DocM,
First off, I am your friend so please don't get offended here. Let me relate a story about being a "union" and "non-union" worker in the same industry.
I was a stagehand for many years and I started working in a local college theater. As the head Audio Engineer, part of my job involved my sitting in the Audience behind the Main house console to do the "house Mix" that you the audience heard. Usually when I did the house mix I simply wore my same dirty jeans and black tee shirt that I wore to work to set-up the gear and the stage in.
A year or two later I started splitting my time by also working at a larger "Union" house, the famous Brooklyn Academy of Music or BAM that many of you may have heard about. It is America's oldest performing art center. Anyway, at this higher level house that is where some of the best of off-Broadway is first performed and developed, the house Audio engineers would bring a clean pair of black jeans and a button down shirt and sometimes even a tie to wear during the performance while sitting at the main console in the house.
Well, I was trying to get paid better and treated with more respect back at that first college theater back up in the Bronx. So after working at a more professional level out at BAM, I decided if I wanted to be treated like a better proffesional I better act like one, and then I could certainly and rightly be treated and compensated as one. So I started bringing a better change of clothes with me on performance days for a number of months all while I could not seem to get them to budge on giving me a modest raise.
Well one night "Ray Charles" came to our theater. Great show and a pleasure to work with him and his crew. But anyway, I was told by my direct superior, Frank the Stage Manager, that I would not be "flying" the console that night as Ray's manager always flies it for them, both monitors for the performer as well as the house mix. So I simply came dressed in my dirtier work clothes with no change on hand. This was a one day in and out sort of a show, so we loaded them in that morning, set them up that afternoon, and held our show that same night.
Well come show time, Ray's manager and sound man looks at me and says, he wanted me to fly the console and that he would simply act as a sort of "producer" standing next to me, directing me as what he was looking for in the mix. This was fine my me, I knew the sound of my house and my gear best (console was garbage, an old EV. I did my best work with the choice and placement of my mics which some were actually pretty good, work with the laws of physics not against them), and this is how it is usually done at the higher levels on the recording side anyway, and that is where I had originally started.
Well, need I tell you that the man who was the director of the entire theater comes backstage after the show and starts giving me and Frank hell, because I was in the house that night dressed in my regular stagehand clothes instead of a shirt and tie. This was never the policy there only a few months earlier as it was me that started such a thing and it was never formally written out anywhere either. This conflict lead to my leaving that theater for good and almost never taking another "non-union" assignment again in any theater. I had personally raised the bar and acted more proffessional and now they simply wanted it from then on for free.
I bring up this tale from long ago because this is how I see P4P going especially since we are up against the gov't and the carriers that have an anti-trust waiver who have both proven they will take and take without ever returning a gosh darn thing to you or us. Be careful about giving the camel an inch and letting him stick his head in the tent; he will certainly come into the tent all the way and you will end up sleeping with him in your bed.
This is why I still feel that the only way for our side of this industry to be treated fairly is to be granted the right to organize and strike. The side with the stronger hand, the carriers and the gov't which controls your access to your own "end retail customers of your services" and sets the rates that you will be paid for your services, will simply continue to take and take, coming up with scheme after scheme, to get more from you for less. P4P is nothing more and nothing less. What conditions one works under, what tasks they need to perform, that rate at which they will be compensated, the equipment they will or won't use to perform such tasks, are all issues for collective bargining. And one is certainly an employee when one no longer has direct access to that end retail customer of their end services. If we don't work for the carrier or the gov't (contract with them) then we can't have free and open access to our customers of our services.
Those that don't learn from history are damned to repeat it. Please learn from this little tale. Thanks for listening.....
