To survive, the Edinburgh Fringe must build a fairer future

FOR better or worse, here is the story that always sticks with me about the Edinburgh Fringe. In the late Seventies, my father was sent to review a show – a ‘rock ‘n’ roll reinterpretation of Shakespeare’, if you please – at which he was one of the two people who comprised the entire audience. As the show began, a young man with an electric guitar took to the stage.

“If music be the food of love…” he intoned, before thrashing out a thunderous riff. “Play on.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said the other member of the audience, and promptly walked out.

The point of the story – in this telling, at least – is that, as wonderful, experimental, brave and sometimes fascinatingly, hilariously awful the Fringe can be, everybody has their limit. Some things are simply beyond toleration.

Shona McCarthy understands the importance of money; for that, at least she can be given some credit. The outgoing chief executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, who is stepping down after nine years in the job, complained earlier this month that the Fringe had not received sufficient support from the Scottish Government and Edinburgh City Council. 

A mere week later, it was announced that the Fringe Society would receive additional Scottish Government funding worth £300,000 over the coming year to develop its digital infrastructure and improve accessibility for artists, audiences and venues. McCarthy, as one might expect from someone who’s just been handed three hundred grand, was quick to express her gratitude, saying she hoped that this would be “a first step towards long-term funding for the Fringe Society” – or, in other words, keep it coming. 

McCarthy has always been keenly aware of the financial challenges tied up with the world’s largest performing arts festival, which is unsurprising – shortly after taking up the job, the Fringe Society was stripped of its core funding by Creative Scotland, presaging considerable contention and acrimony between the two bodies; a few years later, the Covid-19 pandemic would necessitate the cancellation of the entire festival in 2020, and its replacement with a hybrid format in 2021. As a result, McCarthy has always been a vocal advocate for the needs of the Fringe and the artists it hosts – if not, however, the workers both rely on.

In her initial call for greater support, McCarthy argued that the Fringe should be granted the same status as events like the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games. “We’re hosting an event of that scale in this city every single year without any of that central infrastructure you would automatically get with a sporting event,” McCarthy told the Guardian.

It was an unfortunate comparison, because in far too many ways, the Fringe has come resemble the Olympics. In both cases, the benefits for the hosting location are often routinely overstated while the costs are underestimated; typically, the profits of the major Fringe operators are far more tangible than any broader contribution the festival makes to Edinburgh’s economy and its people, many of whom never see this dividend trickle down to them.  

More to the point however, the Fringe, much like the Olympics, depends upon a vast workforce without which neither could function, which nevertheless faces exploitation as a matter of course. Ahead of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, the construction of facilities was marred by overwork and low pay; the opening ceremony of last year’s Paris Olympics only took place after the threat of strike action by hundreds of performers forced through a new pay deal, while the games themselves were notoriously sustained by undocumented migrant labour.  

Likewise, the Edinburgh Fringe has long been infamous for the unliveable and even illegal conditions of its workers, just as McCarthy’s tenure as chief executive has been marked by her consistent refusal to doing anything substantive about it, or even recognise that it is taking place.

For a few years, this wilful blindness was not made easy. Launched in 2017, the redoubtable Fair Fringe campaign made itself a persistent headache for McCarthy through its efforts to reveal the sweatshop-like conditions and mistreatment of festival workers. In 2018 and 2019, the campaign published damning reports that cited findings by the Fringe Society itself to reveal just how far the rot had spread, from major festival employers routinely paying less than the minimum wage and demanding employees work weeks without a day off, to the prevalence of ‘volunteer’ positions which offered a minor stipend and ‘free accommodation’ – in some cases, a mattress on the floor of a spare room shared with several other people – in lieu of an actual salary.

For a while, Fair Fringe activists were surprisingly successful in taking on the entrenched interests of the Fringe and raising public awareness of how the festival actually operates; it even claimed a prominent scalp in C Venues, which was stripped of its Chambers Street tenancy by the University of Edinburgh in 2019 following the revelation that the company expected its volunteers to work for six weeks in exchange for £200. The Fair Fringe campaign further demanded that venues which engaged in similar exploitative practices should not be included in the Fringe programme.

Not for the last time, McCarthy sought to downplay the scale of the problem; after initially responding that campaigners were guilty of “vilifying individual operators without actually understanding the whole landscape, a subsequent statement from the Fringe chief affirmed that, while “we are unequivocal in our condemnation of any form of exploitation”, that condemnation would not come any actual consequences. 

“The Fringe Society has never had a policy of banning or excluding, whether that be venues, companies or shows,” McCarthy said. “Our approach has been to work with people to find solutions, to support and improve. We’re exploring all options for ensuring that codes of best practice are adhered to and the Fringe continues to be a positive environment to visit, perform and work in.”   

McCarthy also emphasised that the Fringe is an “eclectic eco-system”, as if it were a rainforest and not a working environment, and must therefore always include models which expect people to work for no money. McCarthy was not the only festival grandee to be protective of this apparently vital aspect of the Fringe’s operating practices; in 2019, Edinburgh Comedy Awards boss Nica Burns made a curious case that unpaid labour should be considered entrepreneurship, and rejected any suggestion that working conditions for festival workers should face greater regulation: “Yes to people’s choice. Yes to open access. Let the performers and workers decide whether to come or not. Hands off our Fringe!”

There were hopes at the time that such bullish defences showed that the festival’s powers-that-be were genuinely fearful that change was coming. Unfortunately, in a perverse way, the Covid pandemic provided those institutions with a reprieve; throughout 2020 and 2021, focus turned from the working conditions of the Fringe to ensuring its survival through an unprecedented global upset. 

When the festival finally returned in earnest, it brought all its old problems with it; a 2024 investigation by The Independent uncovered adverts for Fringe jobs paying the equivalent of £1.25 per hour, it is worth asking what if any progress towards this goal has been made. Responding, C Venues – demonstrating that they had learned absolutely nothing from their prior controversies – defended its use of unpaid volunteers, claiming that such roles offer the opportunity to “develop skills”.

Where once it seemed that the public airing of the grubby mechanics behind the Fringe might be enough to see it reformed, these past years have instead affirmed the survival strategy the festival’s major operators and institutions will employ: every problem is overstated, every unethical employer is just one bad apple, every ludicrously exploitative scam posing as a job is actually an incredible opportunity for some enterprising young creative, and every instance of bad press can be weathered until the next time, when the whole charade will start all over again. It is therefore hard to see how real change will come without sustained political and especially financial pressure.

Financial pressure is what McCarthy and presumably her successor understand – it is why so much of her attention has been focused on the lack of affordable accommodation in Edinburgh, which has severely impacted the ability of performers and visitors to attend the festival during August. As any tenant in the city can tell you, this is not a problem that goes away when the Fringe packs up for another year, so it is curious that McCarthy had never suggested the possibility of rent controls, or more aggressive regulation of the city’s bloated and rapacious short-term letting racket.

Then again, Edinburgh City Council’s feeble attempts to corral that sector have been consistently rebuffed, with its short-term let ‘control zone’ deemed unlawful by the Court of Session in 2023. As if to signal defeat, the council voted in February to relax its licensing policy on short-term lets during the festival season, ostensibly to make it easier for visitors and performers to find accommodation – provided, of course, that they are happy to stay in properties exempted from tests and requirements relating to gas, electrical and fire safety, as well as bacteria like legionella, because what festival is complete without a touch of atypical pneumonia? 

I’m sure that, in response to this temporary deregulation, short-term let operators will do the opposite of what absolutely everyone in their position has done for as long as the Edinburgh Festival has existed and lower their prices out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than continuing to squeeze the annual influx of visitors to the capital for every spare penny.  

It is a further indication of the capitalist logic that governs the running of Edinburgh, whether during the festival season or not – no solution to any problem will be considered if it threatens those who profit by that problem, and no profit is ever truly enough: for proof, look to the recent proposal that the 46-metre high Ferris wheel which is erected over Princes Street every Christmas – the ideal diversion for those who wish to experience freezing cold and acrophobia simultaneously – should loom over a World Heritage Site for half the year. 

In an open letter published the closing of the 2024 Fringe, McCarthy warned that the “relentless rise in the cost of everything” threatened those upon whom the Fringe depends, writing: “There is no art without artists.” A fine sentiment, certainly, but there is also no Fringe without the countless workers who sustain the festival which hosts those artists – workers who have persistently been treated as the lowest of priorities.

It would be nice to think that McCarthy’s successor – former Riverside Studios CEO Tony Lankester, who will take up the position in April – might represent significant divergence in how the Fringe Society approaches the working conditions of the festival it oversees, but change is rarely delivered through optimism alone. Given how desperately the Society requires core annual public sector support, the only hope may lie in making such support conditional.

Over the past year, the Scottish Government has shown itself to be perfectly willing to pull arts funding should the recipient fall victim to a priggish, right-wing moral panic, so why not insist on robust safeguards which demand any support for the Edinburgh Fringe is dependent on genuinely fair pay and conditions across the board, no exceptions?

Over the eight years I worked as a critic at the Fringe, I met many of the people who embody it – people whose talent was palpable and whose enthusiasm was infectious, who had come from all over the world to be a part of it, to tell the stories and deliver the art that only they were capable of producing. These people genuinely love the Fringe, and in many cases are prepared to tolerate much – too much – for the sake of that love.

Despite the prevailing wisdom, it is not an unfeasibly radical notion to suggest that this love should not be abused.