Here’s how Elsa Hiltner sees that future. All theaters will end unpaid internships. Those with annual budgets greater than $1 million will meet the minimum wage and eventually the living wage for all workers. The compensation categories or actual pay of each worker will be clearly defined and shared. The highest salary in an organization will exceed the lowest by no more than a factor of five. Schedules will be set “as far as possible” to fit within a 40-hour work week.
Those are among the criteria for certification by Pay Equity Standards, a new program developed by Hiltner, who has worked in theater production for 15 years, and her colleagues at the Chicago-based advocacy organization On Our Team. Two small companies in this city—Collaboration, dedicated to social justice, and 2nd Story, dedicated to “real stories from real people for real change”—are the first to fit the bill. On June 29, they received, among other things, the right to use (but only until the end of 2022) a beautiful badge with a laurel wreath in their marketing materials. Six more theaters in the country are working towards certification in 2023.
They are small companies. New York nonprofits with artistic directors earning $1 million or more a year—and with pay differentials that can approach a factor of 50—seem unlikely to apply. Still, as with LEED certification or fair trade stickers or organic food labels, the hope is that the badge will ultimately help theater users choose work that aligns with their values. While they wait for that to happen, theaters can benefit, Hiltner says, from happier, harder-working staff—and from the positive response she’s seen from funders and donors to institutions that are actually “living out their missions.”
But it is also the case that funders and donors generally prefer to contribute to theaters that make a lot of theater. That’s one of the problems facing PlayCo, a New York company that is implementing a new compensation model this year.
As described to me by Kate Luwald, PlayCo’s founding producer, and Robert Bradshaw, its managing director, the plan is designed to address not only the usual inequalities by raising everyone to at least a living wage, but also to correct the disparity in the pay between employees (who may be full-time) and artists (who usually work for a month or two).
This is accomplished in part by placing each job in a clearly defined and leveled pay bracket: a stage director is compensated at the same rate as Loewald and Bradshaw, a full-time associate director at the same rate as a freelance costume designer. Since all categories are “transparent”, everyone knows what everyone is doing, which in almost all cases is more than before. (The exception is Loewald, who took a cut.) Based on an estimate of 250 hours of work, directors who previously received $3,500 will now receive $7,100.
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