Workers and Work in the Arts: Definitional Challenges and Approaches to Collective Action Among Arts and Creative Workers

The arts sector is so notable for underemployment, underpayment, and the devaluation of work and labor, that artists are portrayed in the public imagination not just as poor, but as starving. Artists are difficult to define collectively, with most descriptions of artists and their work requiring caveats to account for occupational heterogeneity. Not everyone working in the arts and creative sector is employed to create or perform art, and indeed, workers in this sector might not do artistic or creative work at all. Likewise, across all sectors, artists are employed and contracted to do art and non-art work and are often precariously situated in so-called portfolio careers, gig economies, or similar nonstandard employment relations (Chong, 2021; Lingo & Tepper, 2013). All of these features pose challenges for worker action and collaboration to improve the working lives of artists. These difficulties in defining artists and their work also make it challenging for artists and creative workers, in and beyond arts organizations, to participate in labor organizing and other forms of collective action to improve working conditions.

For the purposes of this article, we refer to “artists” as those who are the primary creator or performer of works of art and creative expression, both material and ephemeral. “Creative workers” refer to all of those people who come together to support primary artistic workers, for example, through roles in curating, managing, producing, and otherwise supporting the creation or performance of art. The groups are not mutually exclusive, and many individuals pursue or find themselves crafting careers as occupational generalists (Chong, 2021; Cornfield, 2015) that include working as an artist and as a creative worker, and, at times, employment in roles outside of the arts.

The changes of the 1980s that ushered in the post-bureaucratic era and structured the degradation of the standard employment relation (Cornfield, 2015), continue and extend into the twenty-first century, substantially impacting workers and work in the arts. Transformations in work structures, digital technologies, legislative changes, and shifts due to the COVID-19 pandemic have substantially altered the landscape for artistic work and careers (Florida & Seman, 2020; Lingo & Tepper, 2013). This era has also been one of promise for artists and creative workers, with high-profile unionization and mutual aid efforts by museum and arts organization workers, arts educators, and artists. Empowered by access to social media, artists’ voices were heard in the #MeToo movement, highlighting the unchecked exploitation of workers, like artists, who are not protected by EEOC regulations or anti-discrimination policies. Also in this era, federal relief efforts to the COVID-19 pandemic included self-employed workers as eligible to receive unemployment benefits, removing an established boundary that, during the pandemic, allowed many artists and creative workers to access an occupational social safety net for the first time.

In this paper, we respond to the WERN report, outlining two cases that are illustrative of the simultaneous difficulty and promise of new labor activism among artists and creative workers. The first case, based on ethnographic and archival research by Tania Aparicio, outlines the unionization process and outcomes at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The second case, based on mixed-methods research by Rachel Skaggs, outlines the informal art world and occupational community of country music songwriters. In both cases, we critically engage in questions of who is a worker and what is work as essential to the progress and improvement in labor conditions for arts and creative workers.

Collective Bargaining as a Strategy to Define Workers and Work in the Arts

Defining creative jobs as labor is a challenge given the heterogeneity of roles, as well as a misperceived overlap between leisure and work. This symbolic tension has reinforced a professional field highly dependent on underpaid and unpaid work which, in turn, limits access to creative careers to those who can afford to survive on low or no wages. At MoMA, creative workers challenged such unstable work arrangements when, in 1996. they used collective bargaining to set boundaries around their professional activities. This was a rare labor strategy in art museums at the time, even though organizing toward it started in the 1970s at MoMA. Instead, this type of worker had used other approaches, such as professional credentialing, to separate themselves from the economic elites who volunteered to work at art museums for free (Zolberg, 1981). But credentials alone did not fully define museum staff as wage-deserving workers. For instance, museum administrators did not remunerate some of creative workers’ key activities, such as art studio visits or international travel. In contrast, MoMA's first union contract explicitly determines the boundaries of these practices as professional activities. As a result, among others, job stability enabled innovation and impacted the type of culture that the museum exhibited to the public.

I learned about the case when I conducted a qualitative study of the MoMA film department between 2016 and 2019 (work from this project is ongoing but can be found in Aparicio, 2022). During contract negotiations, MoMA employees demanded benefits that are common to other jobs such as percentages for yearly salary raises, health and welfare benefits, pension, and leaves and vacations. But they also made specific claims that delineated their work in the art museum field, such as art research sabbaticals, paid time to visit galleries and studios, and generous travel stipends. With these requirements, members of MoMA's collective bargaining unit defined their professional activities and the material support needed to carry out their jobs.

I observed that creative workers with stable work arrangements took more risks in their aesthetic decisions, were more successful when advocating for innovative art programs, and broadened their audience's cultural landscape. In turn, workers with unstable or short-term contracts had to negotiate for resources to carry out their work and often were relegated to a limited local art scene because they had to ask for permission to travel and cover associated costs out-of-pocket, which in many cases meant taking on credit card debt. This asymmetry of opportunities mattered because advancement in these museum creative workers’ careers depended on exploring a global art world, visiting biennales, and other art festivals. MoMA's union contract explicitly awarded unit members the funding to conduct such activities.

Creative workers at unionized workplaces not only define who is a worker carrying out professional activities in their contracts, they also demand avenues to complain when abuses of power at the hand of their employers take place. MoMA workers reported that before the union contract was signed wages were low, retitling was common, workers could be let go without due process, and nepotism was rampant. Grievance processes provided a formal solution to mistreatment. In fact, MoMA creative workers often remember that their working conditions are superior to their professional peers’. Having a strong union since 1996 set them apart from most workers in the same field because collective bargaining had been slow until recently. In the last four years—refueled by pandemic layoffs—collective bargaining units have emerged strong in a couple dozen US art museums (e.g., Whitney, Guggenheim, New Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, MoCA, Art Institute of Chicago).

Yet, unionizing has limits for the ways in which creative workers seek to define their professional field as well as who is a worker. In 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, MoMA's creative workers organized an informal taskforce to counter institutional racism. Advocates for Antiracism (A4A) focused on bringing attention to the museum's majority-white creative workforce and demanding changes. They proposed an overhaul of hiring practices and outreach strategies with an emphasis on racial justice—which some of them believed should be part of the next union contract negotiation. They developed their suggestions from data that they collected through an online survey circulated in 2020, which centered the experiences of BIPOC museum workers. But A4A was vastly ignored by the museum administration. This shows that there are limits to worker voice in organizational structures through collective bargaining because historical racial exclusion has traditionally been left out of union negotiations as systems of representation even though BIPOC workers in the US predominantly support unionization (as reported by WERN). This tension deserves further attention from researchers as arts and creative industries reemerge from crises shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice movements.

Occupational Communities as a Strategy to Define Workers and Work in the Arts

For those arts workers who are employees, organizations define the boundaries of work, as is the case for employees in other industries. However, for those whose work activities fall almost wholly outside of the boundaries of organizations, it can be challenging to have the products of one's labor be valued and counted as such. In the absence of policies, practices, or organizational structures that support artists’ work activities toward the creation or performance of their art, occupational communities can serve as the structuring forces that create opportunity, serve in gatekeeping roles, and generally mitigate the risks of working in a precarious field (Cornfield, 2015). In occupational communities of music creators, like Nashville songwriters, two decades of transformation spurred by a transition to a digital music economy have made their work individually risky.

The field of songwriters is incredibly competitive, with hundreds of new songs being written by professional songwriters each day. In this context, instead of creating songs alone in search of higher royalty payouts, songwriters collaborate together more often and in larger groups. I find that from 2000 to 2015, the number of successful country songs written by only one songwriter dropped from over 20% to just 5%. At the same time, collaborative groups of songwriters grew, taking on up to 7 members for what used to be a job for 1–3 writers. Likewise, the composition of these groups changed, becoming more inclusive of collaborators, like producers and recording artists, whose work had historically been distinct from songwriting.

In this case, the occupational community of songwriters mitigates the risk of writing songs alone or in dyads. This strategy enhanced an already closely networked occupational group in an effort to maintain access to opportunities, collaborators, and economic return for their work. Unlike musicians, who are eligible to organize under locals of the American Federation of Musicians, songwriters do not have their own union. In the current era, the occupational community of songwriters informally manages aspects of worker training and socialization (Skaggs, 2019), intergenerational collaboration, and occupational succession (Skaggs, 2022). Within the collaborative occupational landscape of songwriters, the community decides who is a worker and who is not. In this role, the community is more successful at replicating entrenched patterns of who counts as a member of the community and is less open to people who fall outside of the white, male, Christian norm. There are broad collective action efforts in the music industry for copyright reform, specifically around streaming music, but there are also artistic movements and collective action toward inclusion of people and groups who have been discriminated against in the genre (e.g., work by The Black Opry, Color Me Country Radio).

The vast majority of artists and creative workers work in some capacity outside of the bounds of a formal organization and are hence not able to access collective bargaining through an employer. Researchers hoping to examine post-bureaucratic occupations, in or beyond the arts, should take note of which types of capital, status, or identity signifiers are important within an occupational community toward designing empirical methods that account for these features. For instance, the Nashville Songwriters Association International, a non-union trade organization for songwriters in and beyond Nashville requires that their professional-level members show their viability as a songwriter through either tax documents (to show that they make money from songwriting) or through proof that they have a reputation as a professional songwriter. The affirmation of a professional identity through economic or social capital is responsive to the occupational context of songwriting.

Empirical sampling methods and approaches to systematically identifying workers whose work lives unfold outside of formal employment are considerably more challenging than for organizational employees. To address this challenge in my research, I developed a novel sampling strategy called a network-based sampling frame (Skaggs, 2022) that identifies who workers are in fields that are not bound by organizational affiliations. Taking into account professional identity or status as a “successful” songwriter based on within-community measures of commercial success, peer recognition, critical acclaim, and an extra-community measure of success, I was able to create a typology of success and sampling frame that accounted for multiple types of relevant status markers, creating an empirical sampling frame for qualitative, quantitative, and social network-based research that reduces reliance on referral sampling strategies that do not allow researchers to contextualize an interviewee's social position within their broader occupational community. This approach could be useful across artistic occupational communities but may also be useful in non-arts communities or for systematically understanding new forms of collective action.

Future Directions and Conclusion

While boundaries such as those that define work and worker are helpful, they also fail when they replicate structural problems. For example, arts workplaces such as MoMA, which are often racially homogenous places, face challenges at the intersection of collective bargaining, worker voice, power, and representation. Bargaining units are embedded in a larger system of inequality, which in the US (and abroad) is deeply rooted in racial hierarchies and white supremacy. Creative workers know that their fields have been exclusive and racially homogenous, and in informal occupational communities like the Nashville music industry, the absence of formal organizational structures leads to homophily at the expense of artists of color, white women, and others whose identities exclude them from the normative group. Through initiatives such as MoMA's A4A they are trying to address such forms of structural exclusion in the field, even if intersections of labor, race, and access to professional art careers are yet to be fully addressed.

Artists and creative workers are organizing outside institutional boundaries through grassroots organizing, exhibiting promise for mutualism outside of traditional forms of collective action. In 2021, Art.coop began as an alternative to exploitation, isolation, and fear in artistic and creative careers that foregrounds solidarity and indigenous knowledge. Their mission is to connect culture and art workers in the field's heterogeneous landscape, which includes educators, organizers, academics, economists, and grantmakers. Art.coop is centering the value of art work and workers by promoting research and connection, as well as self-determined economies. In 2020, Public Assistants began as a mutual aid initiative to provide community support during the COVID-19 pandemic that centered art and collective care and wellness. Since then, they have continued to carry out mutual aid organizing as well as developed into a design lab focused on amplifying BIPOC art and creativity. In addition, collective action in the arts is formally happening beyond unionization, mutualism, and grassroots organizing. Efforts toward increased, steady compensation for arts workers are being promoted by organizations like Springboard for the Arts, Creatives Rebuild New York, and a partnership between the Mellon Foundation and the Centro de Economía Creativa in, respectively, St. Paul, New York, and across Puerto Rico. At the national level, policies that would be most impactful for artists and creative workers are those that help independent workers. The ability to be seen as a worker and to have one's work count as such would position artists and creative workers in a stronger position to organize, be compensated fairly, and to gain protections from work-related discrimination and harassment.

Too often, art is not seen as the product of labor and artistic creators not seen as workers. Work in the arts is subject to and reliant on symbolic evaluation and dependent on asymmetric categories such as high and popular art, art and craft, and art versus entertainment. Such symbolic hierarchies perpetuate material inequalities (Gualtieri, 2022; Lena, 2021) and obscure unpaid and underpaid labor under narratives such as “starving artist” and “doing what you love.” Hence, defining what counts as work and who counts as a worker in the arts is important for collective action. Yet, group heterogeneity continues to be a significant challenge in art and creative fields. As we have explained, artists are not always employees in arts or creative industries, and much of their work goes unpaid which represents a definitional challenge, as current national regulations dictate that labor must be exchanged for wages. These issues are at the root of artists and creative workers’ collective action in pursuit of better working conditions. As we have demonstrated in two cases, by uniting as art workers, people who create, perform, produce, manage, curate, and otherwise labor in the arts, culture, and creative fields have stronger footing to act together.