Lena Dunham Decides People Should Be Paid for Their Work

Lena Dunham is the creator of GIRLS, and her character on the show, Hannah, considers herself the voice of a generation—a generation which, its spokesperson surely already knows, is underemployed, overeducated, crushed with debt, and generally in need of some work. Work that pays, in particular.

So it was a bit strange that a recent New York Times piece revealed that Dunham was about to hire several performers to work for her, and she wasn't going to pay them.

The article mentioned in passing that for Dunham's upcoming tour for her new book, Not That Kind of Girl (for which she was paid an advance of $3.7 million), she opened up auditions for the tour. Dunham received over 600 submissions, from a wide cast of characters that included a "sand artist, a ukulele player, a cappella singers, gymnasts, performance artists and stand-up comics, even some exceptionally charismatic babies."

The Times described the event as "more like a roving Burning Man festival than a sober, meet-the-author literary event." Which is a pretty apt description, since no money exchanges hands at Burning Man, and Lena Dunham was not planning on exchanging any money with her performers.

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17208/lena_dunham_decides_people_should_be_paid_for_their_work