| Abstrakt: |
If we accept the premise that culture, in all its styles, genres, and forms, is of value to our society, then artists are workers who produce that culture, just as taxi drivers are workers who take us where we need to go, and restaurant cooks and waiters are workers who keep us fed. Ride-share drivers, fast food and delivery workers, adjunct and substitute teachers, domestic workers, home health aides, sex workers, and other groupings of miscategorized "independent contractors" have also been organizing, fighting, and achieving tangible progress, which, in many cases, accelerated dramatically during the COVID crisis, as it has for musicians. None of these systems is perfect, but they do recognize the fundamental reality that workers in the cultural sector are workers, and that when they are out of work they need access to social benefits like workers in any other sector. In short, these writers suggest that the instability and peril that used to be associated with small groups of workers such as freelance musicians and artists has expanded - first to low-wage service industry workers and others who were easy to strip of traditional labor protections through miscategorization and other neoliberal sleight-of-hand, then more broadly across the economy. [Extracted from the article] |
