Are technicians today overworked and underpaid?

[Wingwalker]

As a technician today, do you feel that you have to be more multi talented than the technicians of 20 years ago? And do you feel that the pay you receive reflects the extra work you now do?

 

It seems as though Arts Centres and Outreach projects can only afford to have one resident technician who does more than just "set up a few lights" but is also the cook, the cleaner and the bottle washer too. I've heard stories of where technicians have also had to work as ticket stub collectors, maintenance engineers and toilet cleaners etc as the venue simply cannot afford to hire extra staff such as a caretaker. And yet in the same light, money always seems to be available to spend more on more admin staff.

 

Because technicians are now having increased workloads, standards can sometimes slip, which can lead to dangerous working practices and poor performance. They can call in for extra assistance (sometimes) for a show but this is usually a casual tech who's willing to work for peanuts just to gain some experience within the industry. As technicians we're always the first in and last out. Our work is both physically and mentally demanding but we are often seen as low down in the pecking order of financial remuneration.

 

Your thoughts please...

 

D.

[nuttytechy]

From my experience you are spot on.

 

My roles were ranging from the everyday running to babysitting. The theatre I worked at had very few staff and I agree that there were more staff in the office than actually working for the stage or building. The theatre relied mainly on volunteers and part of the time involved training FoH staff an hour or so before curtain up. If I did need extra help which was quite a bit because I couldn't be in many places at once, we were using students who wanted experience.

 

It wouldn't look out of place to see me behind the bar calling the times while serving or on FoH sorting out tickets. The theatre did have weddings who would hire the venue so I had to dust off my suit and just be on hand for the guests.

[paulears]

As I'm old, I vote that in reality nothing has changed. Undervalued and underpaid. However - as technology has advanced, we've started to compartmentalise, so general technicians only tend to be older, perhaps having gone through sound, Lx, set and now video departments over the years. new technicians straight from uni seem to be already set in a specific pathway. They know all about video walls and scalers and other video gizmos, but often little about the other disciplines. As a result, we now need more people to get cover for 'everything' and often the result is that nobody can build the set, or know how to cut legs to fit tiered steeldeck - really basic things from 30 years ago that now result in shrugs and blank faces. In my old fashioned and random world we now have more people on the house crew than previous years because the skill set is less wide. people are into their chosen discipline before they've tried everything. This I reckon is bad.

 

Pay is terrible. the day rate for doing TV work is double what I can get for theatre, and TV has loads of people all waiting to do their particular work type. I cannot get pay up, and I personally haven't had a pay rise in years from 3 of the clients I work for regularly.

 

I really want multi-talented people but they don't seem to exist in the people new to the business, who are still learning.

 

I also find that much of the responsibility of FOH now falls to me. it really isn't my job getting rowdy audience members out of their seats to throw them out, or has happened to miss the start of Act 2 because I've got the police putting them in handcuffs. It's not my job to keep the audience safe, to usher people to seats. I do though. Looking around sometimes, I realise that if anyone got hurt, that would also be me as I'm the oldest and nobody sometimes would even have an expired First Aid certificate. It's not my job to arrange parking, or merchandising and it certainly isn't my job to unblock toilets but all these things are now common. To be fair, I now invoice the toilet job as an extra on the invoice, being creative with the description to get it approved - but I don't put marigolds on for free. Lots of my work has links to Equity rates, so these trickle up automatically, as does subsistence. Some of the jobs for supervisory technicians are still below twenty grand a year salary. That's just not money to have a family on is it?

 

One of my friends was going to leave his salaried job, and go back freelance, but he's engaged and suddenly realised a salary would get him a mortgage, freelance work won't. They heard on the grapevine he was off, promoted him to Head of Sound and now he's happy with his new package. We're worth far more, but some of us are very highly skilled and others are incapable awkward people who don't do any of us any good. There just doesn'tseem to be a way to pay the good ones more than the idiots.

[nuttytechy]

I agree there paulears that the multi knowledgeable Technician is slowly dying out. I'm not that old but not young either and fortunately I am still in a position where I am still flexible to do many different roles.

 

I can safely say that I have also put on marigolds and did my fair share of toilet duty and general house cleaning.

 

In regards to the FoH, There have been a few times where I have to calm down a few people because of their rowdyness. As I also hold an SIA badge too, the theatre manager would send me to de-escalate any problems.

 

The pay is still terrible and working for just over the minimum hourly wage on freelance had forced me to do other work which luckily I could juggle. The sad thing is that I spend less time spending with the family because I have to make ends meat.

[Derek Tallent]

Yes. Definitely. The biggest problem we have in the corporate marketplace is making customers appreciate the value of having a good technician. They'll create a stink at paying, say £40.00 per hour for an AV tech, but think nothing of paying the local car dealership £95 per hour to service their fancy German car...

 

The usual line when someone thinks we're too expensive on labour is do you know how much a plumber or electrician costs per hour? They soon get the message..

[kerry davies]

There is need for both specialist and generalist technical staff, I am the latter. There isn't a job on a festival site I couldn't, at a push, do the basic fundamentals. This gave me an understanding of what the guys doing the job required to facilitate their specialities. I couldn't coordinate all the varying requirements or supervise the safety of those doing the job without some grasp of how they operated. I did find that people were getting deeper into their own speciality and nerdier and needier towards the end of my career and that could lead to them not appreciating the needs of others.

 

As for underpaid there is a job ad now on BR which offers under £10 an hour PAYE in a major city where rents are high. That is less per hour than I pay my cleaning lady. I was getting a tenner an hour over 15 years ago doing a job in a college/community theatre and I only took the work because it also gave me a teaching qualification. I see "day rates" quoted here that I surpassed 20 years ago but as long as people undervalue their time, skills and efforts then employers will take advantage.

 

Years ago on BR I argued that if we undervalued ourselves it was our own fault and "the show must go on" was a lie. It really doesn't if I am expected to pay for it.

[Jivemaster]

Every year the required skills go up. Once in the era of resistance dimmers there would be few cues in a show, now there are thousands of dynamic cues and everything is controlled by a computer through a network or ten. The skill set required grows daily.

[kitlane]

As I'm old, I vote that in reality nothing has changed. Undervalued and underpaid. However - as technology has advanced, we've started to compartmentalise, so general technicians only tend to be older, perhaps having gone through sound, Lx, set and now video departments over the years. new technicians straight from uni seem to be already set in a specific pathway. They know all about video walls and scalers and other video gizmos, but often little about the other disciplines.

 

I agree that nothing much has changed. The big producing theatres may have had specialists but most companies needed multi-discipline technicians. If you were on a small rural tour you drove the van, put up the set, rigged and oped the lights and sound, you were the entire SM department and you washed the actors smalls. That is why my students have to know at least the basics of every department. They all rig and programme lights, put sound systems together, build steeldeck, ASM and DSM, and they all learn to sew. At the end of the degree they should know as much about making a trick release with sash cord and a hinge-pin as they do about networking.

 

Some of the current pay rates I do find shocking. A certain Playhouse in West Yorkshire is currently offering skilled positions at frankly insulting rates.

[gareth]

It's not just one or two isolated cases either - based on the job ads that I see in The Stage and on Stage Jobs Pro, salaries and rates of hourly pay in quite a lot of venues around the UK at the moment is frankly disgraceful when you consider the kind of skill set they expect their potential employees to possess.

 

Just scanning quickly through a couple of the most recent ads on SJP, for example, throws up two prime examples. A receiving venue run by a large theatre operations company is looking for a general technician - presumably they're not looking for a trainee, but rather someone with sufficient skills and experience to be able to hit the ground running from day one, and have enough knowledge to be able to do the job safely enough in a way which isn't going to injure or kill anyone. And yet the hourly rate they're offering is the National Minimum Wage, which is what you'd expect to be paid for the most menial, least skilled work that you could possibly imagine.

 

Another large theatre production company is looking for a head of lighting for their theatre which sits in the shadow of the residence of the richest person in the country, in a town where a tiny one-bedroom flat can cost upwards of £12k/year to rent. Add another £1k for council tax, another £1k (conservative guess!) for bills, and you're up to at least £14k per year, maybe £15k, just to be able to live in the town. The low end of their salary 'window' being offered is £18k, which after tax and NI would give you a take-home salary of just less than £16k. So once you've factored in somewhere to live, you've got £100/month left for everything else that you need to survive. Accounts filed at companies house reveal that the director of this company received a remuneration of £400k from this company alone last year - not to mention what he received from his six other companies.

 

So - yeah, technicians today are underpaid.

Edited July 25, 2019 by gareth

[bigclive]

That's always been the case with the entertainment industry. A job perceived as glamorous and therefore a plentiful supply of enthusiastic young people willing to work for low or no wages, and sometimes so up the their neck in drama-college debt that they will undercut and back-stab out of financial desperation.

 

What's more disturbing is the increasing expectation of young exploited people to do installation or repairs on electrical equipment in an industry that is notorious for word of mouth training that is often very wrong. (There are STILL people disconnecting earth wires.)

 

The bottom line is that if you want a well paid job choose something unglamorous (but usually with REAL training) and keep theatre tech as a sideline.

[kerry davies]

Found this survey which confirms many of the thoughts expressed here. Noticeable is that 51% of the workforce is under 35, 39% are between 36 and 55 and a paltry 8% are over 55. Just over 75% of workers have no dependents suggesting it is not only a young person's game but a single person's job. The demands for freelance workers to be instantly available at employer's whims reinforce the restrictions on family life. Not surprising then that the majority of people come from middle class and upper middle class families who can afford to subsidise their education and working life.

 

Maybe the first lesson in colleges and universities training technical theatre students needs to be a discussion about what 92% of them want to be doing at retirement because 92% will not be lighting designers, sound engineers or anything they currently think of as "theatre". How on earth any of them afford to retire is a topic best left until the mental health of the students has been assessed.

[Junior8]

When I finished college in 1975 I could earn more as an unskilled worker in a rural local factory than most jobs were offering in The Stage and for a fixed 37.5 hour week with all overtime paid at time and a half. Fifteen years later at a receiving house near here it was only the weekly get out money that squared the circle for a number of the staff sorry I mean the two technical staff. But it's not just technicians. A student I taught later, a good mover and singer who worked pretty regularly, gave up theatrical work after one tour when she realised working in a solicitors office down the road was a better economic proposition. On Kerry's final point I am very glad that back them, wanting to get married, I stopped taking The Stage saw sense and settled for a regular pensionable job. I got the same enjoyment from the technical work I did as an amateur or on the side.

 

Nothing to my mind has really changed.

 

Well apart from one thing. I fear that given the age of the majority of technical staff Kerry outlines the very maximum salary offered to such workers will probably be £1 below the level at which they have to start repaying student loans - £364 a week or about £9 an hour.

Edited July 25, 2019 by Junior8

[themadhippy]

And what happened to overtime? Now it's toil if your lucky and a "well its part of the job" attitude,with a dont do it and your out the door as an added bonus Edited July 25, 2019 by themadhippy

[Bryson]

I spent many years running rental theatres. I don't do being the TD (Tech Manager in English) anymore, but there was always a downward pressure from clients on the number of staff assigned to a gig...but no corresponding decrease in their requirements. The one saving grace of my last venue was a solid wall between the lighting booth and audio booth so one person couldn't physically operate both. (Don't tell them about the iPad remotes, please!)

 

And then you look at the old videos of stagehands in the 1920s and there are literally dozens on each show.... I wish!

 

As for pay, last year, before moving inside Canada, I looked at possibly returning to the UK. What I found was that the jobs advertised that I was qualified for were still paying the exact same rates they were paying in 2008 when I left the UK. I'll bet the cost of living has gone up a bit since then...

[kerry davies]

Soddit, link fail. Try again.

 

Workforce Review of the UK Offstage Theatre and Performing Arts Sector

Final Report June 2017