“Stand faithfully by your friends and elect them. Oppose your enemies and defeat them.”
That is the political policy of the AFL-CIO, and one that the AFM has subscribed to for decades. The unquestionable truth of it motivated the AFM International Executive Board (IEB), in its first quarterly meeting of 2024, to endorse US President Joe Biden for re-election.*
Not since the administration of Franklin Roosevelt has any US president shown the level of support for working Americans as from the Biden-Harris administration. With Joe Biden’s leadership:
- Congress passed the American Rescue Plan. As a result, the AFM’s US pension plan (and other union pension funds that also got hammered by the Great Recession of 2007) will be able to maintain benefits for the membership into the future;
- The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) committed to a prevailing wage requirement for musicians and other performers hired by NEA grant recipients;
- All departments of the executive branch were instructed to wake up to the looming dangers of unregulated machine-ingested generative artificial intelligence and develop policy proposals to curb abuse;
- The slashing of federal funding of the arts stopped;
- The National Labor Relations Board was retooled to support workers’ rights both in employment and collective bargaining;
- Cabinet and executive posts have been filled with actual professionals who understand the missions of their departments and the citizenry that they serve.
This is not an exhaustive list, but it does provide a taste of the level of friendship musicians now enjoy in the Biden-Harris administration. It’s why the IEB, aware that political endorsements are always controversial within the membership, determined that an endorsement of Joe Biden for president is unequivocally in the best interests of professional musicians.
*In conformity with US election law, the Canadian members of the IEB recused themselves from participating in the endorsement vote.
