Amazon Fashion & Brands Don’t Pay Models Well

‘We await payment from the client,’ my agent’s response, like the hundreds that came before, portends similar emails that agents and managers worldwide will fire off today.

At the height of Covid-19, ‘Fatima’s next job could be in Cyber,’ the autumn 2020 campaign featuring a funereal ballerina fastening her shoelaces, emblazoned buses and their stops nationwide. I wondered how the government-backed campaign evaded the moral compasses of marketing creatives involved — how its glaring overtones bypassed the spit-balling stage and zoomed to print, all singing and dancing in blithe mockery.

Even this tone-deaf campaign required creatives — writers, photographers, stylists, lighting, makeup artists, models, graphic and set designers—to bring it to fruition. The irony isn’t lost on me. Betrayal from a family member not only baffles but burrows into the softest part of us all. Who can blame them? They probably needed the money.

‘Fatima’ tying her shoelaces recalled the 1834 idiom ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps,’ which in the nineteenth century suggested an impossible, ludicrous endeavor, but today connotes that socioeconomic advancement is attainable for everyone, should they sprinkle a dash of effort.

I struggle to conjure a mental scene of content employees working at their three-screened desks, amiably conversing at lunch while their salaries dwindle and go unpaid for three to six months.

A campaign targeting artists, imploring us, calling us to abandon skills — talents that we’ve sharpened under the sheer force of dedication and love, knowing that our effort and time are irrecoverable, craning our necks over the interminable wall of odds — echoes what we’ve heard our entire lives: There’s always someone to undervalue you, someone to tell you to pack it up and get a job.

For centuries, artists’ works have enriched and enlivened nations. Take Spain’s Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Gaudi; Holland’s Vincent Van Gogh, Vermeer, and Rembrandt; Britain’s Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Rowling, Orwell, and Woolf; and France’s Proust, Sartre, Cezanne, and Matisse. For millennia, artists have quenched nations’ thirst. Artists, long gone, have marched down the primordial corridors of nations, hanging culture on their barren walls. Today, many flock to England to marvel at its bequeathed beauty. A 2019/20 GOV.UK survey of participants in England found that 76% of the population over sixteen years old engaged with the arts in the last twelve months.

Artists are creative professionals; they manifest as dancers, actors, models, stylists, photographers, videographers, writers, make-up artists, hair stylists, designers, sound engineers, singers, editors — the list is by no means exhaustive; the income of these professions have declined inversely to inflation. A famous and wealthy person springing to mind represents only .000000001% of the force. These lucky few have won the jackpot and, if in America, with healthcare to boot. The remaining majority subsist below the poverty line.

Whenever a talent — say, a model — works on a production, a casting director sought them for that particular project. Casting is a job interview that mainly targets models, actors, and dancers. If not a high-budget film or TV series, productions typically last a day to a few days. As talents do not have year-long, full-time projects, they are perpetually subjected to castings. On average a busy talent attends over one hundred castings a year, bagging a handful. Production companies hire casting directors who, armed with a vision — one dreamt up by an ad-executive or a director — rally talents.

The frequency of occupation does not rest on a talent’s shoulders alone; a talent is merely selected — chosen, casted.

Artists go days — even weeks and months in their roles penniless, supplementing on retail and table-waiting. It is no surprise that artists—particularly models — have ditched their agents to rake in thousands a month via OnlyFans.

OnlyFans is the twenty first century’s Sex-line; it has saved many from homelessness and taken the wheels out of abusive middlemen’s hands. As groundbreaking as OnlyFans has been, it is unsuitable for all. Those who persevere in the creative industry contend with work droughts, agents’ misappropriation of monies, and abuse.

In a field where professionals are plenty and opportunities few, an artist wins a lottery when she works. If one’s livelihood such as meals, healthcare, mortgage or rent is dependent on an arbitrary, contingent enterprise as lottery winning, it is imaginable the carcinogenic effects such endeavour, when engaged daily, bears. Even when an artist wins said lottery, it is not the National Jackpot kind — one would want for nothing after such feat — but drawings so meagre that when accounted for at year-end, they scarcely meet the national minimum wage.

Luck can strike a talent’s door; winning can be attainable — consistent even. But soon he learns that agents pay late. So, bank overdrafts become a log he clings to, threading along a river that creeps devilishly to its fall; credit card bills bear their teeth like a neighbour’s mutt who, upon seeing you, unfailingly growls.

I am a professional, but you’d say I have not held a ‘proper job’ in fifteen years. Along with other creative professions, modelling is a job like any other. It has all the components of a ‘proper job’: mental and physical effort, long hours, remuneration, stress, taxed income, and experience that engenders skill. But unlike a ‘proper job,’ earning power in this field does not rise and fall with expertise — novices can out-earn veterans. The transience of projects — jobs lasting a day to a few months in the creative industry means many artists are not employed full-time, and thus lack paid-holidays.

While holidaying with my sales-executive boyfriend, an eye-watering salary landed on his banking app with a satisfying click, seemingly sealing off our patch of sky. It whispered, ‘You’re poor.’ The unrelenting Namibian air made my thirst unbearable, so I threw my gaze over the savanna plain just in time to catch the sprawling brown hills arch and roll off into dark faraway mountains, only to see them lighten and start anew in the horizon. In these mere seconds, I witnessed it all. It seems that with attention, time bends and stretches, multiplying and swallowing everything and nothing. To say, ‘that was the beginning of my anxieties,’ would be untrue.

It started during the pandemic. I accrued mortgage arrears that, as I type, accumulate daily interest. In three years, I have not caught up. Collectively, my agents owe me £30,000 from various jobs completed in the last four months. I haven’t a clue when I will receive payment.

E-com, short for E-commerce, is the twenty-first century’s equivalent of catalogue modelling. Unlike the printed pre-internet catalogues, E-com photoshoots are inexpensive and require little planning; photos taken today will emblazon consumers’ phone and computer screens the next. Product pages strewn low-paid models, of whom I am one.

During a nine hour shift, an E-com model is photographed in over seventy outfits. Finishing his workday, his hand will seek the source of his agony that standing nine uninterrupted hours had been a welcomed distraction. His fingertips will find his nose blood-soaked, a sliver of skin chafed clean off. In the digital-age, labour-intensive E-com literally takes skin. After a hard day of work, he will seek remuneration, but his agent will tell him to wait three months before payment, postponing the analgesic respite that money brings.

On average, after completing a job, a model can expect a three- to six-month lapse before payment. The notion that payment irregularities evens out when the talent works consistently is a specious rationale at best. A blip riding the trend of most modern inventions that seemingly improve consumers’ lives while decimating incomes and the lives of labourers who once made a decent living.

In 2020, Amazon’s revenue was $380 billion. Since then, the company’s balance sheet has boasted the paragon of bar-chart perfection, reaching $500 billion in 2022 — a healthy 31.58% earnings increase. Ranked as the fifth global conglomerate, Amazon’s $1.4 trillion market cap did not dissuade their reducing of models’ daily fee by 31% in year 2021 — not even hesitating firing all self-employed creatives from their London office in late 2022, retaining a handful of full-time employees — security staff being the remaining majority. This move would reverberate and replicate itself in their remaining offices worldwide. The rumour is they sought labour elsewhere, in countries with lower employment costs and curtailing employee welfare.

Alongside E-com, a model — and actors — can land a commercial, starring in a large advertising campaign that pays handsomely. Well, that was once the case.

In commercials, there is a BSF rate (Basic daily rate) a fraction of the ‘buyout rate’ (a licence fee to use the talent’s performance, likeness, name, voice for a specified period, location, device or territory — where the ad will appear). The Talent receives the BSF within three to four months after job completion. Talents rely on Buyouts. TV buyouts are significant relative to the other channels — print, online, billboard or in-house. Although internet users have surpassed that of TV, casting breakdowns remain unchanged. Television holds the largest buyout, dwarfing online’s. With social media’s vast reach, 4.9 billion users, it is strange that its buyout remains the lowest.

TV’s buyout has not been impervious to the industry’s rate decline either. Today, the average three-year TV buyout is £8,000 (worldwide) — a one hundred and twenty percent decline in the last decade. The £8,000 may sound handsome, but considering that artists casted in commercials or campaigns get a handful of projects a year, artists based in big cities (New York, London, Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris — the only places where castings take place) live below the poverty line. Not to mention, models/actors are limited to one brand per sector; are subjected to six-month payment delays and 37% agency/managers’ commissions.

Like a double-edged sword, anti-competition clauses in contracts prohibit a model from working with conflicting brands, while prospective brands ensure that a model has not appeared in any competing brands or have become overexposed.

Brands are opaque about where and when ads appear. While contracts stipulate a campaign’s confines for all parties involved, campaigns often appear in unlicensed territories. The fortunate talent may have a friend happen upon their ad in, say, Slovakia or Zambia. The friend, beaming at seeing a successful buddy in a campaign, texts congratulations along with a photo of their discovery. To the talent, this is evidence. Armed with this information, the talent contacts their agent. But the agent, devoid of a spine, dilatorily contacts the production company.

Agents, alongside collecting a booking fee from the production company or brand, deduct 37%(average) from talents’ rates. It’s not unheard of for an agent to pocket talents’ per diems, or even conveniently forget to inform the talent of their buyout renewal. Tallied, an agent’s commission can surpass that of the talent’s. In negotiations, talents are often kept out of the discussion. Remuneration agreements are either predetermined by production companies or long settled between the agent and the production company without the talent’s input. It may take the neuroplasticity of Sherlock to work out where this payment lag begins. Does it start with the Brand?; Is it the client-hired ad agency?; Is it the parsimonious production companies who, hired by the ad agency, astride a taut rope juggling delivering the product under budget and attending to the talent’s needs. Admittedly, a single entity undertaking these two tasks is no easy feat. Talent care extends beyond flights and hotel confirmation; fair remuneration for the talent’s role performed, usage/licence and timely payments within a month after job completion, is another.

Although my agents owe me money, I have walked into supermarkets and prayed that my Sainsbury’s Nectar Points affords me vegetables.

Last night, I happened upon the term ‘multi-hyphenate.’ A multi-hyphenate has several professions or skills, as per The Oxford Dictionary. As an artist, such a skill zaps creativity, but it is survival. Unfortunately, I am so cocooned in the church’s indoctrination that OnlyFans is unthinkable. So, for now, I make a living as a below-minimum-wage model, actor, writer, photographer, and producer.

While no effective union governs talent agencies, some agencies, as a goodwill gesture, grant advance payments — a fraction of what the talent is owed. In my case, I receive £1,000 per month when I have accumulated a backlog of overdue payments. A few talent agencies offer fee-free advance payments — even fewer grant them. So, talents are left to borrow from friends, family, seek a fast paying job and/or turn to OnlyFans.

Today, with audacity, I ask, ‘I want to speak with the client.’ Insolence, my agents would say. The truth is, it is confidence that only anonymity bestows upon a model writing under a pseudonym. It has taken me over a year to write this piece, not because I lack words or time, but because I feared biting the mercurial hand that feeds me. It is a shared fear, a ubiquitous chain that links my fear to that of the cuffed artist stumbling ahead, furiously wringing his chains, creating a racket as the metal whips past me, to another shackled fellow careening behind with his arms outstretched and bound.

Those disillusioned simply quit and join the traditional workforce, as the ‘Fatima’ campaign suggested.

The hand that began writing this piece back in September 2022 was furious and exhausted. During my sixteen years as an artist, I have led many marketing campaigns and appeared in commercials spanning various industries — banking, automotive, tobacco, television, music, travel, technology, beauty, fashion, and more. As I write in September 2023, the WGA’s request for a fair writers’ wage from TV studios nears conclusion. It has taken over one hundred and forty-eight days, and counting, to reach an agreement, which, at the time of writing, remains unreleased. America, with its problems, has watertight unions that govern the creative industry — a note that the British industry needs to consider. Casting breakdowns seeking models and actors for commercials, film, and TV now state that residuals/royalties are unpayable to the cast. Although we are nearing the end of the 148-day strike for the WGA writers, it is glaringly obvious that other sectors within the creative industry need a pause.

I cried when I discovered that Taylor Swift had paid her whole tour team a bonus, with each dancer receiving over $500,000.00. They were tears of elation. At least these dancers will leave the industry without waiting tables, but comfortably, making way for the young. Before Taylor’s precedent, the creative industry had become glaringly obvious that only the young, who live with parents, can afford to take little to no pay and tolerate abusive behaviours in exchange for experience. By the time the young have gained the experience, they are no longer young but ripe for quitting the industry penniless.

Receiving payment for one’s work encourages and communicates respect and appreciation. Well educated and trained creatives spend thousands of pounds honing their craft, and should command the respect traditional job roles enjoy. Lindesnstaub.com, a leading modelling agency, pledges ‘to always pay our talent the day after completing a job.’ I have never seen this declaration, this act of support for talents, in my life before. Their pledge brought tears to my eyes. I realise how abound with tears I am. Their empathy is not one I have witnessed in those who handle talents’ money in my many years in the business.

For the life of me, I struggle to conjure a mental scene of content employees working at their three-screened desks, amiably conversing at lunch while their salaries dwindle and go unpaid for three to six months.

I could quit. I should just get a ‘proper job.’

If professionals across industries — Healthcare and Medicine, IT, Education, Finance and Banking, Manufacturing, Engineering, Legal, Agriculture, Government and Public Administration, Transportation and Logistics, Construction, Energy and Utilities — were subjected to a three to six-month payment lag, nations would implode, swallowing their economies. Famished workers and their families in tow would roam a destitute world. More strikes than those we see today would erupt across nations like wildfire, birthing a second sun in our solar system. Distinctions between worlds — ‘first world’ — would cease to exist, for we would become an amorphous mass. Perhaps the words ‘starving’ and ‘artist,’ so often strung together and verging on cliché, have not received their due scrutiny.