Heartland Concerts is an all volunteer folk and acoustic music series, presenting the finest in local, regional and national performers in the Rochester, New York area.

I have followed with interest the discussion of unions and folk music, but in all the commentary no one seems to have hit upon the essence of the problem. The union movement arose to protect workers in large industries where any untrained or unskilled individual was easily interchanged with any other worker. The owner of the mine or the chunk of coal couldn't have cared less who was swinging the pick or driving the truck; the coal got to market. The union's great strength lay in the threat to remove the labor of all these workers at one time. This collective power was effective where the power of one worker to withdraw his labor was not of any consequence.

Before I became an engineer I was an electronic technician; one of the skilled trades. There are fewer people who can do that job, and a failure to be on the job can have much more serious consequences. If I am not there to fix the essential machinery the entire production line goes down. I can and have downed tools and changed jobs at times when conditions became intolerable. Because my skills are harder to replace, the union is less relevant to me.

The fundamental question in this controversy is how a union, which is designed to protect a collective body of unskilled workers, can be relevant to a musician who is the essence of individual skill. In an industrial setting the worker's pay comes from the eventual sale of the product or service. A demand for scale wages is reasonable because the value of the product is not based on the individual skill of the worker.

This is emphatically not the case in folk music. The value of the product is directly connected with the skill of the worker and the opinion of the audience, not to mention such imponderables as the weather, the venue and who else may be playing in town that night. It is one thing to demand scale for a performance, but if no one comes in the door and plunks down their money such demands are nonsense. In other words, the essential power of the union movement is completely irrelevant to the professional musician.

I think Ian Robb is on the trail of a workable solution. If traditional union tactics are unworkable, then creative people in local 1000 must redefine the role of the union so it will work for the individualistic world of folk music. The primary focus should be supporting the individual musician. The union's collective power is ideal to offer the benefits found in industrial jobs such as health insurance and credit unions. Perhaps a database of venues on a national scale with information from the membership on just what to expect from the places they are playing could be useful. The point is the union must offer significant benefits to its members or it will not have any members.

Unions were formed to respond to specific conditions and they did the job of correcting those conditions. Labor conditions are no longer the same as they were in the heyday of union activity, but much of the union movement has failed to change with these conditions. The current slump in union membership reflects this. If local 1000 can make itself relevant to the folk music performer and provide an essential service to them it will thrive, if it refuses to change to meet the challenge it will fail. Rallies, rhetoric and appeals to the good old days will not do the job, but inspired leadership can. I hope it will happen because it could make finding good folk music easier for me, the member of the audience who seems to have been ignored in all the talk of unions and music.