Aw, man… that saddens me a bit. Just because everyone is doin’ it doesn’t mean you have to endorse it. I won’t address the sex-ed metaphor, since it doesn’t really work. I’ll offer a new one. Years back, I worked as a production assistant on a big TV show. I won’t say which one, but the title sounded a little like Schmill and Schmace. Toward the end of the first season, I figured out that the $400 I was getting paid per 60-hour week worked out to slightly over $5.71 an hour… three and a half cents under the then-current minimum wage. I pointed that out to the payroll department, and on my next check I received a raise: to $402.50 per week. Certain powers-that-be at the company told me they couldn’t really give me an hourly raise, but that I would be encouraged to pad the mileage on my mileage form and make a few dozen more bucks each week that way. I wouldn’t do it. I understood that the section of the budget from which mileage was paid had more money in it to spend, and that the company had its reasons for not setting a precedent for higher hourly pay for its PAs, and that all the other PAs padded their mileage and everyone knew it and the bosses encouraged it since they didn’t want us to go broke… but I wouldn’t do it. I ended up quitting instead, to find a higher-paying job so I could pay my rent (which took a few months, so I ended up moving in with my sister for a while instead of keeping that apartment). A year later, I went back to Schmill and Schmace for a somewhat higher-paying position.
The point is, I had signed a deal memo, and that was the deal I had made. Everyone thinks I’m a sucker for not taking the extra mileage money, and plenty of people think I’m an arrogant over-principled stuffed-shirt on a high horse for sticking to a principle like that. They think I’m weird for buying my own lunch instead of eating the company-bought lunch, on those days when I’m not actually working through lunch. My wife thinks I’m lame for not coming home with a ream of paper from the copy room for our kids to use to draw on. And I almost never talk about these things, since I know it makes me sound like an arrogant prig on a high horse.
But goddammit, I wanna live in a world wherein artists get paid, and there’s only one thing I can reliably and effectively do to make that world real: pay up. Whether or not anyone else does. I can’t change global behavior, but I can change my own. And if anyone bothers to ask what I endorse, I can tell them that I don’t endorse taking things without paying for them, unless they are actually intended to be gifts.
