Ingrid van Frankenhuyzen's article on the high pay for some directors in the arts sector (Forget KLM and Booking: even in the subsidised arts, directors are big earners.), and the explanatory statement by Wijbrand Schaap in the Cultural Press Agency newsletter lack context. Why do I think so?
Salaries within cultural institutions follow collective agreements/wage guidelines established in the industries. Those collective agreements are largely public. This lists all the layers and all the salary scales. And yes, there is a (big) difference between the director and the employee, but that does not differ - on paper - from the proportions in other sectors in the Netherlands.
In addition, amounts included in grant applications are gross/gross. That is, (statutory) schemes have been added to the salary. Some of those ' big earners' mentioned in the article are creators, by the way. How nice is that! So we are willing to pay creators very well in some cases.
Underlay
The bottleneck is indeed in the 'lower layer'. These are all those initiatives that cannot or do not want to pay according to CAO and the many ZZP-ers working for cultural institutions. As a result of the Zijlstra austerity measures, some of the permanent staff have been converted into temporary ZZP and have thus tumbled out of those collective agreements. Question is whether to call for solving this bottleneck by taking the money away from the 'top'.
Why should the cultural sector level out when the problem is caused by external funders? And why should the cultural sector in particular abandon a proper salary structure while other comparable sectors (education, government) do not? Surely, as a cultural sector, you then shoot yourself in your own foot? Better is: fair practice, better collective bargaining, more subsidy or campaigning for a levelling down in all sectors etc.
Scarce
On top of that, everyone has the freedom to pursue positions that involve this kind of salary. It's just that those positions are scarce. Although that is not so bad: look at the Cultural education collective labour agreement or that of theatres.
Are there no excesses then? Of course there are: think of a full-time well-paid theatre director who also does extra work during working hours and keeps that income himself, or a conductor who is chief conductor of an orchestra for only six weeks a year for a couple of tons. Although with the latter, again, one could argue whether exceptional quality should not also be rewarded exceptionally.
Incidentally, there are also self-employed people in the cultural sector who farm particularly well.
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There is a large group of employees in the cultural sector who are often not covered by cultural collective agreements (sometimes they are covered by civil servants' collective agreements) , who are not or never threatened by decisions of councils for culture, etc., who earn above-moderate wages on average, and who are generally not threatened even now in the Corona era; these are the professionals, experts', in the staffs of the umbrella organisations. There are about 70 of them, with over 1,000 FTE s in permanent positions. Those FTEs are then on average pretty above average on the annual accounts. In addition, there are an uncountable number of consultants you keep seeing popping up in ZZP-like relationships to those umbrella organisations.
It is this group that actually shapes governance in our sector, that writes the notes, that dictates to OCenW what 'the sector wants', and that speak when the sector 'speaks with one voice'. The officials in the various ministries that deal with culture are still outside this count. By the way, far from all these organisations have their annual accounts accessible on the internet, as ANBI societies have to do. so we are not talking about the formal board members of these sector-representing institutions. In practice, these have fairly little influence on what the professional experts do,are also not working full-time and often are not paid much, if at all.
And that's not to mention the large amounts of permanent employment in theatres, concert halls, museums, libraries, which do fall under our collective agreements.
The level of salaries of the professionals in the umbrella organisations, as well as the degree of untouchability of these, is, I think, one of the more important reasons for the fact that we as creators see very little movement in our sector, one also for the soupiness of the policies that take shape in our sector, which in no way reflect the 'çreativity' or the much-touted 'resilience' of our sector.
Something should indeed be done about it, but at the moment it may be less relevant.
What does need to be addressed is the vulnerability of the artists living 'below the bottom' or just above it, who seem to be the ones most affected.
Wijbrand is quite right to be nauseated by the larmoyant moaning about this that echoes from our sector representatives and occasional good givers, because this is a problem that by no means makes our sector unique: Romanian workers in meat factories and so on.
The solution to this is also not to be found within the sector, and therefore should not be sought or formulated there, so indeed the focus on the big earners in our sector is not that relevant at the moment.
The real solution must therefore be cross-sectoral, and it is one that has been ringing ever louder lately: the basic wage. It is precisely in this area that our sector,that of arts and culture, can become a guiding light for society as a whole by developing images and metaphors that make this concept understandable to the broad population that does not want it.
Here, artists (I do not say all artists) can occupy precisely the social position so often attributed to the arts, namely that of pioneers and innovators, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of society as a whole.
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