Wage Transparency Laws—What They Mean for the Dance Industry

Lack of clarity around how much a job pays can be frustrating for seekers of all kinds. But in the dance industry, where gigs are often underpaid or unpaid, and where most performers string together many opportunities over the course of a year, the lack of wage transparency can be particularly fraught. Two new laws in New York City and California seek to rectify this, by requiring employers with four or more employees (in the case of New York City’s law) or 15 or more employees (in the case of California’s SB 1162) to include salary information In every job postings, or risk paying penalties.

While neither law directly addresses the low-salary rampant in the dance industry, they do give dance workers the agency to choose the jobs they want to audit for or apply to based on how much they pay, says Tim Cynova, principal at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., former co-CEO of Fractured Atlas and former executive director of Parsons Dance. This, he says, could put pressure on organizations compensating on the low end. BRAT, too, hopes that employers having to share their rates with the world will lead them to reconsider how much they’re offering—or that rates will eventually be forced up when low-paying jobs fail to attract talent.

On the other hand, Duque Cifuentes worries that without proper support, organizations with minuscule budgets may get left behind when their low-end rates can’t budge. “Because it’s one thing to say ‘This is a requirement,’ and it’s another thing to help people have the resources to do it, so that we don’t find ourselves losing the diversity of organizational types or organizational sizes or types of work, she says.

Cynova says that a positive but temporarily painful likely result of these laws is the systematization of pay structures at small dance organizations that don’t have robust human resource departments. “What’s required of wage transparency is a structure that’s clear and consistent about why one role is comped with this and another role is comped with that,” he says. And that takes a lot of work.

But both Cynova and Duque Cifuentes hope that wage transparency will help the dance industry move towards more equitable compensation—and that it will empower workers. “It changes who has power in an organization, who has information—the opaque system only works for some,” says Cynova. “I think in the end it’s going to make a healthier dance ecosystem.”