Will the salaries of actors and other theater employees in Prague increase?

The Prague City Council's Culture Committee has called on the council to allow directors of city theaters to increase salaries for actors and other employees by raising salary caps.

According to the director of the Association of Professional Theatres, Zdeněk Pánek, actors in theatres that are contributory organisations in Prague have lower salaries than, for example, actors in regional theatres in Jihlava, Ústí nad Labem and Uherské Hradiště. The director of the Švand Theatre, Daniel Hrbek, said that the average salary of employees in his theatre is roughly 15,000 crowns below the median wage in Prague. The chairman of the committee, Jan Wolf (KDU-ČSL), wants to initiate a meeting of the association with the mayor and his deputies.
According to Pánek, city theatres have very limited ways of dealing with the drop in real wages caused by inflation. "Last year we conducted a survey of average salaries in individual professions and we were surprised to find that Prague theatres, which we always calculated separately because it spoiled the result, are in the same or worse shape than regional ones," said Pánek.
Hrbek said that the average salary in Prague is 62,307 crowns, the median is around 49,000, and average salaries in the theater are still 15,000 crowns below the median. "If you want to invite an actor from Jihlava to work, he would have to lower his salary, and he won't," he said. According to him, the theater is not competitive.

Hrbek explained that the wage limits are a binding indicator of the theater's budget that it cannot exceed, which does not allow it to increase employees' salaries. In addition to increasing the limits, according to Hrbek, each city theater would need to increase its budget by three to five million crowns per year for salaries in order to retain employees.

"The situation is bad, we know it. A sound engineer in a private theater earns three times as much as in a municipal theater, stagehands earn the same. I don't see the problem in money. The city is in a big surplus," said Wolf. He promised to arrange a meeting between the association and the mayor and his deputies. "We should meet by the end of November," added Wolf. The committee approved a resolution calling on the council to increase the salary limits for contributory organizations in culture and the arts. All members present voted in favor.

The Prague City Council establishes ten theatres as its contributory organisations, which it annually subsidises from the budget with a contribution covering approximately 40 to 80 percent of their expenses. These are the Theatre in Vinohrady, the Karlín Music Theatre, the Theatre in Dlouhé, Minor, the Spejbl and Hurvínek Theatre, the Theatre under Palmovkou, the Švandovo Theatre, the Theatre on Zábradlí, Studio Ypsilon and the Prague Municipal Theatres, which include Rokoko, ABC and Komedie.

Last year, the theaters received over 640 million crowns from the city. The city contributes to other Prague theaters in the form of non-claim subsidies.