Toil and Labor: A Fair Wage

Craft professionals labor in many areas from teaching and demonstrating to crafting and designing projects. Each of these areas have different labor considerations. To start off this discussion about labor, I’m going to cover the basic hourly income.

I’m sure most of us would love to earn $50, $100, or even $1,000 per hour, but we need to be practical and realistic when we consider our hourly wage. The Federal Minimum Wage in the United States is $7.25 per hour as of 2009. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics those of us in the Art, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media occupations average between $13.92-15.90 an hour. Specialty floral designers average $12 per hour, graphic artists average $23 per hour, writers average $21 per hour, and photographers average $18 per hour.

When you start out, it’s rare that you will be paid top dollar when selling product or services. Over time — as your skill, reputation, and body of work expand — you can begin to move your prices higher. I started consulting just over 8 years ago with a starting hourly fee of $20 and raised that fee to $30-50. I just got a note from my accountant to raise that fee considerably. I do consider my market, I tend to like to work with small manufacturers who don’t have the budgets of biggercompanies. Thus my fees tend to stay on the conservative side.

We do deserve to get paid a fair wage or fee for our work. We don’t often get the same respect for our work as a doctor, lawyer or even the local big-box employee, but we need to set labor costs and not give our labor away for free. We just need to be realistic.