Great Barrington — Arts organizations in Berkshire and Columbia counties have a long way to go when it comes to properly paying their employees and interns. That is the bottom line for a new study on pay equity for employees at arts organizations that was released on Wednesday, June 14.
The year-long study was undertaken by a group of local arts organizations, including Art Omi, Berkshire Art Center, Community Access to the Arts (CATA), Flying Cloud Institute, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Theater, the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, WAM Theatre, and the Williamstown Theatre Festival, with financial support for the study undertaken by the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation. The study was prepared by Aron Goldman, a project consultant from Amherst, who is also a trainer and advisor from the Philanthropic Partnership for Black Communities organization.
As part of the study, 188 employees from 43 different arts organizations in Berkshire and Columbia counties were interviewed. The results of the study were presented at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center at an event on June 14.
“This is an issue that is systemic, historic, and larger than any one organization,” Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center Executive Director Janis Martinson said at the beginning of the June 14 event. “Low compensation in our sector is long-standing, but the generational experience of it is new. The notion that these are genteel jobs, and the social exclusion that results from that thinking that people are left out and behind is old, but the tolerance for that is changing. Simply put, the old business model [of arts organizations] does not work because it is inequitable. We hope and believe that bringing cultural sector pay equity into the limelight will generate mutual learning, accelerate action, and generate greater accountability. We can change this paradigm through recognizing systemic failure for what it is by rethinking the balance of people and programs explicitly asking for funding for equitable compensation.”
“Passion doesn’t pay the rent,” Executive Director of The Berkshire Arts Center Lucie Castaldo said. “As long as working in the arts is considered a privilege, only the privileged will work in our field. It is a long-standing open secret that compensation for work in the cultural sector is most often financially precarious. We can no longer ignore that low pay is also a barrier to building and retaining a diverse workforce that is socially inclusive across race, ethnicity, socio-economic background, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, ability, and more.”
Key findings in the report, as presented, include:
- Only 39 percent of entry- and mid-level employees can imagine a future employed by an arts or culture institution in the region;
- Three-quarters of the employees surveyed reported that they worked unpaid overtime;
- Most entry and mid-level employees have multiple jobs out of necessity;
- Many of the workers surveyed perceive their financial compensation, job expectations, and benefits to be unfair and unreasonable;
- At least 33 percent of employers who took part in the survey reported that they use unpaid interns; and
- Many of the employees at the organizations, approximately 284 employees, work full-time and earn less than $50,000 annually, while approximately 244 employees at the organizations are part-time with hourly wages less than $50,000 full-time annual equivalent.
The report states that “65 percent of regional arts and culture employers surveyed either have no plans to increase pay equity, ‘haven’t had a chance to delve into this yet,’ or ‘aren’t sure what steps to take.’” However, the report offers multiple recommendations, with which many of the representatives of the organizations at the June 14 event stated that they would follow through.
The recommendations include:
- Developing a framework and philosophy for each organization on how compensation is set, which includes a commitment on minimum pay raises based on living wage data;
- Creating consistent salary bands based on job titles and responsibilities, with an emphasis on transparency to staff;
- The listing of pay on all job descriptions and hiring postings;
- The elimination of unpaid internships;
- The commitment to 40 hour work weeks, with exceptions guided by transparent protocols;
- Providing robust benefits for employees, including for paid sick, holiday, vacation, personal, bereavement, and jury duty. Along with health insurance; and
Providing prorated benefits for part-time employees.
During the June 14 event, Executive Director of the Berkshire Immigrant Center Melissa Canavan, and Program Assessment Coordinator and Teaching Institute Mentor for the Berkshire Art Center Kristin Grippo read a selection of survey responses given by employees in the arts sector. Before they did, however, both Canavan and Grippo gave their own personal experiences when it came to working for arts organizations.
“I’ve worked for the Berkshire Art Center for the past nine years, and I have lived in the Berkshires for 11 years,” Grippo said. “Over the years, I have had to work multiple jobs as an educator just to make ends meet. Just recently, I’ve had to move 25 minutes over the border to New York State because I can no longer afford to live in the Berkshires, the community that I love and have served for so long. I’m happy to report that I have taken on more of a full-time organization. Sadly, it’s still barely a living wage. I’m here as a representative of a human who loves these organizations, but we just want to be able to pay the rent and feed our children.”
“My nonprofit career in the arts started in the Berkshires as an intern in 2015,” Canavan said. “Although the pay I received was absurd, it didn’t matter to me because it was an amazing opportunity. In fact, to me, it was an investment. But what I later realized was that I was privileged to that mentality, because I could afford to be in that position. After my internship, I was offered to stay on as a year-round, full-time staff member over the next five years. I would move laterally in my career, and eventually upward, but my paycheck didn’t reflect my value and my worth. I would start having conversations with friends and family members telling me that if I had worked in a different industry or sector, I’d be making a certain amount of dollars. That didn’t exactly feel good when I had to create excuses for my industry.”
The following are some of the survey responses both Canavan and Grippo read:
- “I find it impossible to save, make plans for the future, or even make ends meet just by my own income.”
- “The pay is too low and the workload is too high.”
- “I’d love to stay in this field, but it’s not possible unless there are major changes in compensation.”
- “The revenue coming in for arts and culture is disproportionate to the wages and benefits of employees.”
- “Living expenses are not entirely met for my earnings, so other income from savings and family members are necessary to cover living expenses.”
- “Even after 10 years, I have no retirement savings and I’m still paying off college debt. I have no safety net and I am sacrificing financial stability along with my mental and physical health. This is not sustainable.”
“It turns out there’s an invisible underclass among arts organizations in the Berkshires,” Goldman told The Berkshire Edge in an interview before the June 14 event. “We wanted to put a human face on the experience of entry- and mid-level workers. We’re really hopeful that once we tell those stories and provide that data, there will be a will to align those equity values with some real changes among nonprofit employers, not just in the arts.”
The entry- and mid-level workers sector of the employees surveyed “… represents a lot of people of color, the LGBT community, and other groups that are already experiencing different forms of oppression,” according to Goldman. “Financial precariousness, with the added dimension of marginalization, creates a very unstable population, and it’s not good for the art sector,” Goldman said. “It’s not hard to get compensation data for the highest-paid employees of nonprofits because that stuff is free online, but it’s very hard to get a handle on what is going on at the bottom of the ladder. The data we obtained through this report is very valuable and pretty eye-opening. The group of organizations is determined to use these findings to develop recommendations and commitments to change. These employers need to be more than the sum of their parts and start advocating for policy and systems change and expansion of funding patterns to pay for equity.”
Representatives from local arts organizations at the event who spoke to The Berkshire Edge said that they are all eager to make changes as recommended in the report. “Workers are our greatest resource,” Castaldo told The Berkshire Edge. “Everything we do is dependent on the artists that work for us. Over the last five years, we’ve made improvements, but everything can be improved even further.”
“Some of the data that we heard today is sobering and stark, but it’s really important for us all to be aware of the impact of the low compensation on workers in our field so that we can collectively work together to devise solutions,” CATA Executive Director Margaret Keller said. “I think every organization in this cohort group has been working in earnest on these issues independently, but it has been really powerful to come together as a collective to work together. We feel that bringing this conversation into a public space today and inviting others into the conversation, to share their experiences and stories and to work together on solutions. I don’t want to be glib or suggest that these are easy problems to solve, but I do think that there are steps that organizations can take right now to improve compensation. I want to underline that many, many organizations are doing just that—many of us are taking steps. Part of what we wanted to do in the report and in today’s event was to share some of these ideas publicly.”
Jacob’s Pillow Deputy Director A. J. Pietrantone said that collaboration between organizations was not only important in creating the report but will also be important when it comes to creating solutions moving forward. “We have an obligation to address these problems, and I do think that the solutions are achievable over time,” Pietrantone said. “It’s a long-term education process among audiences and donors about what the real cost is of delivering quality arts programs, including what is fair and equitable. Every little bit of this brings us closer to solutions.”
“It’s made all the difference on this project to work collaboratively,” Martinson told The Berkshire Edge. “I think that we have inspired each other, we’ve learned from each other. And we’ve pushed this into a larger project, addressing things more systematically than simply organizationally. I think individually we could have made these commitments to improving each of our organizations. But this is trying to actually change an industry and region.”
Click here for a full copy of the report.
