Why are Seattle's wealthy nonprofits opposing overtime for staff?
Arts and culture orgs bemoan WA's new overtime proposal while doling out pricey executive compensation packages.
by Nick Hanauer
August 6, 2019
Employees at nonprofit organizations are among the most overworked and underpaid workers in the United States. They do important work, helping the helpless, advocating for the forgotten and bringing music, theater and the visual arts to our communities. And they put everything they have into their jobs, often in exchange for smaller paychecks than their private-sector counterparts. Worse, they pay a steep price for that devotion to their work: At least one study has shown that half of all nonprofit employees are at or near the point of burnout.
But it's a shame that a few of our most prominent nonprofit employers in the arts are repaying the dedication of their workers by opposing efforts to strengthen Washington state’s outdated overtime rules. Everyone could anticipate the business community’s pushback — they unrolled the same predictable nonsense about higher wages killing business back when we adopted the $15 minimum wage; it’s as false today as it was then. But hearing some of these nonprofit leaders actively lobby against their workers in public hearings was especially disappointing.
That a new wage would entail ramping up the floor of fundraising activities doesn't seem that hard to understand and given that the norm in non-profit work weeks is thirty-five hours rather than forty hours a week I'd need some updates (having been out of non-profit in most ways since the 2008 real estate market crash) as to whether a lot of non-profit workers get overtime. The impression I had from my non-profit days was a lot of key people were salaried, in which case the very concept of overtime was a bit moot.
Even if a higher minimum wage seems like nonsense to arts writers who haven't been involved in the donor development and fundraising side of things ... what are the odds that donors are going to hear a call from someone fundraising on behalf of the Seattle Symphony saying how much they need increased support so that, if you will, the wage slave tier of workers can actually be paid overtime? Having worked for years in non-profit I could certainly find that interesting but the average ticket-buyer? Not so sure. But maybe what Seattle arts organizations might want to consider is just being that blunt about it, if they decide to have a change of heart on the issue.
Douglas McLennan has written on the topic as well. That there's a tension between advocacy for social justice and addressing economic inequalities while simultaneously resolving to not pay employees overtime does seem like a double standard that's hard to present in any positive light. McLennan puts it as straightforwardly as that.
https://www.postalley.org/2019/08/06/seattle-arts-organizations-say-theyre-leaders-for-social-justice-so-why-are-they-fighting-paying-workers-for-their-overtime/
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Indeed, they’re arguing against it. Filing a letter opposing the rule changes with the Department, the arts groups wrote that, while they agree the rules need to be updated, “the proposal by the State of Washington to increase this level [the wage level for workers who would qualify for overtime] to 2 – 2.5 times greater than the state minimum wage is unreasonably too high, and would negatively impact the arts and culture services and programs we offer to our communities.” The letter was signed by representatives of the Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Seattle Opera, IslandWood, Museum of Flight, KEXP [KEXP was part of an earlier version of this letter, but didn’t sign on to the final version], The 5th Avenue Theatre, Museum of History and Industry, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Imagine Children’s Museum, Seattle Theatre Group, Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Cascade Public Media, Frye Art Museum, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle Aquarium, and the Pacific Science Center.
Now, we’re not talking about a dramatic increase in pay for arts workers – generally low-paid to begin with – but about whether they should have to be paid for working overtime and how much. One of the dirty little secrets in the arts is how much of the work is made on the backs of low-paid, overworked worker-bee employees. Again, to be clear, we’re not talking about wage increases, but about whether employees should be paid for the time they legitimately work.
The arts groups argue that they’re already strapped for cash and that paying workers for overtime would be onerous. They argue for a lower rate in calculating it and a longer period for implementing it. Sure, paying workers fairly for the time they work will cost more. Nick Hanauer, writing in Crosscut, says that Seattle Opera argues that the proposed rules “would cause us to need to raise between $75,000 and $475,000 more each year.” Hanauer notes that this is “a speculative $400,000 range that betrays a cavalier attitude toward the hours it demands from its workers.”
A few months ago museum employees around America began posting their salaries anonymously in a publicly accessible Google Doc with the aim of giving workers more power in negotiating their pay. The artist-led campaign against the Whitney allowing an arms manufacturer on its board shocked the art world with its success and the Whitney’s capitulation. Clearly, as arts organizations have begun to position themselves as leaders for social justice, their workers, artists and supporters have begun taking a harder eye on the institutions’ own complicit behaviors, values and practices.
It’s illuminating that the argument Seattle’s arts organizations are making isn’t about whether paying overtime is fair, but whether it’s affordable. Of such arguments, leaders for social justice aren’t made.
Highlighting the stratification of compensation in arts organizations could potentially help illuminate where there are levels of compensation in the upper tiers that are part of an inequality system in which the top have X and the bottom have Y ... but fundraising is often full-time work as it is in non-profits and it can sometimes be easy for folks to forget that people still get paid even in non-profit.
The post discussing the recommendation for Driscoll to get 650k compensation with a 200k housing allowance for 2013 has been the most viewed post in the history of the blog.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2014/10/sutton-turner-memo-recommended-raise.html
For now, headlines and opinion have tended to be that Seattle arts organization big dogs have a significant gap between ideals and business norms with respect to overtime ... although that would invite a question as to how much actual overtime happens. It's not as though I haven't heard stories from friends or relatives about how the development of things like split shift scheduling let people get scheduled to work more than forty hours a week in food service in a way that worked around overtime pay over the last twenty or so years. Merely highlighting a lack of overtime pay in non-profit doesn't necessarily address stuff that non-profit professionals would already know about the thirty-five vs the forty hour work weeks. In other words, I get the indignation but there's another level, the part of me that spent years working on the donor cultivation/donor development side, that wonders whether or not this spit take is too easy in skimming past fundraising challenges as a whole.
That the arts worlds work on exploitation isn't that hard to point out, obviously, and that the arts scenes are increasingly seen as a domain of the privileged isn't that hard to see either. But ... I'm also reading headline after headline year after year about how orchestras are shuttering or facing challenges. One of the challenges for some arts systems is that symphonies may be on a century long decline as the prestige format for classical music; museums are facing crises of legitimacy as to all the ways in which the cultural artifacts of museums reflect a "museum culture" that was developed during peak eras of colonial/imperial expansion; and there's also concern about the extent to which a lot of arts culture and arts patronage is bankrolled by industries that are regarded as, at best, morally compromised for their exploitive aspects.
So ... Seattle arts organizations with some big name recognition don't want to pay overtime ... . It's a reminder, at a practical level, that I haven't been in that scene in a long time and wonder whether or not in some ways I'm better off for it, at least in the sense of not being a worker in a non-profit context, though I sometimes miss it.
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