Work Flows and Flexicurity: Canadian Cultural Labour in the Era of the Creative Economy

Mir­jam Gollmitzer and Cather­ine Murray

May 2009

The cul­tural sec­tor is expe­ri­enc­ing mas­sive changes due to glob­al­iza­tion, tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion, the with­drawal of pub­lic fund­ing and dereg­u­la­tion. At the same time, there is a height­ened inter­est of local, provin­cial, national and inter­na­tional policy-makers – from cre­ative city ini­tia­tives to the United Nations – in the eco­nomic as well as social rel­e­vance of the sec­tor.  The authors of this report wel­come this increased atten­tion to cre­ative work but think that the key to pro­mot­ing the sec­tor has either not been rec­og­nized yet or is neglected by policy-makers. This key is a frame­work that con­tains rules for cre­ative labour processes and offers social pro­tec­tion as well as employ­ment and income secu­rity to the cre­ative work force.

The main focus of the cur­rent report is there­fore labour reg­u­la­tion and its poten­tial to fos­ter the cre­ative labour force in a sub­stan­tial and sus­tain­able way. One major goal is the devel­op­ment of a pol­icy frame­work that offers a com­pre­hen­sive view on cre­ative labour that is firmly rooted in think­ing about uni­ver­sal stan­dards, pol­icy respon­si­bil­i­ties, and pol­icy strate­gies before con­crete pol­icy mea­sures are considered.

For the pur­poses of this report, flex­i­cu­rity refers to income secu­rity for self-employed or part time work­ers. “Flex­i­cu­rity” is a term in broad use espe­cially in Europe, but one of the best descrip­tions emerges from Den­mark, describ­ing the spe­cial Dan­ish three-sided mix of (1) flex­i­bil­ity on the labour mar­ket com­bined with (2) social secu­rity and (3) an active labour mar­ket pol­icy with rights and oblig­a­tions for the unem­ployed. The actual word is a con­trac­tion of flex­i­bil­ity and secu­rity. Mir­jam Gollmitzer and Cather­ine Mur­ray use three strate­gies in this piece. They start with a review of aca­d­e­mic lit­er­a­ture that looks at labour in the new econ­omy from a crit­i­cal per­spec­tive. The sec­ond sec­tion of this report is ded­i­cated to Cana­dian as well as inter­na­tional pol­icy devel­op­ments in labour reg­u­la­tion for non-standard employ­ment. Third, the authors con­sulted experts in labour and cre­ative labour from across Canada in order to explore how they eval­u­ate the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion of cre­ative work­ers as well as pol­icy ideas for these workers.

As a result, this report pro­vides insights into the chances for as well as obsta­cles to policy-making for cre­ative labour. Exam­ples of suc­cess­ful, non-traditional orga­ni­za­tion of the cre­ative work force are pro­vided and the grow­ing impor­tance of inter­na­tional labour reg­u­la­tion is noted. More­over, inter­na­tional pol­icy think­ing is mov­ing towards a con­sen­sus regard­ing the pro­tec­tion of non-standard work­ers through basic access to health ben­e­fits, reg­u­la­tion of work­ing time, the pos­si­bil­ity of col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing and non-discrimination of part-time and fixed-term work­ers. While there is an encour­ag­ing aware­ness among policy-makers of the impor­tance to sup­port such work­ers, cre­ative work­ers are so far not per­ceived as one group of vul­ner­a­ble or pre­car­i­ous work­ers in need of such protection.

For now, Gollmitzer and Mur­ray present a model derived from the research con­ducted for this report which estab­lishes the basic steps to com­pre­hen­sive policy-making for cre­ative labour. There are four dif­fer­ent strate­gies to choose from which can be used to advo­cate for cre­ative labour. These include empha­siz­ing cre­ative sub-sectors, a sec­toral or unique cir­cum­stances approach to policy-making, a cre­ative econ­omy approach point­ing to the eco­nomic value of cul­ture, and the clas­si­fi­ca­tion of cre­ative work­ers as one group of vul­ner­a­ble or pre­car­i­ous work­ers among others.

The authors con­clude with the obser­va­tion that prin­ci­ples guid­ing social and employ­ment secu­rity for cre­ative work­ers now need to be trans­lated into con­crete pol­icy mea­sures (located at the top level of the pyra­mid), com­ple­ment­ing already exist­ing tools that offer business/entrepreneurial support.

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