Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
At the beginning of July, 2017 the American Federation of Musicians & Employers’ Pension Fund (AFM-EPF) distributed a notice informing members the Plan continues to be in critical status and “it remains likely that the Plan will become critical and declining at some point in the future, perhaps as early as…April 1, 2018.” For the most part, AFM-EPF Trustees adopted a “here’s what the problem is and what we would like …
On 1/17/2017 we examined the growing problems within the American Federation of Musicians & Employers’ Pension Fund (AFM-EPF) that led to the Board of Trustees to send a letter to plan members explaining how the fund has suffered since the economic downturn and their plan for recovery. Since then, that letter does not appear to have assuaged anxiety among some AMF-EPF members. A group of AMF member musicians met in New York City …
Pensions; can’t live with them, can’t avoid a crippling social collapse without them. Recently, the American Federation of Musicians & Employers’ Pension Fund (AFM-EPF) Board of Trustees sent a letter to plan members explaining how the fund has suffered since the economic downturn and their plan for recovery. Unlike other union pension plans, the AFM-EPF is a defined benefit multiemployer pension plan. The organization describes the distinction to a single employer …
I’m away at the 2016 @ArtsMidwest conference today but want to quickly point out two items of notes related to substitute parity (paying substitute musicians an equal per-service rate as their salary based colleagues). Regular readers know the topic of equal pay for equal work among orchestra musicians is a popular topic and one ongoing curiosity throughout those articles is a complete reticence by spokespersons from orchestra player associations, player conferences, …
Imagine for a moment that you’re passionate about Haggis, so much so that you went to school to study everything you could learn about Haggis and earned a degree in Culinary Arts with the goal of launching your very own startup food truck that does nothing but produce Haggis dishes, let’s call it Pluck You*. Since you’re in startup mode, Pluck You does generate revenue but not enough to live on …