WHO WE ARE:
MWA is an organization of, by, and for independent music workers. MWA seeks to initiate, organize, and support collective action that empowers independent music workers.
MWA seeks to create a world where music is valued financially and culturally and music workers benefit and achieve dignity in their lives.
POINTS OF UNITY:
MWA works with other organizations where and when our principles, perspectives and goals are in harmony with theirs. Our "Points Of Unity" document lists many of MWA's core beliefs:
MWA STEERING COMMITTEE:
Brittany Anjou, Aaron Edgcomb, John Medeski, Anders Nilsson, Gene Perla, Kasey Price, Kevin Ray, Marc Ribot, Kristina Teushcler
MWA ADVISORY BOARD:
Phil Andrews (he/him) is an organizer and music worker. As a multi-instrumentalist, bandleader and songwriter, he has recorded, played live and written songs for many bands and projects, from radical marching bands to floating art boat collectives to queerpunk to art rock to musicals about labor strikes and beyond. He’s currently the bandleader and composer for the 15-piece disco punk outfit Funkrust Brass Band. As an organizer, Andrews started out as a community organizer in Baltimore before moving to New York to work for CIR/SEIU, a union of medical interns and residents. He then spent ten years with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union as the organizing director of the retail sector. There, he revitalized and led the union’s national strategy on new organizing in the retail sector, winning campaigns and contracts in music instrument retail, fast fashion, thrift stores, retail financial services and adult toy stores, from locally owned small chains like Babeland, national chains like Guitar Center and global retail industry leaders like Zara. He also helped to establish and develop the Retail Action Project, a union-sponsored worker center for retail workers. He’s currently serving as an independent organizing consultant. Find links to his projects and work here: www.philandrews.org
Donald Cohen is the founder and executive director of In the Public Interest, a national research and policy center that studies the impacts of privatization on public goods. He is the former political director of the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council. He is currently on the board of the Ballot Initiatives Strategy Center Education Fund. He is a co-founder of the Rainey Day Fund that provides assistance to BIPOC, LGBTQ+, disabled artists, and others who add to the rich fabric of roots music. He is on the Music Council of the Artists Rights Alliance. His opinion pieces and articles have appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The New York Daily News, The New Republic, The American Prospect, The Nation and other online and print outlets. He is also the co-author of the upcoming book, The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back to be released in November 2021.
Kevin Erickson (he/him) is the director of Future of Music Coalition. As FMC's director, Kevin Erickson works at the intersection of DIY music, community organizing, and policy. His experience spans the full range of the music industry, from community radio to live show booking and promotion to brick & mortar music retail management. Before joining FMC's team in 2012, he directed All-ages Movement Project, a national non-profit network of all-ages music venues and youth music programs. He has contributed opinion pieces to outlets as disparate as The Nation and Pitchfork, volunteers with Positive Force DC, and remains active as a musician and record producer, operating Swim-Two-Birds recording studio in DC.
William A. Herbert (he/him) is a labor scholar and attorney who leads a national labor-management research center located in New York. Bill’s research interests focus on labor and employment law, labor history, collective action, new workplace technologies, and precarious employment issues. While not a player, he listens by ear. Bill is a former Deputy Chair of the New York State Public Employment Relations Board and a former union-side attorney. He authored the chapter “Public Workers” in Joshua B. Freeman (ed.) City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York (Columbia University Press 2019) and is a co-author of “Geoprivacy, Convenience, and the Pursuit of Anonymity in Digital Cities” in Wenzhong Shu, Michael Goodchild, Michael Batty, Mei-Po Kwan and Anshu Zhang (eds.), Urban Informatics (forthcoming Springer 2021). His previously published works are available here: https://works.bepress.com/william_herbert/
Paul Frank has served as Director of Organizing at the American Federation of Musicians (AFM). He also served as Deputy Director of Organizing for CSEA, Local 1000, AFSCME where for over a decade he coordinated comprehensive campaigns to organize over 2,000 direct care workers in the private sector in New York City as well as public sector workers in Long Island and the Hudson Valley. Currently Paul is a working as a consultant, advising unions and community-based organizations on organizing and strategic campaigns.
Paul has an extensive background in public and private sector union organizing using creative and innovative approaches to build real power. He has a long history of coalition building working with elected officials, community leaders and organizations both to meet specific campaign objectives as well as to build solid relationships between labor and community. His major focus has been on creating comprehensive, community-based campaigns that empower working people to make real change in the workplace and in the community at large. He brings particular expertise in grass roots organizing and comprehensive campaigns.
Naoki Fujita (he/him) is currently a Staff Attorney at TakeRoot Justice (formerly the “Urban Justice Center”). TakeRoot provides legal, participatory research and policy support to community-based organization through New York. He is a member of the Workers’ Rights Team. At TakeRoot, his practice includes representing service sector and construction employees in discrimination and wage/hour employment actions. He started his legal career as an Honors Attorney at the regional office of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) located in Brooklyn. He has provided testimony on employment-related legislation before the NYS Legislature and the NYC Council. His research on labor conditions of frontline retail workers has been cited by the New York Times and NPR’s Marketplace. Before his legal career, Naoki worked as an organizer for SEIU, UNITE HERE! and the Retail Action Project (RAP). He also serves as a shop steward for UAW, Local 2320.
Olympia Kazi (she/her) is an urban activist, an architecture critic, and an advocate for arts and culture. A co-founder of the NYC Artist Coalition and the Music Workers Alliance, Olympia currently serves as the vice-chair of the New York City Nightlife Advisory Board and on Manhattan’s Community Board 3.
Kortni Malone (she/her) is the Director of Leadership Development at Coworker.org. She has spent over a decade fighting for justice for students and communities in Michigan and across the country. A teacher by trade, Kortni left the school system in Detroit to seek new ways to build power with Black and Brown people. She has worked in non-profit as well as at the intersection of issue advocacy and electoral strategy with organizations like Color of Change, NextGen America, and Elizabeth Warren for President. Throughout her career, she has trained hundreds of folks from professionals in the organizing world to volunteers and community members—cultivating leadership and building power to fight for change. Kortni believes that everyday folks, with the vision, the training, and a good plan, have the power they need to get the change they seek.
Wilneida Negrón (she/her/ella) is the director of policy and research at coworker.org. She most recently worked at the Ford Foundation, where she led cross-thematic area strategy development between the Gender, Race, Ethnic Justice, Technology and Society, Mission Investing, Future of Work(ers), and Civic Engagement Thematic areas, with a focus on helping labor movements deepen and leverage economic partnerships and movement-based partnerships. She is currently part of the Steering Committee Team for the Ford Foundation’s and Mozilla’s Public efforts to explore how to continue to foster the impact and sustainability of public interest technology projects in the US, Europe, and the Global South. She works on the frontlines of social change spaces, fostering new multi-issue and cross-sectoral approaches and solutions to our increasingly complex socio-technical world and serves as a strategic advisor, consultant, and capacity-builder to emerging and established national and global civil and human rights organizations. She has a PhD in Comparative Politics, with a specialization in social and political implications of emerging technologies in East Asia and Latin America, a Masters in Public Administration, and an M.Phil. in International and Global Affairs. She is a lifelong fellow for Data & Society Research Institute and the Atlantic Fellows Program for Racial Equity.
Laila Nur (pronouns: she/her | he/him) joins the MWA Advisory Board with almost a decade of grassroots organizing, leadership development and campaign experience, having served as the NC Lead Organizer for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, board member and organizer for North Carolina IPO, Durham For All and previously organized with SEIU’s Fight For $15 campaign. Currently working as a Senior Campaign Strategist for Coworker.org, he supports and strategizes with workers across industries to make meaningful changes in the workplace. Adjacent to her political work in labor, Laila is a genre non-conforming singer-songwriter, creating over a decade of political music from folk, soul, samba and punk.
Neil Turkewitz (he/him) is President at Turkewitz Consulting Group. A copyright activist and member of the Artist Rights Alliance, he served as EVP International at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was Vice-Chairman, Industry Trade Advisory Committee, and a former member of the Board of the Chamber of Commerce’s Global Intellectual Property Center. Follow him on Twitter @neilturkewitz and on Medium.
Sean Quinn (she/her) is an EU and UK trial lawyer (barrister). While practicing in Ireland she had a dual specialization in Intellectual Property and Criminal Law. Sean's criminal practice, among other cases, involved being hired by a police representative body to represent 22 whistle-blower police officers in a 4-year long trial involving, inter alia, police manufacturing fake terrorist bombs, the IRA, MI6, the planting of evidence by the police to frame innocent people for murder, and death threats against the Tribunal judge and lawyers by a member of the police force. (The Morris Tribunal). Sean practiced at the bar in Ireland for 12 years and was called to the bar in England in 2007 where her practice at Lamb Chambers focused exclusively on intellectual property. In 2013 she set up a sole practitioner’s chambers, Quinn Walpole IP, focusing on private client advices for film makers, authors, artists, composers and musicians. Sean lectured in law at Blackhall Place (law school/ solicitors) and at Trinity College and from time to time gives a private seminar to creatives entitled “Understanding and Managing your rights” and has worked with the highly regarded IP firm Frankfurt, Kurnit, Klein and Selz in the U.S.
In 2023 MWA received support from the New York State Council for the Arts in the form of a NYSCA Support for Organizations grant.