Help us fight for a sustainable music business!
Fair Trade Music connects musicians, venues, and fans to promote a healthy music business—one that pays musicians fair wages.
We certify that venues have “Fair Trade Music” when they pay wages and benefits that are fair to both the musicians and the venue — that respect the livelihood of the performers, yet don’t put the venue out of business.
Reprinted from the Local 1000 Newsletter “New Deal“
by John McCutcheon
You walk into your local coffee shop and you see it: Fair Trade Coffee. Those three small words speak volumes. Decent pay, fair working conditions, a voice in one’s work life. Once a rarity, the fair trade concept has spread to clothing, chocolate, even tourism. AFM Local 99 of Portland, OR knew a good idea when they saw it and coined Fair Trade Music. When I saw a reference to this in their Local’s newsletter I recognized it too. For years our Fair Folk project had floundered under the weight of having to constantly explain what it meant.
But “Fair Trade” was a concept you didn’t have to introduce. The Executive Board agreed and we’re proud to introduce Local 1000’s Fair Trade Music initiative. What does it do? It creates a community of fairness in our trade and streamlines the process by which individual musicians can assure their future. It does this via two simple requirements:
While Fair Folk sought to establish a “national contract” to which employers would sign on to, Fair Trade Music establishes a threshold through which collective bargaining agreements can naturally evolve and, at the same time, introduce employers to the Pension Fund and the ease of Local 1000 contracts.
We’ll be launching the campaign this fall with an initial line-up of 50 venues that will be Charter Members of Fair Trade Music. These will include clubs, concert series, house concerts, folk societies, etc. We have a goal of another 50 venues by year’s end.
What does this mean to you? It means 100 venues that are educated in and will accept pension-bearing contracts without having to do the training yourself. 100 venues in which you do not have to argue to get at least minimum scale. Canadian venues that will pay your GST or HST. 100 venues in which you can feel at home, where you know presenters understand and agree to your Local’s concept of fairness in wage and working conditions. And 100 is just the beginning. What about 200 by the end of 2012?
How did we get these venues? By asking them. One by one. We’ll get more Fair Trade Music venues if Local 1000 members start talking to employers about the idea, giving them the information, following up with them, encouraging them.
What venues do you play that you think are good fits for Fair Trade Music? Are there employers you work with that just need a little nudge to meet Fair Trade Music standards? We’ll have stickers for the doors, digital artwork for web sites, posters, and T-shirts; and a list of honor on our web site. We’ll praise those who meet the standards and pressure those who fall short.
There aren’t enough times when people get props for simply doing the right thing. And Fair Trade Music signals just that…and hopefully sets a standard by which our entire community can be measured.
Fair Trade Music PDX is way stoked to announce their first participant: the ten-day Village Building Convergence, a fundraising event for the neighborhood-transformation-design-architecture-building-community organization City Repair Project.
We’re also way stoked to be working with such an amazing group.
They’ve agreed to pay EVERY musician – not just a few, as it was in the past – at least our minimum 1st tier scale. That they’re paying musicians despite everyone else volunteering their time underscores the Village Building Convergence’s commitment to supporting the artists in a real, rather than merely rhetorical, way.
The main part of any campaign, especially a public relations campaign, is to get the word out. In our case, that means informing club musicians that what they do is worth something more than zero, and informing fans that club musicians are the last to get paid, if at all.
Toward those ends, Fair Trade Music is partnering with local music retailers. We congratulate and welcome Rhythm Traders in Portland as our first official supporter!
Rhythm Traders is one of the nation’s premier retailers of traditional and contemporary percussion instruments from all over the world, including the United States.
Musicians themselves, Owner Brad Boynton and the other Rhythm Traders staff didn’t hesitate to jump on board – they were all too familiar with the conditions we’re working to ameliorate.
As supporters, Rhythm Traders has agreed to keep our stickers, buttons, and brochures on the counter of their giant new NE Portland store, as well as help via their electronic media connections. They’re also offering a discount to Fair Trade Music endorsers, who will receive details via email. (you can sign up as an endorser on The Fair Trade Music PDX page)
In exchange, they’ll get some fine looking “Official Supporter” stickers for their doors, and additional promotion from Fair Trade Music. Also, In much the same way that it will for live music venues, participation will enhance their public image: The public will know that they support musicians earning a living wage.
AFM Indie recently announced a new website called Venuology. It’s in beta, and currently only has NYC club info, but it looks pretty promising, as does AFM Indie. Venuology is a forum for musicians to post reviews of live music venues. It strikes me as being especially useful for touring bands, and will hopefully be more constructive than Craigslist flaming.
Speaking of Craigslist, we’ve just heard about a related project, the Portland Venue Information Project, or PDX-VIP. Musicians working in Portland are asked to take the survey here.
Other recent news here at FTM-PDX : The venue agreement is near completion, as is the supporters’ agreement for music retailers and the like. Our internal online contact management system is coming along, Video PSA’s with FAMOUS ARTISTS are in the works, and Another happy hour is pencilled in for April 13 at Zaytoons, hopefully featuring a music Q & A with someone from the local press. Stay tuned!
