Montreal and the merged local delegate debacle

The debate over the seating of Montreal and allowing the African-American delegates from merged locals to vote continues in the comments of this and our sister blog. To briefly recap the issues: the delegates from Montreal were seated and allowed to vote despite the fact that the the Local was in arrears on its dues (in contrast to several other locals in arrears which were not allowed to send delegates), and the delegates voted to allow the 9 or 10 delegates who came as the African-American extra delegates from merged locals to vote, despite an explicit warning from AFM General Counsel Jeff Freund that doing so would likely mean that any challenge to any election in which they voted would be successfully challenged.

Both issues were about whether or not the AFM would follow the law. Montreal was about whether the AFM would follow its own bylaws (it didn’t) and the other issue was about whether the AFM would follow the law of the land (it didn’t.) Both issues involved principles as well, although there were principled arguments on both sides.

Most of the arguments on principle ran against seating Montreal. The one that didn’t was made best by a commenter to this blog named John Hyde, who wrote:

In the Canadian situation Quebec is extremely important to our culture. It is conceivable that there would be no arts funding, none of the radio policies the U.S. is trying to lobby for nor any recognition of a Canadian culture if we did not have Quebec...A great Canadian cultural disaster has been averted at this convention.

It’s a fair point (although how great the disaster would have been is debatable). It’s a much better point than most the other arguments. But it still doesn’t carry the day for me. Montreal got into arrears because it made a choice to get into arrears and spend money on other things, including increased strike fund benefits for Montreal Symphony musicians. That was a good decision. It was one that the members of the Local appeared to support. I hope that, as a local officer, I’d be willing to sacrifice my attendance at a convention in order to do something as worthy as that. I also hope that, after having done so, I wouldn’t then come and ask that I be exempt from the bylaws because of the long tradition of eating bratwurst in Milwaukee made the voices of Milwaukee bratwurst eaters indispensable to the future of the AFM.

The one principle I could discern behind arguing that those African-American delegates elected as a result of the merged-local bylaw be seated was this: that not doing so would be to return to the spirit of segregation and racial discrimination. The delegate that argued for letting them vote as a form of "€œcivil disobedience"€ made the argument in a nutshell.

It was a very powerful argument emotionally. It appealed to the delegates’ natural desire to think of themselves as on the right side of one of the great moral issues of our time. It let them participate vicariously in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which many of them had missed (and no doubt some of them had been on the wrong side of at the time.) It let them think that they too would have walked with Dr. King in Birmingham and gone to jail with him (my next-door neighbor when I was growing up, Robert McAfee Brown, actually did get arrested with Dr. King, and was correctly regarded as a hero by everyone who knew him.)

I think the power of this argument was what turned a reasoned discussion into a rout. It defeated Jeff Freund’s attempt to get delegates to obey the law by taking it head-on. But it was not on-point in two ways.

The first is that civil disobedience is more than breaking the law. It’s even more than breaking unjust laws. It’s about breaking unjust laws and then demanding to be held to account for having done so. That’s what Gandhi and Dr. King did; they broke the law and then demanded to be tried and punished for having done so. The last piece was the most important; it forced those that made and enforced the law to be the ones truly held accountable.

The proper course of action would have been for the delegates to demand, as part of letting the merged-locals delegates vote, that the AFM immediately send a letter to the Department of Labor informing them of the convention’s action and demanding an investigation. Needless to say, no one demanded such action. And, if and when the DOL does investigate and demand a do-over, the delegates, as well as 1501, will be squealing like stuck pigs. That’s not civil disobedience. That’s just hoping to pull a fast one.

Will the DOL investigate and demand a do-over? I’m not a labor lawyer. But Jeff Freund is, and he seemed to think it likely. He told the convention that they had “no option” but to obey the law. If I were the DOL, I’d be very tempted to make an example of a union that was told to obey the law and did exactly the opposite one month later. Does that mean we all have to go back to Vegas and vote again? And at whose expense? It sure won’t be the DOL picking up the tab.

The Convention’s action was wrong-headed in a more fundamental way. The principle behind the law that the delegates voted so bravely to defy is actually a pretty good one; it’s simply that any member of the union has an equal right to run for local office. As Freund pointed out, a bylaw that said that some officer positions were reserved for musicians making $X per year from Y kinds of performance would be equally illegal. Union democracy advocates would tell you that bylaws making it hard or impossible for certain kinds of members to hold office are often abused in an attempt to prevent democratic decision-making. And, ironically, the same argument by Bredhoff & Kaiser has been used successfully to prevent consideration of making player conference heads voting members of the IEB. But at least B&K is being consistent. The AFM isn’t. (No, that doesn't make the argument that contractors shouldn't be local officers a bad one. Having employers run unions representing their employees is certainly against the spirit of labor law, and arguably against its language as well.)

Having said all that, there is also an argument that the AFM ought to honor the agreement made many years ago, when segregated locals were forced to merge, that the voices of African-American members should not be completely submerged by the numerical dominance of white members in the new, hyphenated locals. But the AFM has honored that agreement for decades. Once it was made clear to everyone that the law makes it impossible to honor that agreement, it was time to move on unless the law itself is clearly wrong. And it isn’t.

Comments

[Luc Fortin, president Local 406]

quote " Montreal got into arrears because it made a choice to get into arrears and spend money on other things, including increased strike fund benefits for Montreal Symphony musicians."

Wrong - The MSO strike had nothing to do with the SWD payments in arrears. The monies spend on the MSO strike came from a separate trust fund, not from the regular account. It wasn't a "decision", just some very bad management by the former president and VP. The directors were not aware that something was wrong with the Symphonic Work dues, until the very end of 2006.

Great column.