Pay and Conditions at the Edinburgh Festival

[Genus]

Hi there,

 

I'm sure many of us were in Edinburgh last month working on the Fringe festival. I know that some venues pay fairly but it's my contention that many venues are massively underpaying their staff.

 

Have you done a Fringe (as a venue tech) recently? If so, I courteously invite you to participate (anonymously) in the linked survey.

 

*Please note, I am not a student, but a professional tech. This isn't about a dissertation or some other home-work assignment, I am trying to gather some data so I can be better placed to try and improve conditions. It's a bit of a crusade.*

 

Survey

[Shez]

Can you post up the results once you've crunched the numbers?

[Genus]

Will do.

[Genus]

Hello, my fringe pay and conditions survey made it to 100 responses (104 right now. So I have some average numbers (and they're very depressing).

 

Venue (rate per hour - hours worked per week)

 

The SpaceUK (£3.08/hr - 75 hrs/week) - No digs

Pleasance (£2.27/hr - 80.5hrs/week) - Digs

C Venues (£1.30/hr - 77 hrs/week) - Digs - shared bedrooms, some awful conditions reported.

Gilded Balloon (£4.12/hr - 84.6hrs/week) - No digs

Underbelly (£4.59hr - 66.9hrs/week) - (1 in 9 had digs)

Summerhall (£6.04/hr - 81.2hrs/week) - No digs - late payments noted by many respondents. - Mostly Edinburgh crew.

Universal Arts (£7.84/hr - 66.6 hrs/week) - No digs - Mostly Edinburgh crew

Assembly (£7.91/hr - 60.7 hrs/week) - No digs (£500 accommodation allowance provided, some respondents had to pay more than this for their digs)

The Stand/Salt'n'Sauce/AR Fringe (£8/hr - 75hrs/week) - No digs - Mostly Edinburgh crew.

 

There were some other venue responses, but with only 1 or 2 respondents for each of those other venues, it's a bit difficult to tell whether the conditions on their survey were typical, so I'm not including them here.

 

The National Minimum Wage is £6.50/hour (only three venues meet that).

[beware]

I know of one venue who used to get students to pay for the experience...

[gareth]

That makes for horrifying reading. The first six on that list should be ashamed of themselves.

 

The trouble is, it doesn't matter how little a venue pays - there will always be inexperienced students and 'wet behind the ears' newcomers to the industry who are happy to go and work their little socks off for insultingly low pay, thereby perpetuating the problem and devaluing the work done by technicians working at the Fringe.

[kerry davies]

Gareth is spot on. As long as there are voluntary slaves then the industry will keep on enslaving them. It might be an idea for the results of this to be forwarded to the Low Pay Commission. If thought useful the situation might be reported to the HMRC NMW Risk Unit though, typical of this government, there is no simple means of doing this. The hours worked are also questionable given that the workers are also living in poor conditions and safety is evidently not on the venue's agendas.

 

It never fails to astound me just how low an opinion of their own worth these people have. It never fails to infuriate me that they believe everyone else is as worthless as they are.

[Stuart91]

It'd be interesting to know if the low wages and crappy conditions extend to other roles and areas within the Fringe, or if technicians are a particularly easy mark.

Also, how do the finances in general stack up? It's well known that many Fringe productions lose money, but are the venues / promoters making money off the back of staff getting poverty wages?

[J Pearce]

A friend left one of the above venues mid fringe some years previous (being deliberately vague), after being asked to work entirely unrealistic hours, which were often extended to cover the nightclub the venue also hosted.

Exploitative doesn't cover it. As well as NMW, might HSE be interested in WTD? I know it is averaged, but a month of 80+ hrs would need 3 weeks of doing nothing to average out to approx 48 hour weeks.

[ImagineerTom]

95% of the shows @ edinburgh are on one of two business models.

1) hired in (usually for a fixed fee) by a promoter/producer so the performer's wages are safe.

2) 4-wall hire of the venue by the performers - like a timeshare performers "buy" specific slots (ie 3pm-4:15pm every day) in a venue that the venue management have built. Performers (usually acting as self promoters) are usually expected to pay all of their venue hire fee up-front and it is then up to the performers to promote their own show and drum up business. The venue doesn't profit (or loose) from the success of the show.

 

The third business model is "The free fringe" whereby performers keep the ticket money (or pass the bucket) and venues keep the bar money and all other costs are split 50:50 but however worthy the model is it's somewhat unstable as this year's "cowgategate" showed.

 

Tech's are split in to 2 groups - venue provided (ie building venues, maintenance, resets between performances) who are generally employed specifically by the venue and then performance techs (aka SM / LX op) who are venue provided in #1 & #3 but performer provided in #2. Neither task is particularly arduous but much like a cruise ship it's the spread of on-call hours that totals up quickly. Most performers/shows also actually do multiple performances (their own show plus daytime busking, plus appear in other people's shows) and seem to assume that technicians can also moonlight in the same way.

 

Edinburgh is a mess and this year there's a bigger problem about to bubble over with promoters/venues not able to pay their bills leaving some important suppliers and crewing companies seriously out of pocket

[Stuart91]

I could see the "Free Fringe" model working for a standup show in a pub, but I'd expect it to get tenuous as soon as you add any serious production overhead.

 

Most performers/shows also actually do multiple performances (their own show plus daytime busking, plus appear in other people's shows) and seem to assume that technicians can also moonlight in the same way.

 

There's a lot more scope for dangerous mishaps if the technicians are badly fatigued, of course performers and promoters are less likely to understand why.

[Jevans]

Ah, but don't forget, you're not an employee, you're a volunteer. Most of the above calculations will be based not on PAYE employment or invoiced freelance work but on being a volunteer and getting substance pay, in which case NMW and WTD become a lot trickier to enforce I would imagine - if you don't sign an employment contract but handily turn up to work every day at the appointed time they can't exactly stop you can they? Recent cases of company members going to court to try and collect minimum wage mean HMRC are absolutely aware of the way the Fringe works (I mean, they can't exactly have missed what is billed as "the greatest show on earth" can they?) and I suspect they have no appetite to take on the resultant mess. Same with HSE.

 

I will say that I worked this year for one of the "offenders" and I wouldn't paint it quite as exploitatively as that - when I worked out the amount the digs were worth based on the identical accommodation being rented out commercially next door you're saving yourself a fair wodge compared to those who get paid properly and are on their own. Those technicians working the fitup period before the festival were paid for that as a separate thing. Would I prefer to be paid by the hour instead of payment in kind? Of course, but I knew the deal going in, enjoyed it, and would do it again. Will I continue to do it for that amount of money when (if? http://www.blue-room.org.uk/public/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif ) I can find better work elsewhere during July and August? Probably not. The major thing that bugs me is that venues almost always collect fees ( sometimes quite substantial, particularly if the show requests a dedicated op for sound mixing etc.) for their staff operating shows but this money very rarely gets to the technician in question - I was lucky not to have to op very many shows but someone in a different venue might have to op show after show and get exactly the same amount of money.

 

The front of house and box office staff were as far as I am aware on much the same deal financially.

[Stuart91]

Ah, but don't forget, you're not an employee, you're a volunteer.

 

Who's covering the "volunteers" for PLI etc.? It'd be interesting to observe the legal bunfight that would follow if a volunteer, drunk with tiredness, makes a silly mistake and burns down a venue (or worse).

[Jevans]

Ah, but don't forget, you're not an employee, you're a volunteer.

 

Who's covering the "volunteers" for PLI etc.? It'd be interesting to observe the legal bunfight that would follow if a volunteer, drunk with tiredness, makes a silly mistake and burns down a venue (or worse).

 

Indeed. I have my own, but many of the drama school students who seemed to all be operating the smaller venues probably won't.

[Stuart91]

Also, presumably (by definition) employer's liability insurance won't cover volunteers. So if they injure themselves there's not going to be anyone covering that side of things either.