THE COMMITTEE FOR A MORE RESPONSIBLE LOCAL 47 included in its last email blast to AFM local officers the following thoughts on AFM ratification practice:
President Espinosa has taken up the mantle of RMA mouthpiece again. The majority of his column talks about how there should be only one video game agreement, and that those who do the sessions should be the ones to do the negotiations.
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...Be that as it may, there’s only one problem with his “one contract” and “those who do the sessions should make the rules theory” – they’re both wrong.
How? ALL musicians should have a say in all contracts within reason. How else to make sure that no group tries to shape the rules to benefit only themselves to the detriment of everyone else, including those who actually do the sessions.
Why? If the negotiation of those contracts are decided solely by those who do the sessions, in this case by the RMA leadership, you can bet they will protect only THEIR interests to the disadvantage of everyone else, including those hoping to do recording work themselves. It’s not supposition, we’ve seen it again and again.
It’s an interesting concept, and at least at first glance appears to make some sense. Try applying it to the real world, though, and problems emerge.
The first relevant point is that both federal labor law and the AFM bylaws recognize that contract ratification is both important and difficult to get right. Labor law does not require that bargaining units ratify contracts, which is an implicit way of recognizing that just who should get to vote is a tough issue. AFM bylaws, which (to the AFM’s immense credit) do require rank-and-file ratification votes, implicitly recognize that defining the appropriate electorate for a given CBA can be difficult by deferring that decision to either the elected local executive board or the elected IEB, rather than by trying to deal with specifics in the bylaws.
But THE COMMITTEE’S argument that ratification rights should be extended to those who could work under an agreement, as well as those who actually do, is not only problematic but contrary to decades of practice in both the AFM and in other unions. The obvious counter-example from the AFM is symphonic ratification. There are probably an order of magnitude more musicians in the US who could work under symphonic agreements than who actually do. Do they get to join the union and come to ratification meetings? That seems like a recipe for having extremely large per-service orchestras that pay very badly. I know that, if I were an unemployed violist, I would rather see my local orchestra have a CBA that didn’t pay the currently employed musicians as much and didn’t provide them any employment guarantees. That way I might get at least a piece of the work I would otherwise be denied.
But does anyone think that paying currently employed symphonic musicians less and depriving them of full-time employment ought to be the goal of the AFM? And, if not, why should that be the AFM's goal regarding musicians working under electronic media contracts?
Worth remembering also is that most unions don’t provide membership to workers not already employed in bargaining units. Should a brewery workers union open up its membership to anyone who might want to work in a brewery and then provide those new members with the right to vote on a contract covering those already working? What kind of contract would, or wouldn’t, get ratified under those conditions?
To ask the question is to answer it.
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