The arts will not survive without extended unemployment benefits, and all of us should care

(Photo Credit: Taidgh Barron/NY Post)

• Annie Jacobson

The Broadway League’s announcement shuttering all theatrical work is both the right call and a ticking time-bomb for the hundreds of thousands of folks who work in the arts.

Without extended unemployment benefits, including the $600/week pandemic unemployment compensation program which has already expired, one-by-one a generation of performers, arts administrators, crew members, writers, designers, box office staff, musicians, house managers, ushers, company managers, choreographers, and more will be forced to leave behind the field to which they’ve dedicated their lives. 

Some before they even got started.

Fundamentally, there are two dominating forces at play. Arts work outside of commercial theater pays nearly unlivable wages for the cities in which they are often located (leading many to lack the type of savings necessary to survive with no income) and the woefully inadequate, deadly lack of planning in the early months of the pandemic meant arts work, specifically theater, is now decimated in the United States until there is a vaccine. 

Theater has long been a fundamental sector of the economy. The most up to date reporting from the Broadway League reveals “Broadway attendance in the 2018–2019 season topped those of the ten professional New York and New Jersey sports teams combined,” leading to a 14.7 billion dollar influx to the economy while supporting nearly 100,000 jobs in New York City alone.

Actors’ Equity (the professional union protecting actors and stage managers nationwide) also recently confirmed more broadly, “sustaining our entertainment sector and the workers who power it is essential to the stability of communities across the country.

Study after study has shown that live performing arts generate a huge return on investment in local economies. Nonprofit theater attendees generate an additional $31 in economic activity per person, per show.”

But, beyond the economic impact, is the foundation on which theater arts lives: its humanity.

Live theater is a field that makes the world a better place, educates, heals, embodies, and instills empathy. Theater often holds up a mirror; asking its audience to reckon with the duality of how the world is with how it can be, and how we contribute to such dissonance.

As Tony and Grammy Award-winning artist Leslie Odom Jr. said in his groundbreaking article with the LA Times:  

“If we don’t give audiences a place for their catharsis and healing in the theater, they will work it out in real life in ways that can have real detrimental effects on us as a society.”

Evidence-based research also confirms the arts are essential to our physical and psychological health. In 2009, The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Society for the Arts released a State of the Field Report where experts in medicine, the arts, social services, media, business, and government concluded unequivocally:

The arts benefit patients by aiding in their physical, mental, and emotional recovery...Art also has the power to communicate and educate, giving it a growing role of significance in healthcare institutions. In addition, research shows that the arts can reduce patients’ use of pain medication and length of stay in the hospital, and improve compliance with recommended treatments—offering substantial savings in healthcare costs...For students in medical and other healthcare fields, the arts can enhance their skills—improving their observational, diagnostic, and empathic abilities. It helps them to understand patients in a different way and connect with them on a more humanizing level.

The detailed statistics are even more astounding. In just one example, treatment involving music led to “increased quality and length of life for individuals diagnosed with terminal cancer (Hilliard, 2003).” Arts work isn’t just assuaging lives (although, that is worthy work all on its own), it’s quite literally saving them.

Of course, this is all to say nothing of the millions who turned to streaming networks, music, books, and more, for help at the beginning of a quarantine imposed due to the very same virus that is now threatening to wipe out those of us who put that art into the world. 

We want to work. We have jobs. They are sitting inside empty theaters, yet some may never open again.

For those who aren’t merely furloughed, they are now tasked with finding work during a time when there is a hiring freeze in all sectors of the economy. 

Until we can go back safely, until more jobs become available, we need guaranteed livable unemployment. These benefits are not free handouts; in fact, that sentiment is explicitly antithetical to how unemployment compensation actually functions.

Our taxes pay for these benefits, taxes collected via our contribution to the very workforce from which we remain indefinitely shut out through no fault of our own (but, while we’re debunking talking points, if $600/week is causing folks not to return to their fields it’s time to examine why poverty wages are allowed to exist in the first place). 

We are not the only job sector relying on these funds to stay afloat. But, we are certainly the last who will be able to return. We just want our field, and all who make it possible, to survive.

I believe we’re worth saving. Do you?

For more information on how you can help, please visit https://beanartshero.com/ 

Annie Jacobson is an intersectional feminist, actress, singer, and writer who has most recently worked on the business side of broadway in New York City, as well as theaters across the country. Her life’s work involves using her voice in a multi-hyphenate approach to help change the world.