Without cultural workers, what happens to our community’s cultural life?
A new report shows employment in the cultural sector is increasingly precarious, with Adelaide’s cultural workforce shrinking in the past 20 years and many workers earning below-average wages. What’s at stake, say the authors, ‘is not some micro-percentage of state GDP but a foundational pillar of the lives of South Australians’.
In a report launched this week, Australian Cultural Employment – An Analysis of the Australia Census and Labour Force Survey Data, authors Ben Eltham and Justin O’Connor analyse cultural sector employment using the last four Australian Census reports. The results – as they highlight in this article, co-authored by Tully Barnett – make for sombre reading.
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The headlines are clear. Cultural employment is growing at a slower rate than the rest of the workforce. There actually aren’t that many jobs in culture: at 2.7 per cent of the employed population, the cultural industries are a relatively small sector, especially when compared to big employers like healthcare, education or retail trade.
Cultural industries that are well-placed to sell their wares in the digital economy, or that provide services to broader sectors of the economy such as housing and construction, are doing better than the so-called “core” cultural industries like the performing arts, publishing or music, which have not fully recovered from the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. While architecture, advertising and design are adding jobs and report above-median incomes, the cultural workforce is growing slowly or even shedding jobs, with many in the sector earning below-median incomes.
The worst-hit cultural industries are printing and newspaper publishing, both losing more than 15,000 jobs in the period 2006-2021. Cultural retail also suffered a sharp employment decline, especially in newspaper and book retailing, entertainment media retailing, and video and other electronic media rental hiring.
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Most cultural employment is not only concentrated in the capital cities, but also in the inner core of these capitals. Five inner city areas in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and central Adelaide contain more than one-third of cultural jobs (35.5 per cent), while the top 10 per cent of these regions contain 44.9 per cent of all cultural employment In contrast, cultural employment in regional Australia is small and sparse.
Inner Melbourne is the largest region in Australia for cultural employment, but greater Sydney still has the most employment overall. Greater Adelaide has one-fifth the jobs of Sydney and a quarter those of Melbourne. Adelaide has lost cultural industries jobs since 2005, a fate shared only with Darwin. However, while regional Northern Territory shows a net gain, regional SA shows a net loss.
Insecure, fragmented and poor
Cultural work in Australia is insecure, fragmented and poor. Cultural workers in Australia are on average slightly younger, more likely to be female, and their roles much more insecure than the broader Australian labour force. Their wages are lower, while their income inequality is higher. They have higher proportions of independent contractors and lower proportions of workers with employment entitlements, such as paid leave, than the labour force as a whole. They have low union density, which suggests they have little labour power.
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The cultural labour force is majority female, and feminising rapidly. This shows up when looking at majority-female occupations such as interior design, but also in the notable entry of women into previously masculine occupations such as “below the line” film crew and backstage performing arts crew. Given the continuing gender pay gaps seen across all Australian wages, including in culture, this feminising trend is not a good sign for the future of cultural workers’ incomes.
Given the very difficult housing conditions of Australian inner cities, it’s likely that many cultural workers suffer housing stress, either paying high rents and mortgages close to their jobs, or commuting long distances from cheaper housing located further away from the inner cities. Such stresses can only add to the insecurity faced by cultural workers, which we were able to measure in their employment conditions.
For our report, we used the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ definition of the cultural sector. This does not include software, industrial design, or fashion retail, which are often used to expand this “creative sector” by almost two-thirds. It does include some cultural retail, cultural goods wholesaling, printing, publishing, broadcasting, libraries, museums and galleries, the performing arts, the recorded and performing music industries, screen production, distribution and exhibition, arts education, advertising, design, photography, and religious and funeral services.
There are quibbles about why, say, tattoo artists are not counted when “Ministers of Religion” and “Zoos and Botanical Gardens” are included. The report speaks to these debates. One of the problems here lies in trying to squeeze art and culture into an early 20th-century statistical framework meant for an old industrial economy, from primary extraction to service value-added.
Culture isn’t the same as cars
But the deeper problem for so much of contemporary cultural policy-making is that culture is not an industrial sector, but closer to a public service like health and education. If this were an industrial sector, then we would be best to let it go the way of Holden cars: culture is a low-wage, low-growth, over-educated and under-productive sector, and the quality of its jobs is often low.
But culture is not an industrial sector. It is an essential part of what it means to be human. Culture is integral to a decent society, recognised by the United Nations as a human right. As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits”.
For citizens to enjoy these rights requires access to education and a broad range of facilities required for cultural participation; it also requires the community to actually have a cultural life.
Jobs are important, and artists and cultural workers deserve a living wage and dignity in their workplaces. But culture is more important than the employment it creates. When we see statistics like this – and these are just the headlines – what is at stake is not some micro-percentage of state GDP, but a foundational pillar of the lives of South Australians.
We will be talking about the future of cultural policy with the collaborative group Reset Arts and Culture, and the place of cultural labour within that, at a launch of the report on from 5-8 pm on Thursday, November 21, at Samstag Musuem of Art. Register here.
Justin O’Connor is Professor of Cultural Economy at the University of South Australia, Tully Barnett is associate professor in creative arts at Flinders University, and Ben Eltham is a lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University.