According to Sirp editor-in-chief Kaarel Tarand, the situation in culture is "worse than bad."

"Regardless of whether times are good or bad, one thing is certain: the share of culture in the state budget has been shrinking for 15 or 20 years now. We've fallen from a former peak of 4 percent of the budget to just one and a half," Tarand said.

Tarand argued that the pay raise promised by the minister of culture is no victory, since it remains far too small.

"A total of €7.5 million in no way amounts to a 10 percent raise, first of all. Second, it's important to note that even if that €7.5 million looks like some money, the first thing every institution does is hand over a third of it to the Health Insurance Fund and Pension Registry, because it's all subject to social taxes. Then come income taxes — labor is the most heavily taxed sector in Estonia. So the state immediately takes back about half of what it gives out in various taxes. That means that what's left, at best, amounts to about €1,000 per employee per year. Maybe," Tarand said.

"So we're talking less than €100 a month. That can't be considered a win. It's the kind of win that in political language amounts to faint praise," he added.

Speaking about what kind of raise would be fair for cultural workers, Estonian Theater Union head Gert Raudsep said that TALO, the confederation of trade unions for employees, has consistently argued that cultural workers with higher education — or those in jobs requiring equivalent qualifications — should earn the Estonian average salary.

The Bank of Estonia's forecast for next year's average salary is €2,065.

"We've almost never reached that level. Maybe once we got close, but that's it. We're actually moving backward. We have fewer employees and the number of cultural workers has fallen. When we were criticized that there are too many actors, which is why we can't pay you properly, the fact is that the number of salaried actors in theaters has dropped by the equivalent of at least one and a half theaters across the whole system," Raudsep said.

"I won't even start talking about freelance creative professionals, because their situation is catastrophic: no social protections and so on — it's an endless story," he added.

Art Museum of Estonia director general Sirje Helme said she cannot claim that a 7.5 percent raise won't help at all.

"Of course it helps. But I've also told my middle managers to explain to people — because everyone has already taken out their calculators and is adding 10 percent — that it doesn't work like that. We don't even know how much we'll actually get. And even if it does come to 10 percent, it's still very little for each individual. It's a huge sum for the institution, but small for a person. And it's an old truth that even if we did reach the average salary but it didn't keep rising, we'd still be losing ground every year to inflation and rising prices," Helme said.

Helme noted that the fewer employees a cultural institution has, the more it could raise wages — but at the cost of unbearable workloads and pressure.

"Our staff see how their colleagues in major European museums work. Psychologically, it's exhausting. They come back and realize that the amount they earn is what a third-tier assistant over there would get. And we're talking about people with PhDs, who have dedicated years to improving their expertise. It really reminds me of a kind of small-scale slavery," Helme said.

Own revenue to become even more important

Raudsep noted that larger theater foundations have €2.1 million less this year than last.

"That means the money has to be earned from somewhere. From whom? From the audience. That means ticket prices will go up and fewer and fewer people will be able to access art that's supposed to be supported by public money," Raudsep said.

"The main idea — why we support theater in our own language and our own cultural space — disappears. It becomes purely about earning money to pay salaries. The theater we see on stage gets cheaper and cheaper, because there's no money left to make it beautiful and high-quality. So this poverty doesn't just reach the employees, it reaches everything on stage," he said.

In Raudsep's view, pressure to generate revenue makes theaters less willing to take risks. "But risk, and the possibility of failure, are the only things that move us forward — and maybe the only things that make it interesting at all," he added.

Helme pointed out that the more expensive a museum ticket becomes, the fewer people can attend, and the fewer visitors, the smaller the museum's income.

Tarand said it sounds nice to suggest that institutions can use self-earned revenue to pay wages, but in fact, that is the worst of the bad options available to a director, because it's the most heavily taxed money.

"When you pay out wages from self-earned revenue, the state takes the biggest share. Then there's no way around it. So directors start thinking about how to pay it in some other, less-taxed way, which leads to so-called non-employment contracts — purchases, service contracts. And with that, we're back on the same death spiral. Then, every three years when the state remembers it might add a little to salaries, they discover that staffing levels have conveniently shrunk and so they can officially allocate an even smaller sum," Tarand said.

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