It’s Wednesday and I’ve been in Kyoto, Japan for a few months now. Over time, I will report on various aspects of this experience. Today, I review an ongoing debate in Australia about the situation facing live musicians. Should promoters be able to hire them to pay poverty wages, including “nothing,” while still making a profit, or should they be forced to pay musicians a living wage. You can guess where I am in the debate.
The Dilemma of Live Music
Regular readers will know that I played in a band in Melbourne and have been in a working band for most of my adult life.
I think I can safely say that I understand the economics of “scenarios” pretty well.
The situation facing working musicians in Australia has always been vexing, but it has gotten worse over time.
I’ve written about some questions in this blog post – Performance artists bear the brunt of neoliberalism (January 4, 2017).
There used to be a lot of venues and big institutions dominated bookings. If you’re lucky enough to land a spot in an agency, you’ll be able to get enough work to make ends meet in a week.
It was once said that the Unemployment Benefit Agency was Australia’s largest employer of musicians, a reference to the difficulties musicians face “making a living”.
They often have to resort to the unemployment benefit system to make ends meet.
Many musicians, especially in the rock and roll segment of the industry, refuse to unionize.
For those of us who do unionize – getting union rates is hard and often means less work.
More recently, large establishments have been undercut by small entrepreneurs who run single rooms and book band themes and have enormous power when it comes to face-to-face with musicians.
Plus, there are plenty of young bands out there who “get it for nothing” – excuses they need exposure to take a break.
The myth of stardom is instilled in them by promoters who offer these young bands the opportunity to pay—often for free or for a small fee.
There is an article in the Melbourne media this week – Paying musicians minimum wage kills live music: Handbag owner (September 26, 2022) – This highlights these tensions.
The new federal Labor government is keen to differentiate itself from the conservative government of the past, which lost office in May, by creating a “national cultural policy” aimed at correcting the previous government’s cuts in the arts sector.
The pandemic also devastated the live music scene – my own band plays very little now because the small clubs we played regularly didn’t reopen after closing for the first two years of the pandemic.
As part of the solution, Musicians Australia, a member of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, is pushing for better conditions for musicians, including a mandatory living wage.
However, small entrepreneurs who run bars and clubs featuring live music have rejected the call and used the old furphy – workers only work for what we can pay them – which doesn’t include any pay at all – just a chance to get exposure!
That old line.
This is the narrative of regular rehearsals – workers have to work hard in order to work.
An entrepreneur who runs a pub in inner Melbourne’s Collingwood says many of the current “rooms” offering live music will stop doing so.
Entrepreneurs also claim in official filings with federal investigations that a living wage can:
… large bands, choirs and orchestras cannot survive financially and prefer large venues to small venues…
My position is clear – any worker deserves a minimum living wage.
If they can’t get these from the workplace, then the workplace is not desirable from a social point of view.
The union’s position is that no sector should:
…a business model “built on exploitation”…
I agree.
In 2007-08, I worked in South Africa funded by the International Labour Organization (ILO), focusing on South Africa’s Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP), culminating in several reports.
One of my tasks is to develop a minimum wage framework to replace the poverty wage system.
I was initially asked to create a framework that would provide buffers for poverty in the first place, which would give the government time to expand what the minimum wage could achieve.
Employers’ groups claim that if the minimum wage rises and unifies, it will destroy workers who will be laid off.
My starting principle is that minimum wages should not be set on the basis of the private sector’s ability to pay – employers should adjust, not workers.
The principle should be minimum wage as a statement of how complex you think your country is or aspires to be.
The minimum wage defines the minimum wage income material standard you wish to tolerate.
Therefore, it should be a wage that allows a person (and family) to participate in society in a meaningful way without experiencing social exclusion or alienation due to lack of income.
It is a declaration of national aspirations.
In any country, it should be the minimum wage that society considers a business acceptable.
The ability to pay consideration must be conditioned on these social goals.
If small businesses, or any business, don’t think they have the ability to “pay” wages, then a mature society will say that these businesses are not suitable to operate in their economy.
These companies will have to restructure through investments to increase their productivity levels so they can afford to pay or disappear.
This approach establishes a dynamic efficiency where the economy continuously drives productivity growth and improves material living standards.
I don’t think workers should be paid less than the tolerable minimum subsistence standard just because some low-wage-low-productivity operator wants to produce in a country and make a “cheap” profit.
I don’t think the private “market” is an arbiter of values that a society should aspire to or maintain. This is where I differ markedly from the mainstream of my profession.
Employers always want to completely deregulate the wage system so that “the market can work” without being tied down. This will obviously tell us the “value” of the worker.
The problem is that so-called “markets” in purely conceptual form are amoral, ahistorical structures that cannot project social values that connect communities and people to higher-level considerations.
The minimum wage is a values-based concept and should not be determined by the market.
All of this is in addition to the usual disclaimer that a pure “competitive market” does not exist for labor because of the imbalance between workers and employers and because the use value of labor is derived from transactions (i.e. workers must be forced to work). This is different from other exchanges where parties make a deal and part ways to enjoy the fruits of the trade.
Regardless, these principles govern how I operate as a professional and make me a “Martian” relative to my professional colleagues.
In the case of the music industry debate, entrepreneurs submitted the following investigations to the federal government:
In this model, a typical weekend lineup of three bands, each with four members, would cost $3,000. Assuming venue and licensing fees and a sound engineer add $800 to the cost of the show, and tickets cost between $15 and $20, a minimum paying audience of 200 to 250 would be required to break even…no venue or promoter in The break-even point, so a typical viable band room capacity is 400-500. Most independent live music venues are of this size.
So the adjustment is imposed on the workers, and the “promoters” still get the profits they want.
Under this algorithm, if there are only two bands playing, each with four members, the cost is greatly reduced and the required room capacity is also reduced.
This tells us – assuming the margins are reasonable (which I don’t) – then the arithmetic tells me that there are too many bands vying for two viable spots.
This will never change as long as promoters are allowed to pay almost nothing for the band.
If the industry can’t maintain non-poverty wages for workers, then it must either innovate and increase productivity — the big “space” approach — or cut back on the workforce.
Another way to address this is to enforce a minimum wage, let the federal government absorb displaced musicians and artists in job security, and design new tasks and responsibilities for musicians in exchange for a sustainable living wage.
The introduction of job security would reduce the supply of musicians to promoters, which would be appropriate as they claim they cannot maintain a living wage without reducing the opportunity to work as a musician on a non-poverty wage.
I envision not-for-profit co-ops emerging, offering job security musicians the opportunity to share their talents.
It would be a better solution than having musicians fighting for crumbs in dirty diving around the city
Music – more from Ernest Ranglin and Monty Alexander
This is what I’ve been listening to.
Jamaican Reggae Jazz Superstar Monty Alexander (piano) and Ernest Longlin (guitar) playing— Starrag 17.
it appeared on their 2004 album Steady as Mount Tai (Telarc Records), recorded live in the studio (one shot).
This is another of my favorite albums. There are many of them (favorites).
Enough for today!
(c) Copyright 2022 William Mitchell. all rights reserved.
