My experience freelancing in Switzerland

Tonhalle Zurich--I haven't played here,
but Juna has!

Switzerland is a great place to be a musician. Our work is valued here. People actually attend concerts, approach new music with an open mind, and pay music teachers well. My boyfriend, Juna, while admittedly very lucky, has been able to support himself for several months now entirely off of performing contemporary music on the trombone.

However, I had a somewhat sour experience playing a few times for a Musikschule in a small village 30 minutes out of Basel. The pay was generous and the students were well-prepared and courteous but the administration delayed paying me for seven months. Their reason for doing this was that after the first gig in November, because I had committed to other gigs with the school in the spring, they figured they'd just pay me all at once at the end. What was even worse, the director refused to divulge the rate at which I would be paid, so I never even knew how much I was getting paid. Even after I was done, though, the communication was so screwed up that it still took over a month to get paid. Through all of this the music teachers who hired me had no awareness of or control over this situation. After many emails with the exceptionally difficult music school director, we resolved the situation and I finally got all my money a few weeks ago (over 1000 francs that I could've been using on monthly tuition payments).

A few things about the Swiss payroll system that I think could've helped the situation had I known them when I accepted the work:

It seems that if possible they only pay by direct debit to a bank account, not ever really by check. Bank accounts for Americans is a whole other post, but I'll just say it's useful to have one (and you're lucky if, as a low-earning student, you manage to open one!). I would've set up the account ASAP and provided the office with all the information they needed up front to get the payment process in motion.

It is normal to be paid weeks or months after doing work, but usually there is a system in place with a definite time frame. If I had known this, I would have asked up front what the system is so I could know when exactly I could expect to be paid, and have something to hold the administration accountable to. If I was really smart, I would've asked for something written that guaranteed payment by a certain date.

You often need to submit something called an AHV number, something assigned to everyone in Switzerland, and from my understanding is the equivalent of a social security number. Sometimes it's not necessary if you don't make over a certain amount, but it's good to know anyhow. I didn't know what mine was, so I had to travel to an office, show them my ID and get them to look it up. That, thankfully, was very easy and free. But because I didn't know the office needed it to pay me (because they never told me until I was asking them where my money was), but if I had known, then I would've given them that along with my bank account information up front.

Apparently, according to one of my Alexander teachers (British man who is married to my other Alexander teacher, a Swiss lady), it is much more common among Swiss to avoid paying a bill until they actually get a warning about it. He joked that the music school was just waiting for my "warning," but I fear that this is all too true. Even after several attempts from the teachers who hired me to get information and expedite the process, I had to email the music school director personally in my embarrassingly basic German before anything got done at all. If I knew that that's what it would take, I would've tried to insist on clarity and timeliness from the beginning, before I had done the work.

The worst thing I kept hearing throughout this situation (from other musicians especially!) was that I shouldn't worry that I wouldn't get paid. That was so not the issue. Some people even said to me that it just wasn't "the Swiss way" to pay in a timely manner. Whether that's something people should just accept is a discussion in itself, but it was especially frustrating to me. Money is not some abstract thing that I can take or leave, now or later. It's nice that I am getting music-related work but it's not enough just to know that I'm appreciated and I will be paid quite well (at some distant future time). I need to know where this month's rent is coming from. 

I do think Juna has experienced much better organization and timeliness from the groups he's played with. And I should also make it clear that I know mine is only one experience. I'm not interested in drawing generalizations. But I did end up accompanying again much more recently, this time for a friend at the Musik Akademie in Basel. I tried to keep my promise to myself that I wouldn't do music work again without something written stating when and how much I would be paid. But this proved impossible (probably for a number of subjective, specific reasons, to be fair). On the day of the gig, when paperwork was supposed to be submitted, the forms were forgotten by the person in charge. Again, for subjective reasons I can see why this happened, but professionally it is unacceptable to me, especially given that I was almost to the point of paranoia asking about rates and pay periods and contracts weeks in advance of the gig, with no steps taken except reassuring me that I would be paid. Finally, after sending an email in which I feel I came on probably a little strong (but feeling this was necessary after my previous experience!), I got a response that what I'm asking for is "fast for Swiss offices." 

In the end it worked out, and at CHF 75/hour, it's a far better rate than I ever made in Bowling Green, OH. Perhaps the issue here is not really freelancing in Switzerland but having integrity as a working musician. The conditions musicians are willing to accept are less than fair in many situations (unfortunately this applies especially to pianists) because we do something we love. This isn't an original idea, but maybe more folks on this continent could stand to hear about it.