This is the second of five observations about the arts after 18 months of COVID (note I’m not saying “post-“COVID). The first part was on money and the arts. Today I want to focus on a disruption in the labor market and how it will affect the arts.
Big Picture
Since April, millions and millions of workers have quit their jobs. Record numbers in April, July and August. This after a year when layoffs because of COVID drove the unemployment rate sky high. Now there are millions of jobs going unfilled. Many businesses have had to cut back hours and services because of labor shortages. The global supply chain is backing up in part because of labor shortages. For the first time in a long time, wages are going up. There has been much much speculation as to why workers are quitting in record numbers. Is it a temporary phenomenon or something more fundamental?
Working in the Arts, Pre-Pandemic
Employment in the arts has been broken for a long time. There are about 5 million workers in the arts in the US and the number of artists has been increasing faster than the general workforce. But labor disputes have been common, contentious and adversarial. Employees on the lower rungs of arts organizations are generally paid poorly while those at the top do pretty well. There’s a significant gender gap in pay. Contract workers, particularly in theatres and museums, have few protections.
It’s been somewhat difficult to quantify the gaps, until recently. For example, in 2019 Philadelphia Museum of Art assistant curator Michelle Millar Fisher and her colleagues started a Google spreadsheet and asked museum and gallery workers to anonymously report their job status and income. Hundreds did. It wasn’t pretty. That spreadsheet has since been removed, but the exercise, which sparked a similar project by workers in the media, revealed wide disparities in compensation across the visual arts world.
The Arts in COVID
During COVID, 1.3 million workers in the arts lost their jobs, according to estimates by Americans for the Arts. A study by Johns Hopkins University reports that, “as of September 2021, the percentage of job losses at nonprofit arts organizations remains more than 3 times worse than the average of all nonprofits (-14.8% vs. -4.5%).”
Job losses across the arts amounted to about 25 percent of employed workers. For temporary, freelance and contract workers the losses were much more severe. It seems obvious that when performances and exhibitions shut down in March 2020 that workers would be let go or have their pay reduced. But now, many workers are beginning to ask why many arts institutions let them go so quickly. It turns out many arts institutions managed to do okay financially during COVID. (of course one reason they did okay was because they let workers go, but still…) One report on cultural institutions lays it out:
The 228 larger institutions collectively enacted worker reductions of more than 14,400 employees, or at least 28 percent of their workforce, according to the report, titled “Cultural Institutions Cashed In, Workers Got Sold Out.” Of the 69 institutions for which financial data was available at the time of the analysis, roughly half ended the year with operating surpluses.
And Now?
As this Joshua Kosman story in the San Francisco Chronicle reports in the Bay Area, the arts workforce, and those being recruited into it, is changing. “We’ve never had as many openings at one time. And we recognize that in hiring so many positions at once, we have a huge responsibility — and opportunity.”
It makes sense — staffs were downsized, and in building back as things reopen, why simply recreate what you had before? But workers are sensing they also have an opportunity now. Unions such as the powerful IATSE (stagehands) have seized on the disruption to argue for better working conditions:
“Observers believe the stance at least in part was due to the hardship brought upon by the pandemic of the past 18 months, with IATSE members among the hardest hit as many are hourly employees with little financial protections who struggled when production shut down for months. The pandemic also made many reexamine their work-life balance, making grueling long shifts with very little turnaround time no longer acceptable. That change in perspective helped turn sufficient rest time into a main cause members rallied around.”
In Baltimore, museum workers at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Museum have been unionizing. And there’s more to come around the country. Why? Bloomberg reports that:
Workers at unionized cultural institutions experienced 28% fewer job cuts on average than those at non-unionized workplaces during the pandemic, according to a report by Cultural Workers United, a program run by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), one of the leading unions representing public-service workers.
Takeaways
- DEI initiatives are roiling the arts labor market: The arts have been focused on the lack of diversity across the arts for a number of years. But the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 made it an urgent imperative. Over the past few years data measuring diversity – racial and gender – has become better and more reliable, and the gaps have been glaring. In response, in some artforms – the movie industry, TV, and theatre, for example – there are commitments to hiring a percentage of diverse candidates across the workforce, both in front and behind the scenes. For example, new Oscar Award eligibility rules for Best Picture include stipulations for minimum percentages of actors, crew and creative staff who must be women or BIPOC. Some TV networks have also adopted quota minimums for BIPOC participation. Do a search for theatre diversity commitment and you’ll see pages of commitments to diversity by theatres across the country. Still not enough evidently. As arts organizations build their staffs again, the DEI imperative will become even more glaring. Unless it isn’t. This will impact artistic processes and product in both good and bad ways.
- The New Activists and Demands for Arts Organizations: Whether it’s climate change, fighting for racial justice, or holding funders to moral standards, many of today’s artists and young cultural workers are beginning to attack the institutions in which they work to hold them to ethical standards. Yes, the world is getting more and more polarized. And social media has made it easier to organize around issues. Universities have been under attack both from the inside (from students demanding their institutions behave in proscribed ways) and from the outside (demands for institutional behavior reform). The pressure on cultural institutions to express themselves politically is going to increase as the culture wars ramp up. Some will use this as an opportunity; others will be trapped by it.
- Threats to Institutions: Perhaps the biggest long-term shift in the arts is the transition away from institutions as the central structure in producing the arts. This trend intensified and accelerated during the COVID shutdown. For example, in the classical music world, the traditional artist management institution has been in decline for years. Increasingly many of the most inventive artists don’t fit into the traditional career paths and managements have largely been at a loss to promote them. During COVID, many of the big artist managers simply closed up for good. In an era where artists have more direct interaction with their fans, their projects (and careers) are becoming more entrepreneurial and independent. Institutions, on their end, are finding that audiences are less willing to buy into subscriptions, preferring to pick and choose what they support. The same thing is beginning to happen from the artist end — artists who are becoming choosier with which organizations they will work. Look for the rise of the independent arts producer, competing directly with staid traditional institutions that have difficulty being nimble enough to compete. Ha! you say. Institutions convey prestige and authority and artists need that. Sure, for now. But the tide of that authority is shifting big time, and the creativity of the institution and what it can offer will matter more and more. Woe to those who shuffle along business as usual. In some ways, the new producers, unencumbered with infrastructure and facilities, have a big advantage. Smart institutions will become more and more hybrid — working with creative teams outside to co-produce and promote.
- Distributed Workforce: During COVID we all learned to shift to remote working, meeting over Zoom and collaborating over Slack. Remote work isn’t ideal for all jobs, but there are benefits. For one thing, studies show that productivity actually goes up in remote work. But more important is the kind of worker you can work with. Hiring remote workers opens a talent pool you likely wouldn’t have access to if that worker had to move to your town and be employed full time by you. Buy a portion of someone’s time. Hire people who are actively part of networks outside your own. You’ll be able to afford talent you otherwise wouldn’t be able to. And the benefits of working with people who are “outside” your organization are enormous. These aren’t consultants, they’re people you have ongoing relationships with. It’s the workforce of the future, and rebuilding after COVID is the opportunity to make it happen.
Next: #3. The Hybrid Arts? Not so Much (at least not yet)
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