The Context of Labor Organizing

Background

In 1947, Congress passed the Labor Management Relations Act—also known as the Taft-Hartley Act—which restricted the power of labor unions to organize workers in certain kinds of collective activity. This was in response to a growing post-war Labor Movement that saw huge profit gains for capitalists but few for laborers. The strikes, walk-outs, and other actions they organized were effective in gaining the attention of the profiteers who exploited their labor—effective enough that capitalists appealed to the federal government for help in squashing union powers. And they won.

This anti-Labor legislation was expanded by the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 (aka the Landrum-Griffin Act). By the mid-'70s, music business profiteers began implementing "union avoidance strategies" to further extend their exploitation of workers through clever legal maneuvering. One of their chief strategies was to switch to indirect profit structures, leading to the "indie phenomena" studied by David Harvey, Stanley Aronowitz, Michael Roberts, et al.

These tactics weren't limited to the music industry. The "secondary boycott" clause of Taft-Hartley—expanded by the "hot cargo" pact restrictions imposed by Landgrum-Griffin—was leveraged by capitalists in many industries to prevent unions from going after executive profits. All they had to do was outsource production to separate, "indie" companies.

The Problem for Indie Musicians and DJ/Producers

A secondary boycott is a boycott "in which a union participating in a strike against a company [pressures] other unions to boycott organizations that did business with that company." Taft-Hartley's prohibition on secondary boycotts has been interpreted more broadly to prohibit “collective economic action” (strike, boycott) whose target is any corporation or owner other than the immediate employer, regardless of how much such “secondary” corporations profit from the labor of “outsourced”, subcontracted, licensed, or subsidiary businesses. This prohibition robs indie musicians of a key bargaining strategy that would otherwise allow them to apply pressure on corporate venues and distributors with help from other institutions.

Without it, those venues and distributors continue to reap the lion's share of the profits from their labor. Indie musicians are forced to bargain for contracts on their own behalf, which exposes them to all the risks normally mitigated by the process of collective bargaining executed by a union.

Additionally, indie musicians are largely underrepresented among AFM members because of restrictions on their work that don't stand to benefit them. Why would a New York-based indie musician join the union if their live recording work is governed by the same standards as Los Angeles session work? Why would they join if their work—which exists almost exclusively outside the contracts set by the union—will not allow them to become fully vested in the union's health and pension benefits? How are DJ/producers to negotiate properly if they can't join the union to begin with? How do we expect to organize anyone without a fully staffed organizing department?

If indie musicians and DJ/producers are to start winning fair contracts, we need to understand the obstacles we face and enact new strategies to overcome them. As of this writing, the American Federation of Musicians—and musicians' unions the world over—have largely left indie musicians in the lurch, and we see this is a profound missed opportunity for all musicians.

A Solution

One possible strategy for reinforcing our organizing efforts is to engage "workers' centers"—not formally registered as "labor unions"—to do the risky work of leveraging employers on our behalf. The Restaurant Organizing Center and Make The Road NYC were both workers' centers who did this work in their sectors, but the contracts won in these negotiations were signed by legacy unions: the Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees and the Retail Workers Unions, respectively.

These campaigns, organized by workers' centers, won contracts in situations where legacy unions failed. The involvement of undocumented workers, and/or the exploitation of outsourced or subcontracted labor, give businesses the legal upper hand when it comes to contract negotiations. Workers’ centers are more legally flexible, and their lack of big bank accounts and high overhead (building costs, staff salaries, assets, etc.) make them less attractive targets for management lawsuits and legal action. They also can pick up the slack where a union's understaffed (or unstaffed) organizing department falls short. Legacy unions, on the other hand, have the resources to administer contracts once they are won, and to provide healthcare and pension benefits and other services.

We propose a binary model, in which both workers' centers and our legacy union cooperate to negotiate contracts, and to divide the work along lines that play to their institutional—and legal—strengths.

In order for this binary model to work, our legacy union—the American Federation of Musicians—must prepare and administer contracts that indie musicians will accept. This presents a number of challenges:

The AFM's existing by-laws prevent this (for reasons we’re articulating in our proposals);
The AFM Convention is the only place those by-laws can be changed, which handcuffs the ability of grassroots movements within the union to organize locally; and
The likelihood of changing the by-laws at the next convention is almost nil.

However, we see advantages to prioritizing this more robust binary model:

It serves as an issue around which to rally members who rarely—if ever—work under contract, and
It will give both local and national leaders political leverage to support efforts to organize members currently not working under contract.

At present, AFM's current membership represents less than 1/6 of its tally in the mid-'50s, and we see the decline of AFM's pension plan as a direct result of our weakness in numbers. Even the best-managed pension plan can't pay out to existing members if it doesn't organize new ones, and growth should be of tantamount concern to anyone involved in organizing within AFM.

In short, reshaping AFM as a union that enfolds and accounts for the concerns of indie musicians and DJ/producers will serve all union members: not just the 18% of members who do most of their work in the indie sector, but also the 70% of members who do any amount of music work outside the scope of currently established contracts, in addition to the senior members who rely on pensions paid out by the union.

And we believe we can make the best use of workers' centers' ability to negotiate contracts on our behalf if the contracts served by the union serve our specific and reasonable needs.

Conclusion

The musicians that sustain the music industry in the United States represent a wide array of genres, cultures, and ways of working. And as capitalists within the industry push for further exploitation of our labor, it becomes all the more our responsibility to create and enact models of advocacy that treat the rich diversity of our profession with dignity and solidarity.

We recognize that the binary model we propose above—which depends on structural changes within AFM to work—represents only one possible solution to the problems germane to both indie musicians and existing membership. However, we insist that the union cannot be grown by simply continuing to organize members that are served by existing contracts. We must grow our contingent of indie musicians.

We stand ready to work with our colleagues within the AFM to create a more just and equitable workplace for indie musicians, regardless of the solution we decide to enact.