM does business, as well as a very creative financial package. This package, which was proposed by the Joint Law and Finance Committee after consultations with the newly-elected president and the RMA delegates, did away with the much-hated fee on payments to recording musicians from the secondary market funds (the so-called "back-end" payments), substituting for it a flat fee to be charged recording musicians. What was so innovative was that the flat fee would be negotiated after the convention with the Electronic Media Services Steering Committee -- essentially the elected representatives of the recording musicians -- and would require ratification by the musicians who would pay the fee, establishing for the first time in AFM history a source of revenue for the national union requiring direct approval by rank-and-file members.

The significance of the defeat of the IEB financial proposal was two-fold. It was the first time since 1991 that an AFM convention had flat-out refused to approve a significant increase in revenue going to the national office, and demonstrated that most delegates were frustrated by the national union's continuing need for more money when their own locals were having to tighten their belts. More important for the long term, it marked a tacit acknowledgement that the concepts underlying the 1991 financial reforms had become unsustainable.

Those earlier reforms established a hefty per capita dues to fund the AFM's general operations while establishing national work dues on most work under AFM contract to finance the presidential departments dealing with that work. Unfortunately, in the two decades since those reforms, membership has shrunk to such an extent that more and more of the nominally dedicated work dues for those departments went to support general operations while the presidential departments were short-changed. The effect was to put an increasingly disproportionate financial burden on the relatively few members of the union who work fulltime as musicians while still obligating locals to charge membership dues which made union membership increasingly unattractive to members who did little or no work. The convention's rejection of the IEB financial proposal showed that the delegates believed that any further increases in either per capita or work dues would push significant numbers of members past the breaking point.

Proposals from the International Executive Board to reduce the number of rank-and-file members on the board of the AFM Employers Pension Fund and to substantially increase compensation for the three full-time officers of the national union died with a whimper when they were withdrawn by the IEB without ever coming to the floor -- a significant victory in particular for the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians, the largest of the symphonic player conferences, which had mounted a campaign amongst its members against the two proposals.

None of the serious external challenges faced by the AFM and its members were ameliorated by anything the 98th convention did. But the convention did face a clear choice between two philosophies of union governance. Fortunately for the future of the AFM and its members, the convention decisively chose the more democratic path.