There is Power in a Union of Voices

By Julia Benzinger, Co-Founder and Co-Director, Rising Waters Collective

On the night before his execution by firing squad in Salt Lake City, Utah, labor organizer and songwriter Joe Hill sent a telegram to IWW leader Bill Haywood. It read: "Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize." (AFL-CIO Labor History Archives.) That was November 18, 1915. Hill had spent his short life writing songs for itinerant workers, immigrants, and the people history tends to omit. He did it because he understood something that is still inconvenient to acknowledge: the work of making culture is work, and the people who do it deserve to be compensated and protected like any other worker. (If you don't know the story of the circumstances surrounding Joe Hill's arrest and trial, you should read about it!)

I am writing this from Barcelona, where the streets are full on May 1st. While its roots are in the United States, May Day in much of the world is not a barbecue holiday. It is a reminder, issued collectively and loudly by workers to their governments, that labor is the thing that makes everything else possible. In the US, I think of Dolores Huerta organizing farmworkers in the California fields. Francis Perkins becoming the first woman to serve in a US Cabinet and architecting the New Deal's labor protections. Larry Itliong leading the Delano grape strike before Cesar Chavez joined it, a fact that gets erased with uncomfortable regularity. Mother Jones, at 83, still showing up on picket lines. The work and collective actions of labor organizers are the reason there is such a thing as a weekend.

Musicians have always been part of this story. Pete Seeger spent decades performing at union rallies and labor benefits. He was blacklisted during the McCarthy era for his political beliefs and despite that, he continued his activism. (APWU, "Pete Seeger: Activist, Master Songsmith.") Woody Guthrie taped a sign to his guitar that read: "This machine kills fascists." Harry Belafonte used his platform and his income to fund the civil rights movement for years. These were acts of solidarity by artists who understood that their labor and the labor of the dockworker and the farmhand and the factory worker were the same labor: human beings making things of value for which they deserved to be paid and protected.

The through line in all of it is collective action. Not one person with a guitar, but a movement of people. A movement of people who activate together with persistence and courage.

And let's take a second to recognize that the canon of music and labor has favored making men the heroes of the movements. The names we invoke, Hill, Seeger, Guthrie, Belafonte, Robeson, are almost exclusively men. The women who sang and organized alongside them, who wrote songs, ran strike kitchens, faced the same blacklists and considerably more erasure, have been largely written out of the standard telling. It is the same structural pattern that shows up in economic data, in the pay gaps, in the 80% of top orchestral positions held by men, in the 11% of women who are music directors at instiutional level orchestras and opera houses. The marginalization of women's artistic labor and the marginalization of women's historical labor are the same story.

This August, Rising Waters Collective is presenting the world premiere of Songs of Resilience by Sheila Silver, a Guggenheim Fellow, Rome Prize winner, and one of the most decorated composers working in America today. Silver is using the song cycle to address the current political era in the United States directly, celebrating what she calls the everyday heroes of our time. (sheilasilver.com) She was born and raised in Seattle and she has spent her career writing music reflecting on social, political, and environmental issues. The world premiere of her work will be performed in the city that made her, presented by an organization that believes paying the work of the composer is not optional.

The Numbers

The reality of what it means to be a working musician in the United States in 2025 is not pretty, and the data that exists, though incomplete, tells a consistent story.

In 2011, the Future of Music Coalition conducted one of the most rigorous surveys of working musicians ever undertaken in the United States, surveying more than 5,000 musicians. Among those who identified music as their primary income source and who spent 36 or more hours per week on music-related work, the median annual income from music was $18,000. (DiCola, "Money from Music," Arizona Law Review, 2013.) Adjusted for inflation, that figure is approximately $25,500 in 2025 dollars. There is no credible evidence that freelance performance fees have tracked inflation. In a 2023 survey of independent musicians, 41% reported making less than $15,000 from music in the prior year. (Xposure Music Industry Report, 2023.) Meanwhile, the costs of being a working performer, including travel, housing, health insurance, and the unpaid hours of rehearsal and administration that never appear on any contract, have not stayed flat. Opera America reported in 2023 that working professional singers routinely net closer to 50% of their stated fee after professional expenses are accounted for.

It is worth noting that the most commonly cited Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for "musicians and singers" look considerably more comfortable on paper. What those figures tend to obscure is that the largest single employer of musicians in the United States is religious organizations, which account for a significant share of the BLS sample. The median for a cantor or church organist in a stable salaried position is not the median for a freelance classical singer piecing together a living from production to production. These are different economic realities wearing the same statistical label.

The gender dimension of this picture is, predictably, worse. Research analyzing more than 7,000 US-based freelancers found that women charge approximately 15% less per hour than men, even when they have complete freedom to set their own rates. (Career.io, 2025.) The UK Musicians' Census 2023, the largest survey of working musicians conducted anywhere in the English-speaking world, found that women musicians earn on average 8.7% less than men annually from music work, and that of musicians earning the highest incomes, nearly 80% are men. Women respondents in that Census were more likely than any other group to work in classical music and musical theater. A 2018 Berklee College of Music study found that disparities in pay and employment opportunity were more pronounced among self-employed and freelance women musicians than among those in salaried positions. Rigorous, US-specific data on women whose sole income comes from freelance performance remains scarce. That absence is its own kind of statement about whose economic reality gets studied and whose gets assumed.

The picture is no less stark when you look at race and disability. In 2025, the musician population of American orchestras remained 75.8% white, with Black musicians comprising just 2.1% of the total, Latino musicians 4.1%, and Asian or Asian American musicians 11.6%. (League of American Orchestras, April 2025.) In the 2023/24 concert season, works by composers from the global majority, meaning non-white composers of any gender, accounted for just 1.6% of repertoire programmed across 111 orchestras in 30 countries. (Donne Foundation, Equality and Diversity in Global Repertoire Report, 2024.) The repertoire problem and the hiring problem are the same problem: when the people making programming decisions are predominantly white, the composers on the stage tend to be too.

The disability data is, characteristically, even harder to find. A 2021 Arts Council England study found just 2% of musicians in funded ensembles and BBC orchestras declaring a disability, against 22% of the UK's total population identifying as disabled. (Classical Music Magazine, January 2024.) The gap between those numbers is not explained by disabled people being less musical. It is explained by barriers: physical venues with no stage access, inflexible schedules, and what researchers call the attitudinal barrier, the baseline assumption that a disabled person cannot do the work. The UK Musicians' Census found that 71% of disabled musicians have faced or witnessed discrimination, with 19% reporting it as a significant barrier to career progression. (VAN Magazine, December 2024.) In a separate survey, 35% of disabled artists reported arriving at a show and being unable to perform due to venue access barriers, and 41% had rejected bookings outright because they already knew the venue would be inaccessible. (Ben Price, Harbourside Management, survey published by PRS for Music, December 2021)

Opera has long depicted disability on stage, blind characters, wounded heroes, "madwomen" as vehicles to fuel the hero's journey. It has been considerably less interested in having disabled artists make the work. That is a failure of imagination as much as anything else, and it is one the field is only beginning to reckon with.

It Doesn't Have to Be This Way

The United States treats arts funding as a charitable impulse rather than a public good. That is a policy choice, not an inevitability, and other countries have made different choices when it comes to how they view the value of culture and those who contribute to the sector.

Germany offers the clearest counterargument. Arts funding there is administered primarily at the state and municipal level, rooted in the principle that local administrators best understand the needs of their communities and artists. Germany has one full-time orchestra for roughly every 550,000 people. Munich, with a population of 1.2 million, has seven full-time orchestras and two full-time opera houses. If New York City had the same per capita ratio of orchestras as Germany, it would have 16. If it matched Munich specifically, it would have approximately 45. (osborne-conant.org, "The German Arts Funding Model.") In the United States, there is a publication called Overseas Musician that exists specifically to help American musicians leave the country to find work.

(Oh, and full disclosure, I am one of those musicians who spent 7 years in Germany as a full-time, salaried government employee working as a soloist in one of the three major opera houses in Berlin. The experience was unlike anything I'd had before, or since, in the United States.)

Germany also provides structural protection for independent artists through the Künstlersozialkasse, a social insurance system for freelance creative workers. Under this system, artists cover only half of their own insurance costs. The remaining half is subsidized by the federal government and by social security contributions from businesses that use artistic and communications services. (Facts About Germany, "TAT-2020-Kultur-Freiheit-Kunst.") The premise is straightforward: if your business profits from the work of artists, you contribute to the system that keeps those artists economically viable. Berlin alone budgeted €947 million for culture in 2024, with plans to reach €1 billion in 2025. (Euronews, July 2023.) That is one city.

France takes a different but equally instructive approach through the intermittents du spectacle, a specialized unemployment insurance system created in 1936 originally for film industry technicians and now extended to performers across theater, music, dance, and circus arts. Today the system counts approximately 250,000 beneficiaries. (NPR, January 2021.) Workers who accumulate 507 hours of documented paid work over a period of ten months are entitled to unemployment benefits during non-working periods, allowing them to remain professionally available and artistically active rather than taking unrelated work to survive. (European Trade Union Institute, "The Art of Managing the Intermittent Artist Status in France.") The French government's position, articulated explicitly by President Macron during the pandemic, is that culture is essential to civic life and that the workers who produce it deserve the same protections as any other worker.

Neither system is perfect. In Germany, by 2023, only 7.2% of music projects deemed worthy of funding could actually be considered for grants due to insufficient resources. (Musikfonds) The French intermittent system has faced repeated attacks from employer federations seeking to eliminate or reduce it, and the median annual income for intermittents remains considerably lower than that of salaried workers. These are serious limitations. But the underlying premise of both systems, that the labor of making culture is labor, that it deserves structural support rather than the charity of individual donors, is sound. It is also the premise that the American arts funding model has consistently refused to adopt.

Despite an initial presidential budget proposal recommending elimination of the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), in February 2026, congress passed a budget retaining the agency's status. The NEA's entire annual budget, at $207 million, amounts to less than what Berlin spends on culture alone in a single year.

We are not waiting for federal policy to change. But we think it is worth showing what is possible, because it has already been built in places where the political will existed to build it.

What We're Doing About It

Rising Waters Collective is a chamber opera organization. We are also, by deliberate design, an organization that pays its artists.

Every performer, every conductor, every director, every collaborative pianist in our productions receives a fee. It is built into our budget before anything else is considered, because we believe that if the art matters, the people making it deserve to be compensated for making it. This is not a radical position but the baseline that the labor movement spent over a century fighting to establish in every other industry, and it is, unfortunately, still considered aspirational in significant portions of the performing arts world.

We are a young organization having just celebrated our first year. We operate on a lean budget sustained by community investment (read: donations), and the generosity of people who believe that the type of storytelling chamber opera trasnmits belongs in Seattle and that the artists creating it deserve to be paid. As a new organization, we are not eligible for most grant opportunities. This year 4Culture, King County's agency that supports art, culture, heritage, and the sciences, put forward a new grant specifically aimed at regional fledgling organizations. The Launch Grant has provided Rising Waters Collective with $30,000/year for three years. We are excited to put these funds toward our programming and the artists who bring that programming to life.

Opera, even chamber opera, is expensive to produce and ticket sales cover only a small percentage of the costs. With the Launch Grant, we still have more than half our budget costs to cover. These funds will come from partnerships and direct investment from community members.

This August, the 2026 Currents Festival brings three productions to Seattle: the world premiere of Sheila Silver's Songs of Resilience, the North American premiere of the Catalan chamber opera disPLACE at Theatre Off Jackson in Seattle's International District, and our inaugural Rising Artists Showcase, featuring six emerging PNW performers in a paid, mentored professional development program. Combined season budget across these three programs: over $75,000, raised mainly through community support.

Joe Hill wrote songs because he believed artists had a role in the fight for fair labor practices. We are not under any illusion that a chamber opera organization in Seattle is going to single-handedly fix the economics of freelance performance. But we can build something here that treats artists the way they deserve to be treated, make the work in front of audiences who might not have found their way to opera otherwise, and be honest about what it costs and who pays for it.

Collective action built the weekend. It can build a world premiere too.

👉 Fund the work: https://poweredbyshunpike.org/c/PBS/a/risingwaterscollective