When I was let go in November 2022—effective immediately, I was told over a three-minute video call I took sitting at the only table in my studio apartment—what washed over me wasn’t panic, but relief. Due to “restructuring” of the theatre company where I worked, my position had been terminated. The truth is I was burnt out, and this news was a balm.

I’ve worked in arts and entertainment since 2018, jumping from contract to contract while freelancing on the side, cobbling together enough of an income to scrape by in Toronto. After having worked for a national media corporation and a local film agency, both of which substituted low wages with glitz, glamour, and prestige, I’d jumped at the chance to work at a local theatre that seemed to put people over product.

But within weeks, a near-constant pressure began to build in the pit of my stomach. I often operated as a one-person agency, responsible for everything from social media to public relations. It wasn’t just me; everyone’s workload at the organization was untenable, and the impacts on our mental and physical health were debilitating.

As I got to know arts workers at other companies, I realized it wasn’t even just us. All too often, non-profits operating on shoestring budgets hire too few people to do too much work while paying as little as they can get away with, causing arts workers to be priced out of the communities they serve. Something had to change. One brisk winter evening the year before I got laid off, two coworkers and I went for a drink at a Queen West bar to do more than just complain—we wanted to organize.

To be an arts worker has become an exercise in navigating precarity, constantly defending the validity and value of our work.

We resolved to reach out to other staff members to gauge their interest in drafting a collective set of demands to present to the artistic leadership. Despite being a close-knit team, in which most struggled to make ends meet while working more than full-time hours, building solidarity was an uphill battle. Responses ran the gamut from apathy to anxiety, and when the workload overwhelmed us again, everything fell apart.

Concerns about the economics of making art usually focus on how the disappearance of funding and space impacts artists, but the scale of this existential threat grows when we consider the ways artists’ livelihoods are tied to those of other arts workers like producers, box-office staff, technicians, and custodians. Most people are drawn to work in the non-profit arts sector by a deep sense of duty: they fall somewhere on the continuum of being invested in community and passionate about art. Many of the sector’s administrators are talented artists in their own right, taking on other forms of work to help support their craft while remaining an active part of the industry.

But to be an arts worker has become an exercise in navigating precarity, constantly defending the validity and value of our work. Nearly 70 percent of Toronto’s arts workers make less than $43,000 annually, and most rely on short-term gigs with few labour protections and no health benefits. We work more hours for less money, shouldering the work of entire departments for years before flaming out. Art is only made more compelling when all the workers who facilitate its creation have the freedom of financial stability and the means to advocate for themselves in the workplace. When thoughtful workers are siphoned from the artistic process by force or neglect, organizations and the art they produce become less vibrant, less diverse and reflective of the city around them, and risk falling out of step with audiences—something Toronto’s non-profit arts venues cannot afford to do if they want to recover from their post-lockdown slump. Unless arts workers collaborate to imagine a worker-led alternative, the sector is destined to exploit the systems art exists to subvert; it’ll not only become a shell of its former self, but cease to have utility beyond its return on investment.

This labour crisis touches most industries, but it’s reflected uniquely in the arts because of the way our work has been devalued. There’s a pervasive sentiment that art is a hobby or side hustle until people reach the top echelons of success. Even in rare organizations within the non-profit arts sector where leadership recognizes the importance of nurturing artists, that practice rarely extends to staff who help facilitate artists’ work. But without smaller community art organizations, some of the city’s favourite local artists, like internationally-renowned musician and visual artist Lido Pimienta or Bilal Baig, the Scarborough-born co-creator of the award-winning CBC comedy Sort Of, might not have been able to access the time, guidance, and space necessary to experiment and hone their craft. And without arts workers, those spaces could not function.

“To be an installer at the AGO used to be an amazing thing,” said Meagan Christou, who at 33 is the Art Gallery of Ontario’s youngest installer. Art installers play a key role in bringing exhibitions to life, preparing the gallery to the artist or curator’s specifications. They’re jacks-of-all-trades, skilled in painting, design, carpentry, and art handling. After graduating from art school eight years ago, Christou was drawn to the profession because of its resemblance to her blue-collar upbringing working agriculture in rural Ontario.

Once upon a time, “you could have a full-time job, buy a house, and raise a family,” she says. Today, full-time opportunities are difficult to come by and like many working in the arts, most installers under 40 work occasional part-time contracts. “I work with people in their 70s—their wage hasn’t increased in a decade,” Christou explained. She regularly subs in for coworkers asked to complete tasks their bodies can no longer physically handle, who are afraid to say no. “Wear and tear on your body is never considered in a wage.”

As the cost of basic necessities continues to rise, it has become unfeasible for many arts workers from working-class backgrounds—many of whom are racialized, disabled, trans, or otherwise marginalized—to justify these precarious roles. When working-class people are pushed out of art spaces, it leaves only those with generational or personal wealth to fill the roles, because they’re the only ones who can afford to subsidize the cost of their own employment.

On March 26, eight months after I initially spoke with Christou and 10 months after the Ontario Public Service Employees Union Local 535 began negotiating with the AGO, she and more than 400 colleagues went on strike for the first time in the gallery’s 124-year history, over precarious contracts and inadequate wage increases. “It’s been 10 months of being stonewalled,” union president JP Hornick proclaimed to a crowd of picketers several days before the strike vote. When I caught up with Christou three weeks into the strike, she cited a clause seeking protections for part-time workers, who make up 60 percent of the union local’s membership, as a major point of contention. The union warned that the AGO’s push for part-time and contracted labour has created an “underclass of struggling workers.” Management receives annual bonuses and executives boast salaries between $150,000 and $400,000, while the majority of part-time workers can barely keep up with the cost of living.

Workers have been picketing six days a week in sleet or shine with no loss in momentum. They’ve been joined by politicians, neighbours, AGO members, and fellow workers from the arts, healthcare, education, and countless other sectors. Cars and trucks passing along Dundas Street honk so loudly and so vigorously at times they drown out the rally speakers. Christou said showing up to the picket line alongside coworkers across departments—most of whom she’s never met—has been empowering. “We hate the job, but we love the work. That’s why we fight.”

If the artistic landscape of a city is controlled exclusively by the wealthy, it shapes which voices and subjects are platformed, and ultimately who feels welcome in art spaces, both as a creator and an audience member. It perpetuates the myth that art is a luxury reserved for the rich rather than a tool of expression and connection. Arts organizations exist to serve their communities and need to be as diverse as the neighbourhoods they operate in.