Cultural Labour

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Who makes culture in our communities today? Answers to this simple question have become more difficult.

The line between producer and consumer of culture is blurring, disrupting traditional paths to sustainable livelihoods and systems of cultural value.

More affordable production technologies, social media and the internet have enabled the emergence of new cultural producers and new genres of expression but they have also destabilised the system of professional training, undermined claims to artistic autonomy and prestige, and forced older cultural forms of production organization to struggle financially.

New media jobs are increasing and the cachet of a creative career compels unprecedented entrepreneurialism. Copyright no longer provides the protection of creative expression it once did, downloading more creative risk onto the individual.

Artists and cultural workers, often among the best educated of the labour force, are more likely to be self-employed, in serial jobs in other sectors, yet they still experience median incomes below the national average and their productions rely heavily on volunteer help from their communities.

New immigrant or ethnocultural groups are less likely to earn liveable wages from cultural work than other creative workers.

Despite or because of these waves of intense structural changes, the cultural or creative sector has experienced a decade of growth more rapid than many other sectors of the economy in Canada, the UK, Australia, the EU and, increasingly, Asia. Contrary to expectation, early statistics suggest the cultural sector weathered the last financial recession comparatively better (Conference Board of Canada, 2009). The cultural creative sector now accounts for 6–8% of GDP in many advanced western countries, which in Canada makes it larger than many traditional sectors, like forestry or fisheries, combined, but it remains under-recognized and under-valued.

Scholarly interest in supplying this blindspot is shifting to include creative cities of all sizes and the spatial distribution of the cultural/creative labour market, acknowledging a devolution of power in the cultural policy field to the local level. How do artists, policy makers, citizens, developers and other social actors in communities use culture to create a sense of place? The quality of the urban cultural milieu is now recognised as a key determinant in attracting clusters, districts or enterprise zones of cultural and creative production, a tool in urban revitalization or managing suburban sprawl and increasingly allied with social or not-for-profit enterprise. Yet there is scant consideration of what artists and other cultural producers actually do, how they work in the urban cultural milieu and how their work contributes to the urban sense of place. In the cultural work/cultural place theme at the CPCC, scholars critically examine creative economy policies for their intersection with labour, social and urban policy and the social economy. Qualitative data on cultural work and its contribution to place is also developed.