The Office for National Statistics has reported that the unpaid economy is growing faster than the paid economy. That won’t surprise anyone who is a carer or does domestic work. Or anyone trying to forge a career as an arts journalist or, indeed, anyone working in theatre. Arts graduates face a lifetime of low wages. Even those who do find paid employment in theatre often put in many more hours than they are contracted to.

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A recent Flyman column in the Stage, commenting on the top earners in 20 major funded theatre companies, made the point that while the salaries may seem munificent to those in the industry who are not artistic directors or chief executives, when set alongside the wages of a CEO in the private sector, a £185,000 salary for leading the National Theatre is not exactly generous.

But subsidised theatre is not banking, and while the Stage’s figures were illuminating in many ways (particularly the pay of female arts leads compared with their male counterparts), they don’t necessarily tell the whole story. There’s staff costs to be considered, the low-pay contracts front-of-house staff often operate under and indeed the fees being paid to artists.

Most artists are not on the payroll but are contracted job by job, and just as the rest of the paid economy is bolstered by those (often women) doing unpaid work at home, so the work shown in funded theatres is often underpinned by those who self-exploit. If the admin time involved in completing a Grants for the Arts application was accounted for, it would send the cost of applying through the funding ceilings, so people just wouldn’t bother. But then those shows tour to paying venues. Yes, the actors will be paid for that gig but it doesn’t take into account the unpaid work that went into creating the show and getting the gig in the first place. On paper everything looks hunky dory, fulfilling the safeguards put in place by unions and funders. The reality is rather different.

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Of course you can argue that all theatre is underfunded and those working in the industry are prone to self-exploitation. Many other industries undermine their ethics when, in times of austerity, they reward those on staff while exploiting freelancers and those on contracts. National Portfolio Organisations need to take care not to offer bum deals either to companies or those employed to do one-off jobs.

It’s not a question of setting those in salaried positions against those who work as freelances. Or indeed those who work in different areas of theatre. Those in administration, stage management and the technical side of theatre may be in a position where, if they don’t like the contract, they can refuse the job because their skills are in demand. But that won’t be the case for many artists and companies in a theatre ecology over-saturated with talent, facing funding cuts and looking to make savings wherever they can. At the recent All Tomorrow’s Theatre event, the refrain was of artists feeling they had to be grateful and not complain about the deals they are offered for fear of not being asked by a venue again. This is “performing gratitude” as Chris Goode described it. “We spend our lives trying not to be too demanding and it doesn’t change anything.”

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Back in April, Bunny Christie pointed out how hard it is to make a living as a theatre designer and how budget cuts are having an adverse effect on design in regional theatres. In the same week Stage Directors UK argued that in many cases directors were putting in up to seven weeks unpaid work on each of their projects. Get any group of independent artists and companies together and the decreasing fees and splits offered by funded organisations is a subject of conversation. It’s a pity that the I’ll Show You Mine campaign that initiated a public conversation around artists’ fees seems to have lost impetus.

Changing this situation is not going to be easy, and harder still at a time of arts cuts. But it can’t be right that when so much theatre highlights injustice and inequalities on its stages, the very means by which that work is created involves time and financial exploitation, immediately excluding those who simply cannot afford to work for little or no money.