The Payment Trap
Why true diversity isn't possible if you aren't prepared to pay people properly for their time and expertise.
This column was first published in European snowboarding magazine Pleasure in 2022. Pleasure is one of the grand old titles of European snowboarding, and I’ve been lucky enough to have work published in the mag frequently over the years. Earlier last year, editor Stefan Goetschl asked me to write a couple of columns on ‘whatever you like’ - obviously the dream gig for an opinionated old hack like me.
Thanks to Stefan and team for getting me involved - click here to support subscribe and support independent snowboarding media. We’ll miss it when it’s gone.
Last year, I was asked to speak at a high profile industry event over here in the UK. Which was nice - until I asked how much they were paying their speakers.
“We don’t pay speakers”, came the reply. “Instead, we look after them while they’re with us - and most people consider the networking opportunities make it worth their while”.
Intrigued, I spent five minutes doing some cursory online research into the event in question. And what I found was pretty telling….
I discovered that tickets to the event averaged out at around £300, and they were hoping to sell around 5000 tickets. In addition, they were selling sponsorship packages to brands, with title sponsorship coming in at around £50,000.
I’m no mathematician, but even I can work out that if those numbers are even partly achieved, there’s likely to be enough cash floating to pay the speakers a few hundred quid for their time - should the organisers decide to, of course.
Now, after working in the industry for 25 years, I have enough confidence and understanding of my own value to turn down this - ahem - ‘opportunity’ (after all, what happens if I don’t want to spend my time in a room ‘networking’ with a group of people who think spending £300 on a ticket to a conference where naked commercialism is dressed up as activism in this way is a good idea? Would speaking for free still be worth my while?)
But the entire exchange begged a few questions.
How is it possible that brands and companies are still - in 2023! - offering ‘networking opportunities’ and ‘exposure’ in lieu of payment? How can any event or company claim to be at the forefront of the diversity conversation if they’re not prepared to pay people for their time and expertise? And what does this all say about the industry at this point in time?
The first thing to say is - it’s always been like this. Swapping creative labour for free trips, product or fees way below the market value is one of the pillars the entire industry seems to be built on. Just ask any young amateur rider hoping to break in, or any journalist or photographer working in the game. Existentially, the time, experience, and expertise accrued over time that adds up to this nebulous concept of ‘creativity’ has always been undervalued, whatever form it takes.
Certainly, my own career bears this out. My own path through the snowboarding industry began when I started writing for the British snow mags in the mid 1990s, a period that today seems like a veritable golden age. Back then, I was being paid around 20p a word to write stories. Today, 25 years later, I’m STILL being paid 20p a word to write for those same magazines. (I’m not sure if you’ve noticed but in the interim, things have got much more expensive).
And yet, I continue to write for these same titles? Why? By telling myself that if I did ask for something close to my actual market value, the magazines would go bust, and the scene would suffer.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that as a convention it is completely insidious and completely accepted - not least by friends and peers I discussed the issue with after I posted this Open Thread on this entire topic last year.
In posting this, I was interested in garnering as many views as possible, from people who’d been on the receiving end of the practise, and from the brands and event organisers making the decisions who were at the other end of the transaction. (This is also what I discussed as a guest on the On The Outside podcast in October last year, above).
Almost everybody who contributed agreed it had happened to them but seemed to accept it as a rite of passage.
Even more interestingly, almost everybody was engaged in the same mental gymnastics as myself in an effort to justify the status quo to themselves. Some felt that focusing on money was too restrictive, and embracing such scenarios was a way of developing creatively. Others felt it demonstrated the requisite work ethic, and a determination to break in at any cost. Others felt it was a way of separating the creative wheat from the chaff.
Still others were even nostalgic about the practise, and seemed almost wistful about the times where life was less complicated, and you could swap a job for a trip or a new board. Almost everybody suggested it was inevitable, and with so many people fighting to get into the game, it would always be this way.
And here I began to discern a theme - absolutely everybody who contributed was, like me, basically justifying it to themselves as a means of justifying the status quo.
Which, in turn, revealed another theme: not ONE person contributing to the thread was from the other end of the transaction - ie, somebody at a brand or an event who is in charge of making these decisions (and presumably justifying it internally, either to themselves or as part of a business strategy).
To me, this fascinating dynamic goes a long way to explaining how this convention has merrily gone on existing without being seriously challenged for so many years. It means that the onus is on the creative, the rider, the speaker and the journalist to justify this imbalanced scenario as the price of entry. In this telling of the story, the brands, events and companies who basically perpetuate this state of affairs are pretty-much helpless bystanders, unable to change things even it they wanted to.
The problem with this is it is based upon some fairly bogus assertions. The first of which is that the money isn’t there in the first place, and the brands/events/companies genuinely can’t afford to pay people fairly. This may well be true when it comes to start-ups (although if it is, why are you trying to work with people you can’t afford?) But the idea that there isn’t enough money in the industry to pay people properly these days is laughable.
Not sure if you’ve noticed, but snowboarding, surfing, skateboarding and the ‘outdoor’ industry are bigger business than ever before. And that’s before you get to specific cases, as my back-of-the-fag-packet sums about the event that asked me to speak for free demonstrates.
Looked at dispassionately, it’s really only possible to draw one conclusion: if a brand, company or event says they cannot afford to pay speakers a proper fee, or give ams or pros a decent contract, then they either have a problem with their business model or they’re being (to put it politely) extremely disingenuous.
And it’s that last word that is key. Particularly when it comes to the question of diversity, which is such a hot topic in the industry right now. Take the event that tried to book me, which is enthusiastically promoted as being at the forefront of the diversity conversation in the action sports and outdoor industry. Can any event or company who is unwilling to pay people fairly be truly committed to diversity? I would suggest not. Why? Because asking people to work for free immediately narrows the pool to those who can …. afford to work for free. This isn’t rocket science. It’s why certain industries, like media or law, tend to be dominated by the same demographics, and why there’s such a campaign in the (ahem) real world to pay interns fairly for their time.
It also means that the stories we hear, and the perspectives companies and brands elevate, have traditionally tended to be extremely demographically one-dimensional. As a friend of mine said to me when we discussed this point, “…true diversity is when stories are told BY people, not just ABOUT them”.
The quickest way of achieving ‘true diversity’? Paying people fairly. The point is - like energy companies announcing record profits while simultaneously raising prices - none of this is inevitable, as much as some might argue otherwise. There are no nefarious outside forces responsible for these choices. These decisions are made by normal people sitting in rooms, and usually for commercial reasons.
So let’s start calling it what it is, and at least have an honest conversation about it. Only then might we get the equitable and diverse industry and community that the entire industry, and events such as the one that asked me to speak, claim to be so passionate about.
Got a story you want to run past me? Let me know! I pay for contributions. Got anything to say about this piece? Leave a comment or hit me up in the chat thread:
🙏🏾 amen to that
I've always wondered what the protocol is for paying/not paying guests on podcasts.... I listen to a wide variety each week - from hugely popular, to underground - and often assume that guests are there (for free) to promote a new book/album/project. (I'm not directly asking what YOU do Matt, more thinking-out-loud)