Wagency

For more than a century, artists' working lives have been defined by precarity. Living hand-to-mouth and working without wage standards, contracts, benefits, or health care now also describes the conditions of bare survival for many freelance workers in the art industry. 

Underrecognized casual labor has long been critical in helping to power the production and circulation of art. Today it does so in highly professionalized environments organized around the demands of the commercial art market. Employment often favors the highly educated and wealth-adjacent, or the affluent who can afford to work for little or nothing, leaving a skilled freelance precariat to compete in a race to the bottom for underpaid gig work. 

WAGENCY is how we propose to organize this atomized workforce. WAGENCY is not a formal trade union, umbrella group, or a guild. Rather, it is an organizational infrastructure designed to increase workers’ individual bargaining power and build collective leverage. 

WAGENCY is open to anyone working in the art field. Its core principles align with the tradition of solidarity unionism and other working class movements: rejecting hierarchical top-down leadership and supporting rank and file control, direct action, and portable membership.

WAGENCY provides tools for calculating and negotiating equitable pay in occupations across the supply chain. Its power lies in the commitment of its members to actively participate in changing the terms on which they engage their labor and to do so in solidarity with their peers. Join us as we build WAGENCY into an organizing model that is participatory, representative, self-sustaining, and self-organized.

Read on to learn more about WAGENCY's tools or sign up here .

Who is it for? Artists, artist assistants, art handlers, arts administrators, critics, curators, educators, interns, studio managers, and visitor service workers.

How does it work? Anyone can join and identify themselves on the public listing page  with one or more divisions. Joining WAGENCY is free.

For those interested in getting more actively involved, opportunities for subscribing members to self-organize and contribute to developing contracts  and other tools for their division are forthcoming. Subscribing to WAGENCY is $5 per month.

Who is it for? Anyone looking for operating expense and top salary data for nonprofit institutions across the U.S., as well as artists who wish to request and negotiate fees meeting W.A.G.E. standards with nonprofit institutions.

How does it work? W.A.G.E. fees are calculated  using a simple equation: the higher an institution’s expenses, the higher the fee. If you have been engaged by a nonprofit institution to provide content and want to be paid according to W.A.G.E. standards or higher, you'll need to know its total annual operating expenses.

WAGENCY provides access to a searchable database containing this number as well as other key information from the most recent publicly available tax records of thousands of nonprofits across the U.S. Using this information, the system generates customized W.A.G.E. fee schedules and sends Fee Requests as a PDF attachments from W.A.G.E. to contracting institutions. Once received, you can negotiate compensation and request payment, all with W.A.G.E. in CC to increase your leverage and provide support if needed.

Dear Scott Rothkopf,

W.A.G.E. has sent the attached Fee Request on behalf of Jeff Koons, an artist who uses WAGENCY to transact their labor. They are cc’d on this message. Once you have reviewed the attached PDF and are ready to respond, please keep W.A.G.E. in cc by replying-all.

Fee Requests and email exchanges are private and confidential. W.A.G.E. does not actively monitor correspondence between WAGENTS and institutions. Should either party need assistance, please send a separate email with HELP in the subject line to wagency@wageforwork.com.

Sincerely, W.A.G.E.

Who is it for? Workers looking for regional wage and salary rates by skill or occupation, as well as unpaid interns who want to know how much their free labor is worth.

How does it work? With barriers to entry into the art field already too high for many working people, surviving on unstable low-income gig work makes them even higher. Even though freelancing enables the kind of flexibility necessary to maintaining an art practice, the lack of health care, worker’s compensation, and other basic protections makes for an extremely precarious life for artist assistants, art handlers, studio managers, educators and many others.

Often hired ad-hoc without a contract to work on projects for which there is little precedent in terms of execution or outcomes, art and cultural workers are commonly expected to perform a wide range of tasks that are not valued equally. Many involve skills acquired not through academic or technical training but through years of underpaid supply chain labor, informal apprenticing, or sustaining a studio practice – itself unpaid and debt-producing.

Despite being critical links in the supply chain, many of these occupations have been poorly defined, if defined at all. In fact, most are not listed in the federal Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system. The result is a lack of industry standards for much of the labor which is integral not only to the production and circulation of contemporary art but also to building its financial value.

The Skills Calculator is intended to close that gap by enabling workers to define their skills with precision and price them according to federal data. It includes a searchable database that merges an art field skills categorization system made by W.A.G.E. with occupational data from the SOC system. Searchable by skill type , the database matches each skill to regional wage and salary percentiles drawn from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Users can calculate an average rate of compensation for a group of selected skills, thereby answering the eternal burning question: how much should I charge?

Who is it for? Freelance art handlers, artist assistants, and teaching artists, with work agreements for critics, independent curators, studio managers and others to be developed with the input of WAGENCY division members.

How does it work? The casual and temporary nature of freelance work leaves non-employees with few options when it comes to organizing for better pay and working conditions. Rarely sharing the same employer at the same time poses a significant obstacle to bargaining collectively and as such, contracts are one of the only tools freelance workers have at their disposal. 

Developed by contract and employment lawyers in consultation with workers, W.A.G.E.'s work agreements establish new industry standards for engaging the labor of those who facilitate the conception, fabrication, production, exhibition and circulation of art.

Instead of producing generic templates, each contract is an interactive 'bespoke' legal document that addresses the specific forms of exploitation endemic to each position. Core to our approach has been to push the boundaries of labor law by applying employee protections to freelance workers wherever possible.

While each is tailored to a specific form of labor, all address areas of common concern: wage equity and transparency, worker safety, equal representation, compensation, and worker classification. Coming Soon.

Read more about this project here .

No. No financial transactions take place through the platform.

If the institution is a nonprofit registered in the U.S. but located elsewhere you can, but otherwise, WAGENCY is limited to institutions based in the U.S.

No. WAGENCY is for negotiation between artists and nonprofit art institutions.

Yes. The fees of W.A.G.E. Certified institutions are determined by their projected current annual operating expenses and are pulled from information submitted to W.A.G.E. each fiscal year.

Yes! And we encourage you to do so. 

No. WAGENTS are required to begin by requesting W.A.G.E. fees. 

You have two choices:

1) Decline to work with the contracting institution.

2) Continue to negotiate until you reach an agreement.

Only W.A.G.E. can see your correspondence and we will only view it if you request help.

W.A.G.E. is keeping track of transactions in order to understand how WAGENCY is impacting the field and to make those insights available to users. All data is aggregated, fully anonymized. We have made every effort to make WAGENCY GDPR  compliant, please read our Privacy Policy  and User Agreement .