The Steel Guitar Forum

hey everyone.
how exactly do you go about getting into the musicians union?
i dont really know alot about the union...
so if anyone knows anything that might help me please let me know.

thanks
god bless

Chris Castle

look up the local chapter for the area you live in, I am quite certain the internet can help.

Give them a call, go to a meeting, bring money, give it to them, they give you union card.

you're in !

Do some locals still require you to audition? Just curious.
In the 70's when I joined local 510 (no longer around), you just paid an initiation fee and dues (including work dues). I had heard that local 6 in San Francisco and some of the larger locals (NY, Los Angeles, etc) required auditions. Any truth to that?

Nobody auditions anymore. (Just listen to the radio.) Take your money, and go sign up; nothin' to it.

Chris Castle wrote:hey everyone.
how exactly do you go about getting into the musicians union?
i dont really know alot about the union...
so if anyone knows anything that might help me please let me know.

thanks
god bless

Chris Castle

Chris. I am on the Board of Directors for the Atlanta Federation of Musicians. You can just go to the office in your area and join. Call the office first and see if they have a website that you might be able to use for joining.

May I please ask you what city you live in and why you want to join the musicians union, and what you are expecting to gain from joining the union.

wow... thanks for all the info everyone.

bill, i live in paintsville, ky.
i have been asked to do some recording with a few artists i nashville in the next few weeks.
im not really sure how the union works to be honest. but alot of people have told me i need to join it. anything that could help me with my music helps.

chris

Im pro union but in this case the local does NOTHING for me. I have not paid my 2008 dues for local 257 in Nashville yet. They put you in the book and you can place notes on their board downtown but they don't get you any work. I don't think I'll join back up, money is too tight to throw away unless you're doing a ton of TV or "A" sessions. The only time they might come into play might be in a contract dispute and then they may not help you out. Tennessee is a right to work State.

If you're non union, the problems don't come your way. The Union players that work with you get hung out to dry with fines for working with you.

I was a member of the Dallas-FW AFM for a few years, and I got enough work from just the Music Performance Fund gigs over the course of a year to cover dues. I also knew Mike Kennedy, the guy in charge of booking casuals fairly well, and I got a good bit of work because of that. A couple of the hotels downtown in FW required union players, even for private events, so I didn't mind paying, it was worth it.

When I moved to Austin in 1995 I checked into transferring to the local here, but they basically told me I had to put up the initiation fee again, basically start over, and the dues were higher as well. I asked around, nobody I knew or worked with had much regard for the local here so I decided it wasn't worth it... Maybe it's better now?

I was a member of the Musicians Union for 30 years. I finally got tired of paying the dues for nothing so I dropped it. No loss.

My local back home in PA was terminated back around 1979 or so. They were worthless. We had trouble with a club and they wouldn't do anything. We studied the by-laws and discovered that it was literally one big contradiction. Whatever rights we had according to one page were taken away on another. It was systematically put together that way, apparently by a lawyer. The only thing you could count on them for was to come collecting dues if you didn't pay up. Their minimum performance wage was about 5 percent of going bar gig pay, yet their dues per-gig were more than their set minimum wage. Every musician in the local quit and that was the end of them.

I've done just fine without them for nigh on to 30 years now. Maybe they're not all that way, but it will take a lot to convince me otherwise after that fiasco.

I'm not sure about how it works in other cities but in NYC you can have somebody (union) sign off on your first couple union sessions and still get paid with no problems. After that if you keep getting union work you need to join. The union does not get you gigs or help you get paid. They do occasionally show up to make a mess of things though. For instance there was a jazz cruise around Manhattan for years. 5 piece jazz band with generally very good players. Non union paid $100 to $150 a guy for a couple hours. The union got to them and negotiated a 3 piece at union scale ($125 club date pay per guy). So now you get a keyboard guy covering bass, a sax player and a drummer. Oops, no more jazz on the jazz cruise. No more customers either. That gig is long gone now.
I am into to the union but they are so freakin stupid and out of it. I tried to talk to the guys about how to work something out for NYC touring and full time freelance players but it was hopeless. There idea of helping players is selling them old "drum machines have no soul" bumper stickers at the work dues window. Its pretty pathetic.

years back I was a member of the local Union in Norwalk Ct, the Stamford chapter I believe. Actually a few of us in our band were members, we thought is was a good thing to do at the time.

The Union meetings were run like a Soprano's episode ! Yelling , screaming arguing etc, totally out of order. If anyone did not agree with the President they were close to being removed from the meeting !

One time we were playing a NON UNION gig in Stamford and the UNION rep came and tried to shut us down. he threatened us personally with fines and "you will never work again" stuff.

My friend took his Union card out of his pocket, ripped it up and handed it to him and said, I am no longer a member and told him to get lost. I did the same. The guy attempted to shut down the music with the club owner , the club owner threatened to call the police if he didn't leave. He left.

My friend and I both got a call from the chapter President a few days later asking us to please reconsider quitting ! He was a funny guy, good Italian, he liked me, I'm Italian !

It was more like an Italian club than a Musicians Union. My buddy is a Polock, he felt left out

Bill Hatcher Wrote

May I please ask you what city you live in and why you want to join the musicians union, and what you are expecting to gain from joining the union.

It All Depends on What You Expect To Gain By Joining.
Like almost everybody on here said, "Not Much" and you have to be careful of who you work with in the future, or you could be fined.

If you are working in the studios, might be to your benefit. If you work clubs and road Dates, don't expect too much, My Union Experience was with 257 in Nashville and they didn't do much for me and I was only asked to present my union card once in 7 years, Wilmington De., I Think?

I made more money as non union on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi than I ever Did in Nashville as Union.

The Union won't bring You Fame and Fortune and It Won't make you a Professional, You have to do all of that on Your Own.

Chris Castle wrote:wow... thanks for all the info everyone.

bill, i live in paintsville, ky.
i have been asked to do some recording with a few artists i nashville in the next few weeks.
im not really sure how the union works to be honest. but alot of people have told me i need to join it. anything that could help me with my music helps.

chris

Chris. Thanks for your info.

If you are a recording musician doing a good amount of recording then it would be in your favor to join. Every session you do will have a contribution to a pension fund for you. I will be taking my pension in a few years and believe me it will help me out. If you ever get a chance in your life to talk to Lloyd Green ask him what his participation in the American Federation of Musicians did for him when he had his hearing problems that forced him to stop recording for a period of time.

The fund that pays out this pension is one of the most well funded pensions in the US and there are some players that are drawing over $100,000 a year from it.

Find out if the recording you are doing is covered under a contract and if you need to be in the union to get paid for it. If you do..then join.

Your always going to hear from folks who don't like the musicians union for some reason or another. They love to bash it, but most of them have not really been involved in the better work that is negotiated by contracts. Here in Atlanta the union has negotiated the contracts for several large orchestras. A new member of the Atlanta symphony starts out at about $65,000 with a month paid vacation and full medical. Pit orchestra players for Broadway shows here make on average $1700 a week to do a run and there are several theatre companies here that put on shows year round.

I could go on and on about what the union, good and bad, but I can only speak from my own experience and it has been very good with what the musicians union has done for me over the last 40 years. I am starting to wind down my pro music career. Much of it is very different than when I started.
These days the players are not a part of an organization that gives them any leverage at all. You are totally at the mercy of whoever is hiring and you tell me when the last time you saw club owners and agents giving you all the money you thought you deserved. At least the union set pay scales for its members....and remember that scale is not the highest amount you can negotiate...it is the lowest amount you can work for. If you work for scale, then that is either all you are worth, or all the negotiating potential you have. I know plenty of players here who work for over scale and there are recording musicians who work for double or triple scale. If the producer will pay it, then they can get it.

If you are say an interior decorator and you want to be associated with the rest of your industry then you join an association that promotes what you do. The cost of this in the majority of industries whether it be the lawyers or poultry farmers or nurses or whatever is much more than being a member of the musicians union. What I am getting at is that just having your name in the union directory and being in the network of pro players can be good for you and the potential is work the nominal fee it costs.

If all you are doing is just working cheap in clubs and bars and old folks homes and such....don't join.
If you want a part of the work that is done by pro musicians then you need to go where they are working and try to get in with them and find out how they got there, what they are doing to stay there, what organizations they belong to etc. Take under consideration the advice of all, but weed out the good from the bad and make up your own mind.

My only gripe with the Union is that while we recording musicians make up 10% of the membership and bring in 90% of the funds, the Union seems to be more concerned about what Bill Knobknocker and his Hillbilly Tootin' Trumpets in Winetka are going to do when the union needs an extra monetary boost. It could be a one time $5 total membership assessment, and they're too scared to pass that for fear of hackin' off ol' Bill. They come to us and say they're going to double or triple our work dues to make up the loss. This is why the PMG is starting to grab a foothold.

MD. What the union should do in my opinion, is to sit down at a table, look at what is left in the realm of the pro musician and put all their emphasis on that. Recording musicians, theatre musicians, symphonic musicians..that is about all that is left making a decent living and your right about the dues from this area making up the majority of the union support. BUT, you have to look at the work of the union in negotiating those contracts that have resulted in the payments made in that field.

Also the pension fund....what is it now..well over a BILLION dollars!! How you going to start a new "specialized" union of recording musicians, of symphonic musicias and so on and expect to take that money with you. It is under so much federal control you can't even imagine.

Our union does have many things wrong..the biggest I can see is the total gap between reality at the working level and the reality at the top in New York. The leadership is virtually out of touch with what is going on now and many times they are thinking 30-40 years ago. If you ever go to a convention of the American Federation of Musicians, it looks like an old folks home!

The union is in the last throes of being a viable organization, but so is the recording industry, so is the live music industry, so is the symphonic industry, so is the theatre industry.

Easy just to bash them, harder to make changes and try to save it all.

I don't think I can support the break away groups within the union. The whole premise of having a union is that we all work together as a group to support each other in bettering our membership. If the part of the union that is doing well wants to abandon the rest of the musicians then I can't see that, BUT on the other hand the union leadership should not let one area continue to drag down the health of the union. Something needs to be done. The organisation needs to pare down to fit what is going on right now in the music industry.

I have a different perspective Bill. I am a union member and am glad for many of the things they have done. The issue is that things are changing and the union could be doing so much more.

Recording musicians, theatre musicians, symphonic musicians..that is about all that is left making a decent living...

This is simply not the case. Most musicians I work with are making a decent living in a fully freelance situation. If the union offered something such as group rates on health insurance, credit union and that sort of thing players would be glad to work with them. All the union knows how to do is put the screws on a couple geriatric golden geese. There is no structure in place for musicians to use the union in the real world at this point. The basic battle between worker and big management basicly doesn't apply anymore and its the only thing the union knows how to deal with. The problem with the union is in its basic structure. I think a resource model would be more useful than the current exclusivity and conflict model.

Chris Castle wrote: i have been asked to do some recording with a few artists i nashville in the next few weeks.
im not really sure how the union works to be honest. but alot of people have told me i need to join it.

The best way to start would probably be to ask the employer whether he is a signatory to the Sound Recording Labor Agreement.

If he is a signatory, then you would have to be an AFM member to work under a SRLA contract.

On the other hand, if the employer is not a signatory, and if you are an AFM member, then the AFM would prohibit you from working for that employer.

For more, info Google "Sound Recording Labor Agreement", "Limited Pressing", etc.

Bill Hatcher wrote: The leadership is virtually out of touch with what is going on now and many times they are thinking 30-40 years ago. If you ever go to a convention of the American Federation of Musicians, it looks like an old folks home!

Are you suggesting that this would not be appropriate for steel guitar players?

Bob Hoffnar wrote:I have a different perspective Bill. I am a union member and am glad for many of the things they have done. The issue is that things are changing and the union could be doing so much more.

Recording musicians, theatre musicians, symphonic musicians..that is about all that is left making a decent living...

This is simply not the case. Most musicians I work with are making a decent living in a fully freelance situation..

Are they making $65,000 -$325,000 a year like our symphony memebers? Are they making $1700-2500 a week like the theatre pit players are making? Are they making $400 for a three hour session?

99% of just freelance musicians out there gigging one nighters don't make that kind of money. I know, most of the time I am one of them out there slogging it out at night for what they usually make.

The context of my statement is in regards to who is actually funding the union. It is NOT the average income freelancer, it is what Michael was talking about. The recording dues from a relatively small group of union members and the other higher profile "decent" wage earners dues, AND these people are seeing a decline in what they are doing and their industry in general.

Just look at the special payments funds in our union like MPTF or whatever it's called today. These funds have dropped to drastically low numbers and very soon will be not availiable at all. These were funded by union recording contracts and paid by employers and the recording industry.

I too fully support the Musicians Union, but we are getting to a point where we need some drastic changes if we are going to continue.

I find it puzzling when members are disappointed that the union doesn't functon as some sort of booking agent.
-John

John Steele wrote:I find it puzzling when members are disappointed that the union doesn't functon as some sort of booking agent.
-John

John. In the past when there was an orchestra at every big radio station and an orchestra at every hotel and musicians every where, there were situation where the local could provide you with leads for work and actual gigs...no more.

Some equate the musicians union with others that have provided their members with job leads and such.

Some just want to join and wait for the phone to ring! You should sit on the Board and hear all the stuff that goes on!

Guess it's different in certain locals,Remember in the 70's in this area[Columbus Ga] the local union was a JOKE,BANDS playing under union scale etc,but I always keep my card up to date because when I went on the road to any of the BIG cities,you BETTER have that card,I noticed three or four years ago was on the road awhile,never was asked ANYWHERE if I had a card.Of course we were just playing clubs and shows,but back in the 60's if we played clubs in Atlanta,New Orleans,etc,you had better have that card or you did'nt play.DYKBC.

Bob Hoffnar-
If you ran for president of the union and won, I'd rejoin. I was in Local 802, years ago, and they did absolutely nothing for the working musician, but, take your money. It really was a joke. Especially when the union rep showed up at a gig and was looking for a handout. This happened more than once. The last time was at the Huntington Town House, a large catering hall. I physically escorted him to the door after handing him my book and card. Nothing short of mobsters.