Significant gaps exist between the median wages of cultural workers and those in other sectors
Analysis of professional and technical workers
Today’s post explores earnings in groupings of occupations in the arts, culture, and heritage in 2024, using annual averages from the Labour Force Survey. The post provides wage statistics for the groupings of cultural occupations and compares professional and technical occupations to similar groupings in other areas of the economy. I did a similar analysis two years ago, using 2022 data.
I focus on three groupings of cultural occupations that are provided (and named) by Statistics Canada: “professional occupations in the arts and culture”; “technical occupations in the arts and culture”; and (other) “occupations in the arts, culture, and sports”. I describe each of these groupings in the next section.
The Labour Force Survey, even using annual averages for Canada as a whole, doesn’t have a large enough sample size to pinpoint specific arts, culture, and heritage occupations (as I have done with census data).
Wage data from the Labour Force Survey exclude self-employed workers. Because artists have very high self-employment rates, many of them are excluded, along with other self-employed cultural workers.
Today’s post highlights the national data. In coming weeks, I’ll analyze provincial data on the same topic.
The median hourly wage of both professional and technical employees in the arts, culture, and heritage is well below the typical level for groupings of professional and technical workers in other areas of the economy.