July 26th, 2009, 10 Comments »
I heard from a friend of a friend that teachers in BC (and elsewhere in Canada) can choose to accept 80% of their salary and, in return, take one in five years off. They’re not guaranteed exactly the same job when they come back, but I gather they get a similar one. I searched the web and the BC Teacher’s Federation website (BCTF) in particular to confirm this, but couldn’t do so. Does anybody know if this is true? Various people on Twitter thought it did, but I’ve emailed the media contact at the BCTF to confirm.
It’s not that important, because I’m more interested in the abstract concept. If I were a teacher, it would seem pretty enticing. I know 20% is a significant salary reduction, but I imagine one could pick up work in the summer time to to reduce that to 10 - 15%.
If you make $55K a year, then that gets reduced to $44K. Given the nine weeks in the summer, one could, conservatively earn another $5000, bringing us back up to $49K, or a 13% reduction in salary. That seems well worth it for five years off over a 25 year career. Imagine the possibilities for travel, professional development, recuperation or just plain old leisure. You could, for example, write a novel every five years.
I see this model working best in highly ordered and predictable careers like policing, nursing and teaching, where seniority is a key determiner in advancement, and jobs are reasonably plug-and play. It’s also suited to careers where innovation is slow-moving (see also the academic’s sabbatical, though in those cases I gather that they’re expected to be producing academic work).
In a corporate setting, I’d imagine taking one in five years off would be pretty stigmatizing. In highly competitive fields, you might be labeled a slacker. I wonder if this is also the case among teachers, and what percentage of BC teachers take advantage of this job benefit? I’d also be curious to see if taking off one year in five has an impact on performance.
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November 8th, 2007, 23 Comments »
As you may know, Hollywood writers from the Writers Guild of America are on strike, seeking a larger cut of DVD and Internet-based revenue from their employers. This video apparently summarizes their predicament.
I’m pretty ambivalent about this labour action. I’m at least a year behind in my TV watching, and the writers are hardly Polish steelworkers. But I did wonder–how much do TV writers earn?
I know nothing about television writers’ compensation, so I’ll just report what I could find on the Writer’s Guild of America website. On that site, I found a 2004 Schedule of Minimums, which describes (as you might expect), the minimum compensation for various types of projects. There’s some industry specific language there that I don’t fully understand. If anybody works in the industry, please let me know where I’ve gone wrong.
Grey’s Anatomy and Soap Operas
Krista Vernoff is a writer and producer on “Gray’s Anatomy”. I picked Ms. Vernoff because I saw a video featuring some “Grey’s Anatomy” actors striking in solidarity. She’s got a lot of producer credits, but in season two she’s credited with writing three episodes.
Assuming Ms. Vernoff wrote both the story and the teleplay for each episode, she’d earn a minimum of US $30,823 per episode, or about US US $92,500 for the three she wrote. This has nothing to do with the popularity of “Grey’s Anatomy”–these are standard minimums for writing sixty minutes or less of network prime time TV. Maybe there are bonuses or premiums for working on popular shows? I assume that Ms. Vernoff was also compensated for all those episodes in which she’s credited as supervising or executive producer. It’s unclear what that work is worth.
According to the aforementioned video, Ms. Vernoff also earns four cents for every “Grey’s Anatomy” DVD that’s sold. Is that four cents or 3/22 of four cents? I’m not sure, but there’s some additional money to be made there.
Network prime time television is pretty splashy, admittedly. What about somebody who’s slaving away for a daytime soap opera or so-called “strip program”? If you’re the head writer on an hour-long soap opera, you earn US $31,879 a week, minimum. If you’re a contributing writer on a soap opera, you earn a ’script fee’ of US $3,087 per script.
They’re Making Out Okay
I may have this all wrong, but it looks to me like television writing pays pretty well. That video claims that, at any given time, 48% of writers are out of work. I’d be curious how they arrive at that figure, but it’s not surprising. If you’re a freelance writer and not currently writing something, then do you qualify as unemployed?
The video also makes much of the threat to writers losing their houses, health insurance and not being able to support their families. If those wages are at all accurate, I wonder how dire the threat to their hearth and home is? If they’re not, I’d love for one of the writers of the United Hollywood blog to clarify some typical TV writer compensation.
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