This is how Elsa Hiltner sees that future† All theaters end unpaid internships. Those with an annual budget of more than $1 million will meet the minimum wage and ultimately the living wage for all workers. Compensation categories, or each employee’s actual wage, will be clearly defined and shared. The highest salary in an organization will exceed the lowest by a factor of five. Schedules will be set “as much as possible” to fit within a 40-hour work week.
Those are some of the benchmarks for certification by the Pay Equity Standards, a new program developed by Hiltner, who spent 15 years in theater production, and her colleagues at Chicago-based advocacy group On Our Team. Two small businesses in that city—Collaboraction, dedicated to social justice, and 2nd Story, dedicated to “real stories from real people for real change”—are the first to meet all the requirements. On June 29, among other things, they were granted the right (but only for the remainder of 2022) to use a beautiful laurel-wrapped badge in their marketing materials. Six more theaters across the country are working toward certification by 2023.
They are small businesses. New York nonprofits with artistic directors earning $1 million or more a year — and with pay spreads approaching a factor of 50 — seem unlikely to apply. But as with LEED certification or fair trade stickers or organic food labels, the hope is that eventually the badge will help consumers of theater 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 responses she sees from financiers and donors to institutions that actually “live their mission.”
But it is also the case that financiers and donors generally prefer to contribute to theaters that make a lot of theatre. That’s one of the issues that PlayCo, a New York City company, is implementing a new compensation model this year.
As described to me by Kate Loewald, the founder of PlayCo, and Robert Bradshaw, its director, the plan aims not only to address the usual inequalities by giving everyone at least a living wage, but also to address the unequal pay between staff. (who may be full-time) and performers (who usually work for a month or two).
It does this in part by placing each job in a clearly defined and equal pay category: a director gets the same salary as Loewald and Bradshaw, a staffer at the same rate as a freelance costume designer. Because all categories are ‘transparent’, everyone knows what everyone makes, and that is in almost all cases more than before. (The exception is Loewald, who took part.) Based on an estimate of 250 hours of work, drivers who previously paid $3,500 will now be paid $7,100.
