What do journalists, actors, musicians, dancers have in common? Besides the fact that most of them want to make the world at least a little bit better, they have in common precarious and unstable working conditions. Many are self-employed and left to the will of their employers. When taking into account the increasingly common platform work, which is present in these professions, the future of workers in this sector does not look too bright.
In order to improve their position, the International Federation of Actors (FIA), the International Federation of Musicians (FIM), the Union of Media, Entertainment and Arts (UNI-MEI) and the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) started a project two and a half years ago that strengthened unions and provided them with new tools to fight for the rights of atypical workers. At the final conference, which was held in Madrid from June 8 to 9, examples of good practice were presented.
What can the union do for me? And what can I do for the union?
At the beginning of the project, the Polish Union of Actors (ZZAP) had 450 members, of which only 10 percent were freelancers. Now, at the end of the project, they have 1224 members, 40 percent of whom are freelancers. Their biggest challenge was to determine the minimum price of work for the actors. And when that price is determined by the agents in agreement with the productions, then it seems that there is no place for the union. But that did not discourage them. They approached the agencies and explained to them that if actresses and actors are paid more, then they will also get more money. Now they cooperate with more than 40 agencies that when negotiating do not go below the agreed minimum price.
The Association of Dramatic Artists of Slovenia (ZDUS) says that the project helped them because they were facing a lack of funds, a hostile government and a pandemic. That is why they offered their members the opportunity to receive psychological help completely anonymously. When people saw what and how they were doing, their number of members also increased.
The project enabled the Actors’ Union of Turkey (AUT) to create tools on how to approach new members and how to help them with problems that do not necessarily have to be exclusively work-related. Thus, they provided a lot of help in cases of abuse, and more and more of them are being discovered in the acting world. They also provided psychological help.
FAIR Media Sind from Romania, an organization that brings together unions and associations from the culture and media sectors, warned that the government wants to make it impossible for unions to protect workers. There is no word “union” in the regulation that should regulate the rights of atypical workers. It is unconstitutional and contrary to the law, so they hope that they will be able to overthrow it. Despite the difficulties, they managed to negotiate favorable collective agreements in the public sector, for example in public radio and television, theater.
Members and non-members, should we differentiate?
The representative of FAIR Media Sind explained that the Romanian law allows unions to agree certain rights and benefits from the collective agreement and that they apply only to union members. “If you want to ride the bus, you have to pay for the ticket. If you don’t want to, then you go on foot”, he clarified their logic and emphasized that it is about certain additional rights, while most of the rights that are being negotiated apply to everyone.
The president of the Danish Union of Journalists, Mogens Blicher Bjerregård, warned that unions must be careful about negotiating rights for members and non-members. “With such a division, we give a trump card in the hands of employers to hire non-union members, who will ultimately be cheaper for them,” he pointed out.
The guidelines of the European Commission favor atypical workers, but…
During the duration of the project, European Commission’s Guidelines for the application of Union competition law to collective agreements regarding the working conditions of self-employed persons without employees were issued. They brought some legal clarity to the negotiation of collective agreements for the self-employed. Until now, the problem was that the negotiation of prices and tariffs of self-employed workers was seen as price fixing and cartelization. The same applied to collective bargaining.
Thanks to the Guidelines, an agreement on prices in a collective agreement is not price fixing, but if professional associations, unions or the self-employed would publish prices independently, then this is considered price fixing. The publication of prices would certainly help the self-employed in all professions, because in this way it would be impossible for individual clients to lower the price of their work.
However, the good news is certainly the fact that prices can now be negotiated as part of negotiations for a collective agreement. The bad news is that the Guidelines are not binding and have no influence on national legislation. But when they already exist, we can refer to them and request that national legislation be harmonized with the Guidelines.
When you want, you can
This is demonstrated by the example of the Belgian trade union ACV Puls, which represents workers in culture. Their representative, Tijs Hostyn, explained that even before the publication of the Guidelines, they decided to do research on whether they could enter into collective bargaining for self-employed members, and they also sought legal advice. With the data and legal interpretation, they went to the employers who agreed to the negotiations. They also carried out a large campaign on social networks, which achieved great success and raised awareness of the importance of protecting the labor rights of the self-employed. The result? These days, they are in final negotiations with employers regarding the collective agreement for artistic and technical jobs in the cultural sector.
In Sweden there are several examples of regulation of the rights of the self-employed. Eleonore Fahlen, representative of the union Scen Och Film, says that in small theaters that do not receive state subsidies, there are collective agreements for the self-employed that regulate the minimum wage and working hours. Now, in all negotiations, they remind on the EC Guidelines, but Fahlen says with regret that despite this, employers have no desire to negotiate. The larger unions, which they approached in the hope that they would start negotiations with employers together turned them down.
While in the USA, for example, Starbucks is closing down stores where workers organize union branches, musicians in top orchestras have been very well organized for years. Heather Kurzbauer, a musician and university professor, says that her colleagues used to get up from rehearsals if the conductor exceeded the time limit by one minute. She did it in Europe, so everyone looked at her strangely. Although everyone now wants a fair practice and to pay musicians fairly, this has led to the paradox that, due to a lack of funds, orchestras reduce the number of rehearsals and concerts, and if they do not receive subsidies from the state, they can hardly sustain themselves financially.
Do workers have a future?
Judging by the preliminary results on digital work in media, culture and entertainment, they have, but a special effort by unions is needed to protect workers in this new environment. Career models have changed. More and more people are doing more work on more digital platforms. It’s the environment that changes literally with every app update.
Often labor laws do not define the rights of workers and the obligations of owners of digital platforms, there is no transparency about how the algorithms work on these platforms. This causes great stress for workers as they are faced with enormous uncertainty while trying to remain competitive in such an uncertain environment. In addition to all this, there are no standard benefits or minimum wages….
It is clear from everything that could be heard at the conference that women and men working in media, culture and entertainment really have a lot in common. That is why it is important that trade unions and professional associations start fighting together for the protection of their rights.
Author: Zoran Pehar
Photo: FIA, Zoran Pehar