Bringing Good Jobs to the Arts: Strategies for Creating Better Art by Creating Better Working Conditions for Artists


By Nick Beadle
a man and woman stand on a set resembling a jazz bar

Jeffrey L. Page and Laurin Talese at Lady Day rehearsal. PTC's Photo Archive

Great art comes from passion—but being able to pay the bills helps too. 

“When [a company] provides an artist enough money so they’re not worried about the bills,” said Jeffrey Page, a stage director, “the proverbial line they’re drawing inside the rehearsal room is an audacious and bold and absolutely authoritative line.”

Page is a resident artist at Philadelphia Theatre Company (PTC). As generational shifts and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to ripple through the arts, PTC has re-evaluated how to balance the passion that fuels great art with providing a supporting and sustainable workplace for the artists that make it and the staff that support them. 

“Even if artists love their vocation, that does not mean they should struggle to get by,” said Margo Moskowitz, PTC’s managing director. 

"We love it but people also deserve to make a living wage," Moskowitz said. "[Artists] should be able to enjoy their life. The arts should provide that." 

PTC, a National Endowment for the Arts grantee, is one of many employers who, knowingly or not, have been part of a nationwide good jobs movement. A “good job” is one that helps workers not just get by, but get ahead. Good jobs place a high value on creating a strong relationship between workers and their employers, as well as pay wages that meet the cost of living and offer benefits to cover needs like healthcare and childcare. 

Over the past four years, the Biden-Harris Administration made good jobs a priority of the federal government. The federal government has invested nearly $300 billion toward creating good jobs as well as set up dozens of programs that open paths to good jobs to more people, including people of color, rural workers, and working parents.

Good jobs are not just beneficial for workers and society—they help employers, too. Jobs with strong working conditions regularly see reduced costs from lower staff turnover, greater productivity, and greater customer satisfaction.  

Steps taken by PTC are good examples of some ways employers in the arts or elsewhere can be proactive in creating good jobs by starting ongoing conversations with their workers about their needs. There is no perfect solution, but “relentless incrementalism”—as Moskowitz described it—is critical to creating an environment where workers thrive and artists create great art. 

Here are some strategies that could help.

1. Offer security, support, and flexibility where needed. 

By definition, a theater production is not a permanent job. "One season you’re working, one season you’re not working," Page said. “That’s sort of the name of the game."

The impermanence can seem perilous in environments where performers feel like their job is always dangling by the thinnest of wires, in part because of deep-rooted attitudes in the arts that a career has to be all-consuming. That can be especially hard on actors performing intense or traumatic parts, for example.  

Taibi Magar, PTC’s co-artistic director and also a stage director, said the national racial reckoning after the 2020 murder of George Floyd led to conversations within the theater about how companies and productions mistreated performers. It led to PTC bringing in sensitivity consultants and adopting techniques to help performers playing difficult parts.

"It has kept people working in a healthy way,” Magar said. “The actors feel cared for. . . . It feels more welcome to express when they’re having challenges."

Page said he appreciates PTC’s steps to create a more supportive environment. 

"There’s kind of this unspoken invisible forcefield of support that you have where you don’t have the feeling that you’re constantly inside the audition room," Page said. 

2. Embrace hard questions and seek authentic perspectives. 

Page joined PTC early in the pandemic. When PTC asked him what it needed to better serve diverse audiences and communities, Page, who is Black, said the company "leaned in instead of scooting back" when he shared his thoughts. 

"You’re not going to be able to hang up a poster of MLK or Malcolm X and the flood gates to the community will come open and you’ll be in an audience of Black people heaven," Page said.

Page thinks PTC’s embrace of these hard questions and authentic perspectives showed in its production of Cost of Living, a Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about people with disabilities and their relationship with able-bodied family and caregivers. Ahead of the production, the cast met with people with disabilities and caregivers to understand their lives and challenges. 

"I have watched [PTC] be extremely firm in terms of finding ways of opening up the arts to the wider community and making it more accessible," he said. "I have seen not a drop in the quality but a wonderful evolution in the quality."

3. Make sure everyone understands the strategy, buys in, and keeps the conversation going. 

The most successful good jobs strategies have input and support from each part of the operation. "The idea of a culture shift has to have a larger buy-in," Moskowitz said. "It can’t just be the board, it can’t just be artists on stage."

"That doesn't mean we’re perfect—we’re certainly not perfect—it just means we’re striving."

Striving for better has proven vital in workplaces that have successfully adopted good jobs strategies. What brings people to a job is often very personal and ever evolving. Continuing communication between managers and workers—permanent and otherwise—can strengthen the enterprise and what it puts out into the world. 

Page said he thinks PTC’s supportive environment shows in the work it puts on stage.

"They really want the best of me," he said. "The best of me is the one who is relaxed and laughing and understands my life is not on the line."

Nick Beadle is the former Chief of Staff for Workforce and Communications for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Good Jobs Initiative. He is a national expert on strategies that create good jobs, economic mobility, and economic mobility for underserved communities.