Singers love to sing.
As my voice teacher cautions, “Your greatest asset is likely also your greatest liability.” Our passion for singing fuels our imagination and our curiosity, motivates us to practice and study, helps us transcend obstacles and discouragement, and empowers us to express ourselves. But our passion for singing is a liability, because it makes us easy to exploit –we’re willing to do practically anything for a chance to perform, for any opportunity that just might advance our careers.
We take on spectacular debt to enroll in performance degree programs that provide main stage performance opportunities to only a fraction of their students (usually those on scholarship). We’re willing to sing for free in order to get experience and exposure, often for organizations that pay the orchestra and production staff. When regional opera companies charge us audition fees in order to pass their cost of doing business on to us, we pay up. When prestigious companies like the Metropolitan Opera ask us to take a pay cut in order to help with their bottom line, we acquiesce. We have historically kept silent about the systemic racism, prolific sexual misconduct, and unsafe conditions that plague our industry and our educational institutions. We’re easy prey for predatory “competitions” and “training programs” that charge exorbitant fees but fail to deliver on their promises.
So many aspects to our culture quietly incline us to devalue our own work. We hang on the hope that some gatekeeper, conductor, director or coach will take us under their wing and elevate us above the majority that are doomed to fail in so competitive a talent pool. We dread being told that our voice, our artistry, our musicianship is somehow lacking, never mind concerns about appearance, age, or demographic. When most people train for a skilled profession and enter the work force, they have an expectation (or at least an ambition) of being able to earn a living wage. But we’re routinely told to lower those expectations.
Our culture must evolve such that we all believe that our passion and skill entitles us to commensurate pay and safe working conditions. It would be helpful if our labor union governed from the premise that its members are all entitled to fair pay, a safe workplace, and traditional benefits. But AGMA does not. AGMA is essentially operating from the same scarcity mindset that we have all been conditioned to believe can never change. They are dominated by the fear of losing what little they have been able to secure for some of its members, and they have become complicit in our ongoing exploitation.
AGMA’s leadership wants us to believe that there is no viable path for itinerant members to qualify for health and unemployment benefits. This is absurd. The other entertainment unions provide portable benefits to their itinerant workers, and there is simply no good reason why we should not do this as well. The reason that AGMA’s leadership refuses to pursue such an option for us is that it would require restructuring that they long ago ruled out, despite the fact that it would likely yield benefits beyond the provision of the portable benefits that virtually all union performers aside from us enjoy. This restructuring would include:
- Moving to a basic Collective Bargaining Agreement [CBA] for multiple signatories, rather than negotiating a unique CBA with each, and
- Requiring the use of our Guest Artist Agreement [GAA] when union members work for non-union producing organizations.
These changes would indeed be challenging and time consuming. They may also require adjusting the means whereby our members who are full-time employees of signatory companies receive their benefits, in order to move to a system capable of providing benefits to both full-timers and itinerants. And there’s the rub: AGMA’s leadership is unwilling to pursue a path that would achieve access to benefits for all its members, because they do not want to transition those members who already have benefits to a different system. And this unwillingness serves to perpetuate the very culture of structural scarcity that we need a strong labor union to help us transcend.
The culture that says, better not complain about racism or harassment, or they’ll just hire another singer who doesn’t. The culture that says, our industry depends upon the good will of the patron class, so suck up to those with money and power. The culture that says that in order to pay our bills, we have to accept more students into graduate programs than we actually have the resources to train. The culture that says, we can only keep the lights on by underpaying our artists. AGMA chimes right in and says, we can only make sure that some of our members qualify for benefits if we deny access to benefits for the rest of them.
This, my friends, is what the AGMA referendum is about. A group of us created and submitted ten proposed amendments that would lay the groundwork for resolving the structural inequity to which our membership has been subjected. AGMA’s leadership countered by refusing to bring our amendments to a vote on their own merits, and cobbled together a competing constitutional rewrite that would serve to enshrine this structural inequity.
Talk to most any Board member or officer, and they’ll be happy to spin out their talking points about why it doesn’t make sense to offer to provide the portable benefits model embraced by most labor unions, or insist on the use of a GAA. They have decided not to fight for health benefits for all members, or to insist that we take our union protections with us when working for a non-union house – “Better not insist on the GAA, or they’ll just hire the non-union singers who are willing to work for the shitty pay and working conditions that you were lucky to be offered in the first place.”
If AGMA is to have any hope of surviving as a union that represents itinerant workers, major structural and personnel changes will be necessary. But if AGMA has already given up on fighting for the protections and benefits that all of us need, if they feel so strongly that the survival of our industry depends upon the perpetuation of the structural scarcity and inequity that plagues our profession, then it is time for them to admit this to those of us whose needs they are not committed to meeting, and to allow us to explore our options rather than continuing to hold us hostage to their policy of benign neglect.
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