Opinion
If Tay Tay can pay pay $84 million in staff bonuses, why can’t other rich bosses?
Kerri Sackville
Columnist and authorAs she wraps up the US leg of her Eras tour in LA, Taylor Swift has given farewell gifts to the crew and support staff who brought her show to life. This isn’t uncommon; performers regularly give end-of-tour bonuses or gifts.
What is unusual is the amount. Swift has given a total of $US55 million ($84 million) to hundreds of her staff, including the road crew, caterers, dancers, and truckers. (The truckers reportedly received about $US100,000 each, along with handwritten notes of appreciation.)
All alone? Hardly. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is the work of many, and she has rewarded them richly.Credit: Lisa Lake/TAS23/Getty Images
It’s a fantastically generous gesture but, of course, Swift can afford to give some of her fortune away. The Eras tour is grossing almost $US13 million a night – a night! – and is expected to surpass $US1 billion. Swift herself is worth about $US740 million, according to Forbes, and is only getting richer as the Eras tour continues.
But plenty of people can afford to give money away, and many of them do not. We hear fairly regularly about senior executives in profitable companies receiving huge bonuses, but how much of the profit trickles down to coalface staff? How many Australian truckers or data-entry clerks or admin assistants are receiving significant bonuses when an organisation does well? (And please don’t mention billionaire Gina Reinhart’s $4.1 million in staff “bonuses”; giving $100,000 each to only 41 staff chosen in a lottery is more a PR strategy than a genuine profit share.)
Taylor Swift is a brilliant artist, but not even brilliant artists can create a multi-million-dollar tour without help. Without her crew and musicians, her stylists and choreographers, her dancers and acoustic technicians, Swift would be just a woman playing guitar and singing on stage. She’d still sound great, but few in the audience would be able to hear.
Similarly, no one can build a multimillion-dollar company without enormous support from staff. That goes for Australian CEOs on $5 million or $20 million salaries. No one can be the queen of a hive without worker bees.
So why is Taylor Swift’s grand gesture so unusual?
We like to believe we live in a meritocracy, in which the smartest, most talented and hardest-working will succeed. Even if this were true – even if we ignore birthright privilege – brains and talent are gifted at birth, as much a stroke of luck as any inherited wealth.
When rich people buy into the myth of meritocracy, they develop a sense of entitlement to their own wealth. They don’t feel the need to pass on their good fortune or their profits because they believe they have earned it all themselves.
Netflix’s Ted Sarandos rakes in $US40 million while writers and actors strike for the right to fair pay. In Australia, meanwhile, philanthropic giving declined in 2022 by 2.3 per cent on the previous year. And only 15 of the donors who made The Australian Financial Review’s Philanthropy 50 List last year were also on the AFR 2022 Top 200 Rich List.
The Centre for Social Impact analysed tax office data last year and found that only 2 per cent of top earners donated more of their income than did lower-income earners. More than half of top earners reported no tax-deductible donations or gifts at all in 2018-2019.
Taylor Swift’s generosity is admirable. The bonuses she distributed will be genuinely life-changing for some crew members. But it is truly sad that sharing profits with staff is so extraordinary. No one builds an empire without help, and no one amasses a multimillion-dollar fortune on their own steam.
Kerri Sackville is an author, columnist and mother of three. Her new book is The Secret Life of You: How a bit of alone time can change your life, relationships and maybe the world.