Austria’s Fair Pay experiment shows fixing artist pay takes more than money

Austria has become one of Europe’s most instructive testing grounds for a question that haunts cultural policy across the continent: can governments actually close the pay gap that keeps artists and cultural workers precarious? Since 2020, the country has rolled out a suite of measures known as the Fair Pay initiative, embedded in a broader Fairness Process aimed at the independent, non-profit arts and culture sector. A new policy brief by Verena Teissl and Yvonne Unnold of Hochschule Kufstein Tirol, published in the European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, dissects the first years of implementation and reaches a sobering but constructive conclusion. Money alone, the analysis finds, cannot fix a labour market whose fragility is woven into funding structures, statistics, welfare law and federal politics.

The stakes are high because the independent sector has become indispensable to Austria’s cultural life. Emerging from the cultural democracy movements of the 1980s and sustained by public funding, small and mid-sized non-profit organisations specialised in contemporary, discursive and participatory formats that the major institutions and folklore circuits rarely produce. Yet the sector’s cultural relevance has always coexisted with economic fragility. The dominant funding logic distributes support through project grants, often described as the watering can principle, spreading resources thinly across many applicants. That model conditions bogus self-employment, unstable incomes, hybrid professional roles and multiple jobholding, which have hardened into defining characteristics of the sector rather than occasional exceptions.

The consequences compound over a lifetime. Austria introduced artists’ social insurance in 1983 and mandatory coverage for the so-called new self-employed in 1998, but that scheme covers health, accident and pension contributions while excluding unemployment insurance and continued payments during illness. Multiple and seasonal employment frequently triggers double contributions without accumulating benefits, and low pensions leave the sector’s pioneering generation facing poverty in old age. The 2010 Theatre Employment Act promised improvement, but its implementation in the independent scene remained partial because of double insurance burdens, limited budgets and high ancillary wage costs. Interest groups have advocated fair pay for three decades, and the new study treats their persistence as evidence that the problem is structural, not behavioural.

The reform itself unfolded in stages. Fair pay entered the 2019 government agreement, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed the sector’s lack of reserves, acted as a catalyst. In 2020 the Federal Ministry launched the Fairness Process with sectoral interest groups, grounded in collaborative governance and articulated through a Fairness Code and the principle of voluntary commitment. A nationwide survey of the fair pay gap followed in 2021, and in 2022 the federal authorities adopted a Fair Pay Strategy that acknowledges shared responsibility across federal, state and municipal levels. Between the 2022 pilot phase and 2024, the earmarked support programme grew from 6.5 million euros to 10 million euros, signalling incremental fiscal consolidation even as the broader framework remained non-mandatory.

The core instrument is technically elegant. It consists of an earmarked support programme, open to artists and cultural organisations alongside traditional funding, in which applicants submit standardised data forms documenting the gap between actual and fair remuneration so that the difference can be covered. To operationalise fair pay in an unregulated and highly diverse working environment, interest groups produced discipline- and profession-specific salary schemes for employees and fee guidelines for freelance work, which funding authorities disseminate as normative reference points. The deliberate choice of the term fee guidelines rather than fee schedules is designed to deflect potential accusations of anti-competitive agreements in occupational fields classified as liberal trades, a legal tension that European research and advocacy have long flagged.

The Austrian model contrasts sharply with the Dutch benchmark that the authors use for comparison. The Netherlands makes fair pay mandatory for organisations in covered sub-sectors and for municipalities as subsidy providers, and it rests on a collective agreement. Austria’s approach relies on voluntary commitment, which the study identifies as a decisive weakness. Fragmented governance and non-binding measures prevent the gap from closing uniformly: implementation varies in commitment, timing and fiscal contribution across Austria’s federal layers, producing asynchronous rollout, incomplete gap closure through uneven co-financing and limited participation in rural municipalities, where remuneration gaps are often highest. Obliging municipal mandates, the authors argue, would reduce precisely these disparities.

Politics intrudes as well. Because cultural affairs fall to the state governments, the right-wing FPÖ in one Austrian state has opposed implementing Fair Pay on the grounds that folklore should take priority in grant-making. The study notes that this position disregards the distinct paradigms of voluntary engagement in collective cultural practices versus professional cultural labour, as well as Austria’s ratification in 2006 of the UNESCO Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. The episode illustrates how fair pay reform, even when fiscally modest, becomes entangled with contested visions of what public cultural funding is for.

Measurement problems compound the governance ones. Austria’s cultural statistics do not systematically differentiate between public and private non-profit employment structures, nor do they comprehensively register independent initiatives, leaving the sector unclassified, underexplored and only partially visible. Those gaps contaminated the Fair Pay Gap survey itself: missing population data and biased sampling led to misrepresentation, so the survey captures only large-scale trends in pay disparities while the policy operates on an incomplete empirical infrastructure. The authors argue that understanding a hybrid labour market characterised by precarious conditions requires comprehensive data collection and transparency about the realities of cultural work, without which reform cannot be calibrated or evaluated.

Perhaps the deepest constraint is that cultural funding, labour law and welfare policy operate as an interconnected system. Recent restrictions on supplementary earnings during unemployment disproportionately hit the arts and culture sector, where multiple jobholding and hybrid roles are structurally embedded, and may undermine both cultural sustainability and the efficiency of public expenditure. Meanwhile, a sector-wide shift away from project-based funding toward genuine employment would require expanding employment law and significantly increasing cultural budgets, to an extent the authors describe as currently unrealistic; multi-year subsidy agreements were even temporarily suspended under national austerity measures. Alternative pathways, such as collaborative sectoral organisation and cross-sector partnerships developed jointly with the field, might reduce systemic dependence on project grants while preserving diversity in programming.

The lessons the authors draw reach well beyond Austria. They call for harmonised standards across territorial authorities, mandatory municipal fair pay requirements on the Dutch model, adequate statistical visibility for the independent sector, and stronger interest-group representation, which in Austria has been critical to building the sector for decades even while the interest groups themselves face a high pay gap. At the transnational level, they point to a European status for artists and cultural professionals to standardise employment protections, public goods principles that recognise cultural labour markets as distinct, cultural awareness clauses in other policy domains, and the push to include culture among the Sustainable Development Goals. Narrative framing matters too: social impact analysis, refined since J. M. Schindler’s pioneering 2012 proposal, can generate credible evidence of the societal contribution of arts and culture, and reframing public cultural expenditure as societal investment rather than subsidy could secure more durable political support. For now, Austria’s higher incomes and preserved diversity of offerings look like genuine progress, but the study’s central message is that fair pay is not an income correction. It is a systemic transformation, and it succeeds only when fiscal commitment is matched by governance coordination, good data, cross-domain awareness and enforceable European frameworks.

Subject of Research: Fair pay policy implementation and precarity in Austria's independent arts and culture sector

Article Title: Doing fair pay. Implications from the Austrian experience

Article References: Teissl, V., & Unnold, Y. (2026). Doing fair pay. Implications from the Austrian experience. European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 16, Article 16458. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16458

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16458

Keywords: fair pay, cultural policy, Austria, independent arts sector, precarity, artists' status, cultural funding, social protection, interest groups, UNESCO, European cultural policy, non-profit cultural organisations