April Thoughts

We’ve found early success when reminding union members that musicians were getting paid $100/night in the 80’s when rent was a fraction of today. We found success reminding members who were concerned about non-union musicians playing for nothing and taking our gigs (scabs), that scabs could actually become our biggest regular incoming membership. After the union establishes a network of unionized venues committed to paying a living wage, young up-and-comers will view the union as the easiest source for securing a gig in the first place. My first days gigging, I took any offer I could because there were so few opportunities. The Union will increase those opportunities.

Many of the organizers have been inspired by the ideas of profit-sharing, crowd-sourcing, fully-transparent democracy, and group-brainstorming, many of which were espoused initially by Marx and other brilliant socialists and social-thinkers. In this light we encourage full participation from our members in the organization and structuring of this union through consistent dialectic group-building between committees. We’ve established networks for tackling larger social issues through our union committees centering marginalized voices, including the BIPOC musicians committee and the Lady Musicians Committee for lady-identifying musicians. The union manifesto for year one is also open to input from membership. The majority of, if not all, tasks are to be eventually transferred to the administration of all members vs a singular committee dictating our actions, subverting any chance for a small group of ideas or individuals taking over the will of the membership as a whole. This was the downfall of so many mighty American  unions. We are fortunate to be developing ties with some of those remaining unions, as outside of the music scene, Colorado is a state full of laborers just like us. Looking at the unionization attempts at the Bessemer, AL Amazon plant, or the formation of the Alphabet Workers Union at Google, we are witnessing the start of an exciting re-unionization period after it’s collapse surrounding the Reagan-era, before the consequent stagnation of wages.

 The constraints the free-market has pressed on the American arts scene forces artists to compete in unhealthy ways, forcing the less successful into a regretful community position of a poverty-wage encourager, by taking gigs for too little. Only a union can alleviate this. If Colorado is known internationally for it’s music scene, if it hosts the most legendary outdoor venue in the world, and one of the most frequented markets for touring and local artists, it’s time we reminded people WHO they are paying tickets to go and see, and WHY they are drinking on this night in this room. They are our fans, they come to see US play in a nice room. Our hosts/employers are taking far too much out of these transactions when it is clear to see the $12 PBR flying off the shelves at the Fillmore. Where are venues efforts to unionize against the banks, landlords, utility companies who they claim make it too difficult to pay us or market for us? It was a standard agreement to have venues handle promotion in our predecessors time. Now everyone seems confused why the numbers aren’t lining up? We hope this union will encourage our employers to organize against their financial “burdens” as well, as worker productivity has quadrupled in the last few decades. 

Hundreds of venues have closed in the last hundred years in Denver, the music has remained. We will never, at any point in time, need venues as much as they need us. We need only to look a few decades in the past to see how unbalanced the profit divisions of todays music scenes are. A few decades before that, the language of work strikes was so common to America that it saw over 4,000 strikes in 1937, and 1/3 of it’s workforce unionized by 1954 (21 million workers). Unions and strikes are American as apple-pie. Fighting back against the eternal class-war with our brothers and comrades, is maybe the most responsible thing we could do with our time. Fans respect us, we don’t have a responsibility to make the world a better place, but rather, a calling.  Happy to have everyone here on board.

Aidan Pagnani