San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
How society fails independent arts workers
A little more than a year ago, as 2020 was getting into gear, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to think that AB5 would be the biggest force reshaping Bay Area theater for the year.
Many theater workers get hired as independent contractors instead of as employees — a system that AB5, also known as the gigworker law, is poised to upend. The law, a codification of a 2018 California Supreme Court decision, seeks to make it much more difficult for hiring entities to classify their workers as independent contractors, a move that typically saves hiring entities money by passing on the risks and expenses associated with fulltime employment to workers themselves.
The pandemic, of course, quickly overshadowed AB5 as the theater industry’s most urgent danger (and two new proposed bills would exempt theaters from AB5, though their fate in the state Legislature is uncertain). But now a report released in January from Urban Institute, “Arts Workers in California,” which was commissioned by the Center for Cultural Innovation and funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, underscores just how precarious artists’ livelihoods were even before the pandemic, while also offering intriguing ways the public might better support the creative class.
Among the report’s most telling statistics about arts workers, a term it uses to refer to both artists themselves and other “cultural workers” who frequently work outside employeremployee relationships, include the following:
Nationwide, approximately 31% of arts workers are selfemployed compared with approximately 10% of the broader workforce, suggesting much greater vulnerability in a decimated job market.
“At the height of the pandemic, nearly half of workers receiving unemployment benefits had gotten them through (the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program), meaning that absent PUA, they would not have had access at all.”
One reason we tolerate an even more frayed social safety net for artists than we do for everyone else: “The allure of artistic work often obscures — from arts workers themselves and the public at large — the working conditions that arts workers face,” according to the report, noting that organizations frequently ask arts workers to work for nominal fees or for free.
It calls for us all to write “a more inclusive social contract,” where everyone gets benefits and protections in return for their labor, not just those whose work falls within the traditional employeremployee model.
Now might be an apt time for that demand to gain traction.
“We’re releasing this report in a moment where there is broad public recognition of how many people are not protected by the safety net, because of COVID19,” says Angie Kim, president and CEO of the Center for Cultural Innovation.
Another report, from Californians for the Arts, released Feb. 25, lends further urgency to “Arts Workers in California.” Surveying 993 of the state’s “creative sector workers” in the fall, it found that 83% of respondents’ employment situations were affected by the pandemic and that 88% had lost income because of it.
These burdens, both reports note, are disproportionately borne by arts workers of color.
San Francisco curator, visual artist and organizer Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen has worked on both sides of the employeeindependent contractor divide. After 11 years, she left her fulltime job at Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco nearly a decade ago, seeking space and flexibility to focus on her art. “My entire art practice was completely on hold the whole time I was there. It was just too many hours to be able to actually make art,” she recalls.
If her salary didn’t go far before, money was even tighter as an independent contractor. She drew on childhood
lessons about how to live on $5 per day for groceries, how to use discarded furniture on the street.
“The bookkeeping was insane,” she says. She juggled 10 to 15 1099 forms, each for tiny amounts. “It used to take me an hour to do my taxes every year. Now it takes me a month.”
She has to keep track of every canvas she buys, every curator she takes out to lunch. She doesn’t get paid any extra when, for a recent installation at Adobe Books, she spends months researching, or trains herself in a new skill, such as resin casting, or has to mess up “around 100 times” to get something right. She doesn’t get paid for any of that administrative time — and, yet, nobody would question, say, a mill worker’s right to benefits, she says.
“The second an artist says they want health insurance, it’s like we’re asking for too much” — even though, as “Arts Workers in California” points out, the arts made up 7% of the state’s GDP in 2016.
“Arts Workers in California” surveys an array of proposals to make life better for the state’s independent artists: extending collective bargaining rights, wage and hours laws and antidiscrimination protections to independent contractors; developing wage boards for the arts; creating a portable benefits model or individual savings accounts for benefits such as unemployment insurance, so that contractors could carry their benefits from gig to gig.
Another intriguing proposal in the report is the coop model, whereby a group of independent artists — not working on the same project — could band together to buy benefits much more cheaply than they could as individuals.
Daniel Park, administrative assistant and project coordinator with the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, contrasts coops and unions. He has a background in theater, and he points out that actors don’t get many of their most important benefits, such as health care, “unless you’re regularly working and able to contribute back into the union.”
Esteban Kelly, executive director for the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, who was interviewed for “Arts Workers in California,” describes how a coop might work for artists, drawing on his experience cocreating the coop AORTA (AntiOppression Resource and Training Alliance), whose members hail from all over the country.
At first, members worked as 1099 independent contractors. “We’d tithe back 10 or 15% of whatever we landed as freelancers to start building up our startup business,” Kelly says by phone from his home in Philadelphia. “Then, at a certain point, after three or four years, we flipped it, and we incorporated and signed ourselves up as W2 employees.” Each worker kept 1015% of a freelance fee as a commission, giving 85% to the coop, which then distributed paychecks.
“The hardest part of setting up coops is not setting up coops,” he adds. “It is finding people who understand what the f— you’re doing,” whether that’s trying to get a bank loan or any other step in starting a business.
Evans MacFadyen has experimented with coops and other shared models throughout her career and even in her personal life, with child care. “Artists know how to share their own resources really well. The second that the government comes into play, and you have to start filling out all the forms and registering for all the things, it starts to fall apart,” MacFadyen says. In her experience, the government doesn’t have a way of recognizing “when this person can pay, they pay, and when this person can’t, they can’t.”
That mismatch is just one of the ways the country’s default structures fail independent arts workers.
As these two reports lay bare, we must reinvent how we value and protect broad swaths of the labor market if we are to emerge from this pandemic or fortify our economy before the next disaster.