Nothing I am good at is particularly well-compensated, nor does that compensation reflect the level of expertise I hold as compared to other disciplines. At least, not without generally taking out the joy of the thing itself. Non-technical writing, performing music—there aren’t a lot of careers to be had with these skills. While I can sometimes pitch them as useful, or transferrable, very few people are offering jobs that actually pay for what I do: the academic job market is bleak, publishing is still concentrated in NYC, and making a career writing books is a moonshot. As for singing, well, I’m not a pop idol and I don’t play an instrument well enough to go it alone.
As a college student in New York, all of the internships I went out for were in publishing. They were both insanely competitive and largely unpaid (and those that did were minimum wage). Luckily for me, my college, in an attempt to even the playing field (so that these sorts of opportunities were available to more than those who could afford to work for free) had a scholarship fund that paid out $10/hour (this was 2014), or supplemented up to that rate. My friends who were interning at banks and Fortune 500 companies were well paid, gaining both experience and a nice wage. Those of us in the arts generally had to choose. Even if you were one of the lucky few to get a publishing job, you’d have to start out as an editorial assistant, a position that, in 2016 when I was looking to get hired, usually paid between $36-40k/year. In New York. The finance jobs were selective, too, but getting the job wasn’t the only prize. A hefty salary came with it as well. And I know, there are some that argue finance requires more hours, or whatever, but let’s just agree that publishing doesn’t pay enough.
The other thing I’m good at, teaching, though not seen as artistic, is considered a vocation, and therefore job satisfaction should be compensation enough. Even though we are begging people to train as teachers, we don’t feel compelled to financially compensate them as well because, apparently, job satisfaction is not a perk but a part of the compensation package. Because feeling virtuous feeds, clothes, and houses us?
At the moment, I’m back working in publishing, a nice 20 hour/week gig that falls under the title of “graduate assistantship.” As a PhD candidate, I’m limited to those 20 hours a week—going beyond that endangers my funding, because of course, I should spend the other 20 hours of the traditional work week writing my dissertation or performing other professional work. It makes sense for the graduate school to protect that time—I’m there to get my degree. Unfortunately, that cap on hours works better in theory than in practice, and so many of my fellow grad students are moonlighting to try to pad out our pay packet.
I have a better position than most, not least of all because I have guaranteed 12-month, rather than 9-month funding. As assistantships go, this one is clutch, and as it’s traditionally gone to someone on the creative writing side of our department (not critical, like me), I sometimes feel like I snuck in, got lucky. It’s easier for me to leave my job at work, not worrying about my students when I leave campus, than when I taught. I’m getting the chance to hone skills and demonstrate proficiency in areas that make me better suited for the non-academic job market (as I’m not interested in the slog to chase a tenure-track position). I believe in the value of literary journals to the artistic, cultural landscape, and believe that the publication I work for is elevating voices that might not otherwise get to be heard. I have a boss who is serious about protecting my time. But that sense of vocation, of feeling like I’m lucky to have the job I have, is not great.
Why? Because job satisfaction is not enough. I do not, and should not, “dream of labor,” to borrow the meme-ified phrase. While I like my work, I don’t perform it simply because I believe it to be valuable. I do it because it’s how I make money. I’ve noticed of late that I feel like I don’t have enough hours to do all of the things that need doing at work. I’m having to consciously remind myself to stop working when I hit my hours for the week, and to take breaks. I was a sprinter when I ran track and that’s also the best way to describe how I work. I’ve never been one for all nighters simply because I work better in short bursts of intense activity. A part-time job is great for me in theory—I only spend 4 hours at the office, not 8 each day, preventing me from getting bored and tired—but the reality is that I just end up doing the same amount of work that I’d end up doing if I was actually employed for longer. I keep cramming all of my sprints into my office time, and then am too tired to do the other work. I’m better working by project, not time.
Part of the desire to push, though, is that feeling I mentioned earlier, that I’m lucky to have this position, and that if I ever want another position like it, I need to prove some sort of super-human devotion and never complain. On June 8th, The New York Times published an opinion piece by Simone Stolzoff on just this—that people who work in jobs in the arts, or jobs that are considered a calling, are much easier to exploit. It didn’t surprise me to read it, but it was still shocking to see someone finally say the thing.
In that article, Stolzoff writes about a woman who ends up leaving her career as a librarian because the compensation is not enough and she feels unable to ask for more:
In a 2018 paper, Fobazi Ettarh, who at the time was a librarian, coined a term for how the perceived righteousness of her industry obscured the issues that existed within it. Ms. Ettarh called the phenomenon vocational awe, which she defined as the belief that as a workplace, libraries were inherently good, and therefore supposedly beyond critique. When a workplace is seen as virtuous, she claimed, it’s easier for workers to be exploited. “In the face of grand missions of literacy and freedom, advocating for your full lunch break feels petty,” she wrote.
The article also mentions how, in (relatively) better paid industries, like healthcare, there’s still little space for asserting a right to be paid better, to have better hours. I find myself in this position frequently, or versions of it: though I believe my employer would have made up the hours if asked, I took a voluntary 20% reduction in hours for the summer months so that my employer could use a special fund to pay for my work, rather than dipping into our increasingly slim budget. When you work for something like a literary magazine, that cannot pay its bills on the basis of subscriber and reading fees but instead relies on donors (and in our case a public institution) to value a vague, unquantifiable thing like a sense of community good or prestige, it becomes very easy to put the mission ahead of your own needs. In healthcare, getting paid more for working during a pandemic is not profiting off of misery—it is being compensated accurately. But we normalize not paying people enough from the beginning—the residency/intern model that exists for medicine (human and veterinary) is so clearly exploitative. We try to shrug it off, saying that later career compensation justifies poor pay and impossible hours. That the oversight and mentorship is part of it. Is it really okay?
The idea of teaching, art, medicine as calling has a romanticism that I appreciate—in an ideal world, the people who shepherded my future and those of future generations, who create the media I consume and share, who may very well save my life someday should be motivated by more than financial compensation. Vocation means better teaching, art, medicine. But without the ability to really advocate for better pay (be it from the fear that we are replaceable or that we come across as grasping), we price out all but those who can afford to enter these jobs, or carry the debt of training in them, and we insure burnout. Emotional fulfillment is wonderful, but it is not a replacement for a livable salary, health and dental, and regular working hours.
I see this too with the constant discourse of, “if you can’t afford college without student loans, don’t go,” or “if you’re underpaid in your current job, switch careers.” Somehow, the entirely laudable and valuable conversation on deemphasizing a four year degree as necessary for any job, on re-legitimizing the choice to pursue a trade or go to a technical college, has instead become one that seems to say that, if you are poor, you should not make art. If you are poor, do not teach. If you are poor, don’t work for a non-profit. If you are poor, you don’t get a vocation.
For some reason, we act like art is a luxury for the wealthy or born from madness, of a need to create whether or not compensation follows. Or that only those at the very top should be paid—extravagantly, perhaps—because we only need enough art to fill a few museums, to prove a nation’s cultural competency. But we don’t consume art because we’re just humoring artists. We do it because it is what brings pleasure, meaning to life. If you only hang art on your walls because you think it has resale value, or because someone else deemed it great, you might be missing the point (you are definitely missing the point). One of my favorite things about the limited series Station Eleven (based on a book of the same name) is that, while it appears to be a standard post-apocalypse story, it is, at heart, a story about the importance of artistic expression to the preservation of humanity. In the story’s present, we follow a troupe of artists performing Shakespearean plays that bring meaning and joy to the communities of survivors they visit. Artistic expression provides hope during an extended lockdown in the story’s past. A comic book provides a template for morality.
To say, “I do not dream of labor” is not to say that work must be miserable. I would like to either feel that my job has meaning, or find pleasure in the tasks that make up my working day. But that should not be a trade off. Simply because I enjoy what I do does not mean I am not working. Liking my job shouldn’t mean I don’t get to ask for a raise like everyone else.
Love this! It’s nice to have all these ideas in one place. And your synthesis is so smart. I love the comment on Station Eleven--I hadn’t thought enough about the art angle when I read it. And your nuance and critique of “poor people don’t get a vocation.” Ty for this!!