Changing Hands: Personal Changes and Money Woes

My mother used to tell me, “People will rise or fall to the level of the bar you set for them.”

She also used to say, “You’re responsible for your own happiness.”

I hate to admit it, but yet again, Mom is right…

Guys.

We have a problem with the American arts system.

I recently put my two weeks’ notice into my teaching artist job, which has been my heart and soul. I’ve been happily (and independent-contractually) employed for two and a half years now with the second-largest opera company in Chicago, which is the third largest city in the nation. My official title was Program Director and Lead Teacher. Their educational outreach department has seriously expanded since my arrival in 2015. Last year, our company held a Gala to raise funds for the upcoming season. The education department had a goal of $75,000---based on our performance within our educational outreach, the donors dug deep into their pockets and we raised closer to $90,000…for our department alone. Our educational outreach program works in conjunction with a local nonprofit, which receives funding from the state of Illinois and even MORE funding from the Federal government in the form of grants. These grants are used to fund the program I was responsible for running, as well as pay my and my coteachers’ wages. With all of this funding and money and prestige, you would assume that we were making a decent living as permanently-placed, year-round fully-engaged teaching artists, right?

I went broke this past semester. Raging, completely-financially-tapped-out broke.

For all of you artists who are currently considering fleeing your daytime desk jobs, let me explain a bit. Freelancing artists are almost exclusively deemed ‘independent contractors’ by organizations for tax and payment purposes. Being independently-contracted means that, for the most part, you will end up working for a stipend rather than a salary. This stipend is usually estimated with an agreed-upon hourly wage—a company agrees that you are worth X amount of dollars per hour, and they request that you work X amount of hours, and so the contract is drawn up and everyone signs and is happy, blah blah blah. If the company is legit, it will not only include actually working hours (or in this case, teaching hours) in the contract, but also extra hours for planning periods, meetings, rehearsal rescheduling, etc. I was paid $30/hr for a maximum of nine hours a week, six to eight weeks at a time on a semester-basis; for a teaching artist, this appears to be a really generous hourly-wage!

The trouble with this is, I have NEVER ended up working ‘just’ my contracted (read: ‘paid’) hours on a production. There is ALWAYS something else to work on, something else to address, some costume to secure or some choreography to tweak or something that has exploded and requires your immediate attention. My time sheets continually reflected that I went over my allotted time, sometimes by almost triple the amount. Last summer, I stopped counting at 96 unpaid hours mid-week, because the production work was not done and I knew more unpaid hours would have to be utilized.

The payments that I DID receive for my time were erratic; because of our independently-contracted state, teaching artists were unable to request direct deposit like the ‘real’ company employees. Instead, we were presented with paychecks every two weeks according to a schedule that was set and presented to us at the beginning of every semester…and then never followed. Our checks were never printed nor delivered in the mail on their timely due date. Sometimes, at the beginning of a semester, payments would be as much as a week or a week- and- a- half later than promised, due to ‘clerical errors’. Rents were often late and bills accrued more and more late fees. My coteacher became so sick of this, he would physically show up at the office every two weeks to demand his payment in person—he claimed it was the only way he could ensure receiving payment in a timely manner. When we asked our superior about this situation, she ‘fixed’ the issue for two pay periods, after which it returned to its tardy state. I’m sorry to say, my coteacher and I took this lying down--as contractors, we simply did not feel we had the social clout to formally complain about our pay being late.

And then, there was the issue of taxes. Because I was employed entirely on an independently-contracted basis, no taxes were withheld from my paychecks. The organization I worked for did not have to claim me as a full-time employee, so they technically did not have ‘financial obligations’ towards me tax-wise. In response, I became a bit of a tax-freak. I started downloading automatic mileage apps on my phone and using an app to track my purchases during company time, or for company usage. Even with tracking my mileage, my receipts and documenting every single thing I could think of, I would take a large personal hit on my personal taxes every year. I was forking over 4K+ for the untaxed hourly income I earned. As a freelancing artist making an average of 30K a year, this was a MAJOR financial hit. Even worse, I had no job security, as the program’s existence is based on grant awards on a by-semester basis. We had no decisive start and end date to the program until a few weeks beforehand, or sometimes even less than that. Should the state of Illinois go broke (it did) or the Federal government decide they no longer wanted to fund the public programs to the extent that they had been (they also did), my program and my personal paycheck would take a hit (it did…twice).

It wasn’t as if all of this pay inefficiency went unnoticed. My direct superiors TRIED to help. They would suggest artists I could collaborate with in hopes of getting cheap assisted labor, or send the office intern over to my school as an extra pair of hands. They requested more funding for the program overall, and some of their wishes were granted…but not the pay of the teaching artists. This fall, we received more funding to create a third coteaching position to handle the production side of the program…without raising the pay of the current teaching artists. My company sprang for a ‘liason’ position, wherein a teacher in the high school I was posted in was paid a stipend to assist the program’s survival…but again, no one discussed raising the current hourly wage of the teaching artists. The liason himself became very devoted to the program and its impact on the school and community, and began to independently apply for grants to assist in paying us for our work. My teaching team’s efforts produced more grant money and more state funding for the program, all of which went into a giant pot for the program, but none of which seemed to end up being allotted to paying the actual teaching artists.

Despite all this, I continued to work for the program. I told myself that I was lucky—LUCKY!—to have such a prestigious position with such a credible local arts company. I was proud of the progress we had seen, and proud of the personal growth my students were reflecting (we had no less than fifteen students attend college on some sort of music scholarship, some of which were fully-funded). I repeated to myself that old mantra in the business world, ‘work twice as hard to get half as noticed’. If I just kept GOING, someone would eventually notice and promote me. I began to apply for higher positions within both companies. I began to email my bosses to drop hints about wanting a promotion, and finally went so far as to blatantly ask for one. When my request was denied, I asked for letters of recommendation to help me find another teaching job on top of my already-insane freelancing schedule.

This past September proved to be too much. After pulling fourteen-hour-days for over two and a half years, I finally went broke. My bills stacked up at an alarming rate. My credit card providers and student loans began calling, from 8 AM to almost 9 PM every day. My personal credit score nosedived; I am now effectively trapped in my current lease, at least until my credit score rises enough for a landlord’s consideration. My boyfriend had to pay double rent to ensure we would not be evicted, and paid for all the groceries since August. After almost three years within the educational outreach industry, I am currently sitting at a desk and working a temporary entry-level administrative position to support myself.

That’s how this story ends---after two and a half years, six productions, 50K+ miles on my car, and countless hours of work, I literally could not afford to live and continue teaching art.

This is not the ending I was expecting, especially based on the data.

My educational outreach program was reviewed each semester by my superiors, my individual students, and my fellow teachers and colleagues. I received this compiled data from each formal review; it was compiled in a manner that listed both our program’s results and the national average of similar programs side-by-side. Since my start in the summer of 2015, the program has grown by 300%. That’s an explosive growth rate by any standard, but especially when working with a demographic that is 1) compiled of teenagers who are 2) identified as being ‘at risk’. Our rate of student satisfaction remained well above 100%. Our attendance average was radically above other programs in our area, as well as the national average. I began a program initiative to expand our professional contacts to bring in visiting artists and guest lecturers from all walks of life within the performance industry, thus expanding our professional reach. I founded the program initiative to provide headshot and resume workshops to our students, getting them a professional leg-up on everything from auditions to college applications; in this way, the program’s impact would be even more far-reaching. We began formally renting costumes and backdrops from regional companies, thus establishing a line of professional credit for the program. We began collaborating with other arts programs to provide crossover curriculum/opportunities to the students, and have produced high-quality works from our efforts. We have had no less than fifteen students attend college on some sort of music-based scholarship, ranging from partial to full tuition. This past summer, we were featured in the Bill and Melinda Gates’ Organization’s promotional video series on Chicago’s south side schools.

All of this has been accomplished on a part-time, hourly position with no growth opportunities and no hope of future pay increases.

This is absolutely, completely and utterly NOT acceptable.

Let me tell you why: because the corporate world would not have tolerated this bullshit.

If this were the corporate world, I might have been recognized for my personal drive and ambition. The program’s explosive growth most surely would have been documented, recognized and lauded. My coworkers and I would have been rewarded with financial compensation and some form of job security—that’s the way that the corporate world generally works: effort, payoff, reward, repeat. Sometimes one would have to work harder than usual to be noticed, or for a longer period of time, but one ALWAYS expects a payoff for their efforts.

Because we are freelancing artists working within the system, we received nothing but a ‘thank you’ email.

This is NOT a sustainable model.

We have a problem with the American arts system.

We are currently overproducing generations of highly-qualified artists every year who cannot afford to live and produce art.

These artists graduate with thousands upon thousands of dollars of student loan debt only to find that

We have undervalued our artists into near-extinction.

Think about the last time you spoke to any of your friends and colleagues within the field. When was the last time you heard someone say that they ‘couldn’t afford to be in a production’, or that they would LOVE to paint/compose/draw/photograph/sing/dance/pour cement and feathers on their head and sell themselves to an art gallery, but that they quite literally were faced with the choice of producing art or earning money for groceries?

Instead of a culture that values artists and the work they produce throughout their long lifetimes (think of the brilliant later performances of Richard Harris versus his earlier work, or the last performances of Joan Sutherland versus her permieres), we are driving our artists into early extinction. So often I hear my fellow performers discussing ‘the long end game’. This is the belief that, should an artist find the means to simply survive within their field long enough, they will be rewarded with many more performance opportunities, not by way of merit or experience but based on the fact that many of their colleagues will simply stop performing. The older you get, the more often you see your artistic colleagues drop by the wayside in hopes of finding financial stability in other fields. What other field can say this is true—that they are literally driving their members out purely based on a model of basic financial survival? Could you imagine a lawyer or a construction worker, or any other specialized field making such a ridiculously self-destructive claim??*

I have thought long and hard about this issue, the issue of undervaluing artists within our society. I have read studies, gotten subscriptions to journals and magazines, invested time in personal interviews, explored mission statements, queried forums, and discussed it with just about every colleague and coworker I could think of (note: I apologize for driving you all crazy with this topic of discussion). I could rail against the company itself for boasting of a profit-filled year in its corporate newsletter, but refusing to recognize its own employees are woefully underpaid. I could accuse the non-profit provider, and argue that, being a company who’s sole purpose is to further and provide for the public, it should be more aware of its financial obligations to its own contracted workers. I could scream about the state of American society at large, how it seems less and less interested in investing into its own culture and more and more consumed by instant gratification and ‘dumbed down’ material (that allows people to mentally ‘unplug’), neither of which has much of a place in the arts (which exist to explore, question, to think and to ‘plug in’).

In the end, the responsibility and bulk of the blame does not end on my superiors, or my company, or even the American culture.

It lands on myself.

At the end of the day, I am the one responsible for my own financial hardship.

Just like my mother said, “People will rise or fall to the level of the bar you set for them.”

I need to start setting my employers’ bars higher.

You see, I’m not JUST a performer or a singer or an artist.

I’m an independent business owner.

I cannot think of myself as a mere pawn in contractual agreements and negotiations—I am my own manager.

I cannot simply acquiesce to any and all the demands/conditions of my contracted employer without also considering and defending my own financial needs—I am my own finance coordinator.

I cannot simply allow conductors or directors or any sort of superior to treat me, my requests and my objections lightly—I am my own HR department.

I’m more than ‘just’ an employee in any form, and to reduce myself to a ‘mere’ employee allows an employer to wield a certain socially-acceptable amount of power over me and, ultimately, my financial fate.

It is not my job to be passive, to work hard and silently hope for recognition, to pray that ‘good things come to those who wait’-- it IS my job to be an actively-engaged member at the negotiations table, to step up and take control of my financial future.

It IS my job to set prices that reflect a fair living-wage within my current geographical location based on my education and experience.

My job IS to continue to hone my skillsets within my craft, so that the skillsets I present remain current and innovative within my field.

If my current consumers are not willing to pay my asking price for my goods and services, my job is not to undercut my own earnings or to negotiate a bargain price on my own skillsets.

My job IS to wait, to be patient for the customers and consumers who WILL value me and who will consider me a worthy investment of their time and money.

My job IS to be steadfast within my belief in myself, my education, my experience, and my abilities.

We artists need to start asking, nay, DEMANDING what we are worth in every aspect of our lives. It is only by doing this, by establishing this attitude as the new ‘norm’ within our field, that we can hope for any sort of social shift and to see real change.

Of course, this requires us to know exactly what we ARE worth.

So…how does one calculate their livable-and-earnable-hourly-wage?

Here is a good rule of thumb: Take whatever you need to survive on a yearly basis. Divide that by fifty-two (weeks of the year), then by five (days of the week), then by 8 (hours a day). The number left over is the dollar amount you should charge per hour of your time.

OR—you could use this handy-dandy calculator that my fellow teaching artists developed. Just plug in your geographical location, the number of dependents in your household, you skillset and your educational background, and it will automatically estimate your hourly wage for you. (While you’re at their site, go ahead and sign up for their monthly newsletter, as it is a FANTASTIC resource!)

https://teachingartistsguild.org/pay-rate-calculator/?utm_source=Teaching+Artists+Guild&utm_campaign=168efe8abf-Calculator_email_blast&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f81bf3420f-168efe8abf-223288177&goal=0_f81bf3420f-168efe8abf-223288177&mc_cid=168efe8abf&mc_eid=fa9c53c205

Be advised, this number might appear high to you at first, but beware: DO NOT CHANGE IT. If we ever hope to start changing the stipulation surrounding the over-romanticized ‘starving artist’ model, we have to start believing that we ARE INDEED WORTH THAT MUCH. “Starving” for your art might seem like a romantic image, but I promise you, the reality of it is a much less enjoyable experience.

If you’re in the Chicago area, I also highly recommend attending a CVAC event or two (Chicago Vocal Arts Consortium). They have some upcoming workshops that deal with finances for artists, including ‘Taxes for Artists’…because we all have piles of receipts and we all know April is coming. Information about CVAC can be found here: https://www.chicagovocalarts.org/

Now, go forth and make good art---and GET PAID FOR IT.

*I have a theory that part of our particularly-American fascination/obsession with youthful artists, particularly our operatic ‘young artists’ is partially based in wanting bragging rights for ‘finding them first’ and partially based in the fear that if we don’t catch the next Enrico when he is young and green, his opportunities will dry up quickly and he will quickly cease to exist as an artist at all.