EQUAL PAY (pay gaps, unequal labour)
‘Equal pay’ has become a classical issue in the discussions on the need for a more social Europe. These discussions centre on the reduction of pay gaps between men and women but also relate to the issue of unpaid labour in some sectors of activity, including creative industries and culture.
‘Equal pay for equal work’ is one of the EU’s founding principles, enshrined in Article 157 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFUE). According to this principle, EU countries must strive to eliminate discrimination on the basis of gender in all aspects and conditions of remuneration for the same work or for work of equal value.
The EU monitors the correct transposition and enforcement of Directive 2006/54/EC on equal pay and supports EU countries to properly implement existing rules. The Directive 2006/54/EC consolidated existing directives on gender equality in the field of employment together with the case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union.
While Europe has the best global performance as regards correcting structural labour inequality between men and women, it is still a very unequal place. This partly relates to its huge historical and socioeconomic heterogeneity and, above all, to the systemic and inertial nature of gender inequality. The latter has been shown to resist all sorts of volunteer actions and seek the implementation of systematic legislative solutions.
The issue of gender-based unequal pay is also important in the sector of culture. Namely, many unpaid labour activities in this sector are predominantly carried out by women. In addition to casual and freelance work characteristic of creative professions, it should be said that creativity necessary for creative labour is largely the result of women’s engagement in unpaid care practices, which are often made invisible.
However, the issue of pay gaps and unequal labour affects all cultural workers and creative professions; systematic solutions are also needed to improve the situation of the creative sector in general as compared to other, more regulated sectors.
Namely, as observed by Kong (2011), what is known as ‘precarious labour’ shows a tendency to gradually become a ‘precarious economy’. Such an economy would be based on ‘portfolio careers’, in which different work roles are performed simultaneously, often for different clients at the same time. Moreover, so-called ‘independents’, ‘self-employed’, ‘consultants’, or ‘freelancers’ are in a specific position in which they combine the roles of entrepreneur and employee, becoming what has been referred to by Voß and Pongratz (1998) as Arbeitskraftunternehmer and translated into English as the ‘entreployee’ (Haunschild & Eikhof, 2009). Such new work arrangements require new legislative approaches, which should be based on the insights from the rich literature on the subject. (FL, MP)
See also: Social Inequality and Cultural Policy; Gender balance and culture; Creative industries; Creative class; Cultural work and precarity