I’ve been thinking about this since attending a roundtable at the Baltic, facilitated by the Real Living Wage Foundation, on low pay in the cultural and creative sector.

It was one of those rooms where you could feel both the weight of the issue and the commitment to change. A grounded conversation, not abstract, but rooted in lived experience. Across institutions, organisations and practitioners, there was a shared recognition:

Pay isn’t always working.

The data makes that clear:

  • The creative sector is the third lowest paid, after hospitality and retail
  • Around 40% of the sector is low paid
  • In the North East, 1 in 3 children are growing up in poverty — 70% of those in working households

That’s the backdrop. But as a self-employed practitioner and micro studio owner, the issue shows up slightly differently. It’s about whether working in the sector actually works. Especially creative work and the cost of hidden labour (which we all know so very well). This is where I go off topic to what the event was about (the real living wage in institutions), but I do think it’s an important perspective to share. Because underneath the data, one thing kept surfacing for me: Goodwill is quietly holding the sector together.

The gap we’re all quietly holding

From a Sail perspective, as a small, senior-led studio working across public and cultural projects often with a collective of others, the issue shows up in a very particular way.

It’s not always explicit low pay, it’s the gap that exists. The ambition and importance of the work is high (especially within social change projects): inclusive, thoughtful, strategic. Practitioners love and care about what they do. This work and approaches shape communities, shifts behaviour, and creates opportunity.

But budgets/funding don’t always match ambitions. So the gap gets filled with goodwill. That often includes extra thinking, extra engagement, additional routes, more rounds, more flexibility, more care. All of it framed as collaboration. All of it, in reality, labour. And it’s not sustainable (not on every project anyway, I get this is not a ‘binary’ conversation) for individuals.

What we say vs what we fund

We hear a lot about inclusion in the sector. But if the pay isn’t there, that is deciding who gets to stay. What voices we hear.

It’s not just about underpaying people, it’s quietly shaping who gets to build a career in this sector in the first place. Who can afford to take the work, who can absorb the uncertainty, who has the safety net to continue, who has the liberty to take the risk.

Goodwill and “flexibility” are quietly subsidising the sector, and masking the issue. Because on the surface, things look like they’re working. It’s easily masked in the creative industry because the people that work in it — work in it because they care, because they have a passion.

The burden of holding it together

The burden of this gap doesn’t fall evenly.

It often sits with:

  • small studios
  • freelancers
  • early-career practitioners

The people with the least structural power. Larger institutions feel the pressure too, especially with funding cuts, squeezed budgets, rising costs, increasing expectations. But smaller businesses (without an infrastructure) are often the ones absorbing the risk in real time: managing cashflow, protecting collaborators, trying to do the right thing within systems that don’t quite allow for it.

What also was hopeful was the solidarity in the room: we can’t solve this alone.

So what actually needs to change?

The question I had in my head, and raise at the end was this:

What would need to change in how work is commissioned or funded for fair pay to become the default — not the exception?

Because right now, fair pay is often treated as:

  • a value
  • a commitment
  • a stretch

But not a structural condition.

And until it is, we’ll keep having the same conversation. There was a real sense in the conversation of how we continue the conversation and move forward together. Because the issues discussed: low pay, inequality, access, sustainability, are not things any one organisation or sector can fix in isolation.

What’s needed now

We need systemic change, we need government to value (and correctly fund) arts, culture and creativity for what they are: innovation, imagination, community building, problem solving — work that actively shapes the places and systems we live in.

We need long-term thinking. And crucially, diplomatic, collaborative leadership, and listening to the voices that often go unheard.

If we’re serious about building a creative sector, and a city, that’s inclusive, sustainable and impactful, then a few things feel non-negotiable:

  • We need to value creative work as skilled, essential labour, not passion work.
  • We need funding and commissioning models that match ambition.
  • We need more spaces for honest, cross-sector dialogue.
  • We need leadership that can hold complexity, not just opposition.
  • We need support for small businesses and creative freelancers that are often on the bread line

Because right now, there’s a disconnect between what we say we value, and what we actually resource. And it’s often the more meaningful, critical work that makes change that takes the biggest hit.

There’s no shortage of care, ambition or ideas in the sector. Far from it. It is a sector with a huge place in my heart, the impact it makes, the solidarity it brings, the people that care.

But without structural change, we’re asking people to hold up a system that isn’t holding them.

Voices are being erased. And that’s not a foundation we can build a future on.