Concept of Creative Labour

Abstract

There is a lot to life than labor according to wise sayings, but work consumes big amounts of people’s energy and time. Work has the capability to absorb and enrich workers, and it can be experienced as humiliating or fruitless. The standards of working life matters, the same situation happens to the connection of work to well-being. The degree to which a certain job gives chances for employees to be creative is feature to be put into consideration for many people nowadays.  Even though all jobs offer a chance for creativity, some jobs are believed to offer more chances of creativity than others. Creativity and art have a special relationship, expressive and primarily aesthetic occupation being amongst them, and maybe most common in the arts, but more well-known in the films, television, publishing businesses and music in the media institutions. Cultural industry is the term used for this combination of money-making and publicly funded enterprises. Creativity and creative labour have a big impact not only on industries and workers but also on the world and society. London gives a good example of an urban centre with world status, which is well displayed by its different cultural identity, activities and the growth of its creative labor. Industries in these cities are globally oriented and diversified; which in itself promotes the needed support for both domestic and international creative activities. this makes the city more attractive to people who are artistic minded hence giving the city a chance to be developed cultural wise and socially.

For the last three decades, communication technology, information, industries, media and services have increased their demand in the market world. They bring experiences that never existed before making human needs and wants easier. Progresses made are basically cultural because they reflect ways in which people handle current problems and opportunities (Charles Landry, 2013). The main point here is that the advancement in services designed and technologies built by human being, are what we currently name ‘Creative Labor market. Creativity is necessary to ways of living and working today, and in many right mind forever has been (Florida, 2002 p. 21). The main aim of this essay is to evaluate critically the creative labor concept and ways in which cultural labor markets are unequal.

Key Concept of Creative Labor

Traditional labor markets money matters indicate that workers worked basically to earn money. Art industries were frequently the safeguard of complex, exclusive craft society. It was totally difficult and costly for artists to explore cultural trade such as landscape painting, woodcarving and book printing. Societies used to regulate the number of beginners enrolled and this put a limit on new members in labor market. Old craft labor system did not develop in the 19^th century, but big cultural businesses like newspapers and book publishers developed; while artistic labor adjusted slowly from craft labor to profession. Many creative workers were working for large companies (example, radio presenters and advertising executive, newspaper journalists) in the early 20^th century. Some labor workers begun to be paid for their intellectual possessions in the shape of loyalties not just for their labor. Bill Ryan (1992) came up with types of cultural workers, where he categorized them in 6 types. Primary creative; writers, journalists, director actors, musician, technical employees who have become significant creative influences (example, music producers). Technical workers- sound engineers, backstage crew, key grip, camera operators and print operators including others. The third types are the creative managers. They include agents, bookers, artist managers, creative producers, A+ R men, commission editors including others. Market personnel include publicists and marketing managers; holders and executives are the money men such as CEOs account executives and company directors. Finally, the sixth type is the semi skilled labor who includes garment workers, laborers and extras.

Creativity can be in the best way described as ‘having a new idea’ (Hawkins 2002), and our community should have information. He also thought that we should be clever, challenging and active when it comes to handling information. This leads to the question where this creativity happens? We can say that creativity is made by creative industries, which can be right but in our current society creativity happens anywhere according to Hawkins. Dean Keith a psychologist came up with the idea that creativity is privileged by an intellect that has been improved with different perspectives and experiences. It is linked with a brain that shows different knowledge and interests (Florida, 2002 p. 33). Due to the ideological contents of its distinct features, creative labor denaturalizes and heightens work normal principals. Normal work principals seem to disagree with broader social values when it comes to creative labor’s marginal background (Theorizing Cultural Work, 2013 p. 74). In conclusion, when it comes to creativity thoughts are not common, aesthetic, smart, individual and clever. A creative mind innovates, creates and builds up new concepts and thoughts because creativity covers up cultural social and economic parts.

Creative labor market is essential for employees because among the responsibilities of a creative worker is to communicate with the society. A creative worker builds jobs for the society from the achieved innovations. According to Raymond Williams, a creative worker is different from other workers. He claims that a creative employee builds the message of experience their main labor in life; the artist’s job is the genuine work of communication and makes use of acquired skills to communicate that experience. Creativity involves different ways of habits and thinking that requires being cultivated in both persons and surrounding culture (Florida, 2002 p. 21). Creative industry employees are assembled and organized so that time limitations such as workplace and normal office hours are set in stone. Creative labor workers are high-ranking and they form the center of the financial system: engineering, science, education, music and entertainments, architecture and design, finance, healthcare and law. In short, they are sources of happiness and wealth and the government should do anything to cultivate them (Florida, 2002 p. 29). Creative labor is a cooperative and private model of production. Creative labor is a muscle to people; since an individual can take control of things they intend to innovate and chose the associated impacts to the surrounding world. Creativity breeds choice, freedom and autonomy, features that makes innovators or employees feel in control, empowered and in a way comfortable. Free agents are able to break from the monopoly of big organizations and be in charge of of their lives (Florida, 2002 P. 28). Another advantage of creative labor are good working conditions, it is not a must you work in an office, you can be in a atelier, film, radio, studio at home or traveling around the world.

Why Cultural Labor Markets are Unequal

New entrants continuously join the labour markets and this creates an excess of artistic labour which keeps earnings down. Pools of surplus in creative work include; employees with ‘day jobs’ who will take on a lot of freelance work, new participants to the creative labor industry and experts in correlated culture who are interested in culture. A lot of workers in the similar industries are artists who are put out of place, with many artists working several different categories to make ends meet. Competitive feature of cultural labor jobs and personal objectives of artists signify joint action is difficult and unions are missing or feeble.

Creative activities are characterized by various activities that make them unequal. The art for art’s sake, workers mind about uniqueness, harmony, technical power, etc. of a creative service or good. Thus workers care and value about art for art’s sake, in distinction to workers in routine industries where wages are working conditions are mostly considered. That means artists can efficiently settle for lower wages instead of accepting boring jobs. A number of creative products are multifaceted hence require diversely skilled contributions. Each skilled input must be available and carry out some minimum stage to make a precious output, building the ‘motley crew’ property. Challenges comes when you are required to select efficient member of the team, organize and sequence their actions as well as keeping in track their contributions. Infinite variety is another characteristic of creative activities.  Products are differentiated according to their uniqueness and quality, and this leads to infinite variety; a chance for artists to create more products, gatekeepers to choose from, and consumers to know-how than there is assets or time to do so. Choices and resources do not align in some cases, and in some of these creative industries, this creates extreme fixed costs that can be hardly recovered via a ticket price.

Example of Inequality for Cultural Workers

In a study exposing class, race, pay inequality and gender, some 43 percent of individuals employed in publishing, 26 percent in design and 28 percent in music come from privileged background, compared to 14 percent of the whole population. Less than 7 percent of workers in creative and cultural industries come from minority ethnic group. Of the 7 percent, four percent work in design, and around 5 percent of the whole populations employed in this industry are non-white across UK (Cultural Trends, 2014). Compared to the most recent data from National Statistics 2014, 13 percent of United Kingdom’s 64 million people, ten percent of the 23-69 year old employees and over 40 percent of London’s citizens are minority ethnic and black (BAME). This research found that Information Technology is the most ethnically diverse, computing and software; about 15 percent come from BAME backgrounds. Only 15 percent of the workers are women in this occupation. 54 percent of employees in publishing are women, and just 24 percent of radio, film and photography and TV employees, and 30 percent of employees in architecture are female.

There is a considerable class and gender limitation, where females in creative and cultural industries earn 112 Euros weekly on estimated average, which is less than men doing similar jobs. When it comes to architecture, the gap between women and men salaries is estimated to be around 151 Euros weekly. In distinction, pay gap between women and men who were surveyed in publishing, advertising, galleries and museums was found to be insignificant statistically. In larger parts of cultural and creative industries, employees from privileged backgrounds are paid relatively higher than the rest of the jobs in these industries even though the jobs done are the same. In information technology, the earning gap is anticipated to be 117 Euros weekly based on the background of the employee, and 191 Euros in publishing weekly. Anxieties over diversity are often sent away using personal anecdotes about successes made in careers.

To conclude, in the ‘old economy’ we have stable markets, and in the ‘new economy’ we have dynamic markets, and the capacities of achievement are less national and more global. In the gone days, manufacturing used to e the nerve of the economy but in the modern days everything is concentrated around knowledge, services and information. The foundation of value in the traditional economy is physical capital or raw materials, and more value is now placed on social capital and human resources. In entrepreneurial areas, labour and capital were the main drivers of growth but now it is all about networking, innovation and knowledge. The main starting place of competitive advantage was cost reduction through scale, but currently it is made up by communication’s breadth and depth, innovation and quality. Modern innovations have changed the tastes of economy workers and businesses, since people are now coming up with adaptability and broad skills which make the society discover and think differently.

Creative industry, creative labour and creativity are significant, essential and great in the current world. Creative labour builds and innovates, new tools, gives new information and theories which have influence and impacts to workers and economy in general. It makes cultural and social existence of people, urban and the world more precise and our methods of operating smarter. Creative industry is helpful for staffs, mostly in media due to its extremely accepted graduate employment targets. Creativity booked a place in communication and media, which include crafts, advertising architecture, designer fashion, film, antiques and art market, performing art, interactive leisure, publishing, radio and television (Creative Industries Task Force, 1998) Women are likewise poorly represented, just fewer than 36 % of jobs in the creative industries are women compared to about 47 % male in a whole economy. The region with the biggest proportion of jobs for female is in photography and libraries, where about 70 % of the workforce is women – an indication of the fact that, female workforce is often concentrated in low wage jobs among other factors.

Beside this gender and ethnicity discrimination, social class inequalities are becoming highly popular. Employees from unprivileged background are poorly represented in most creative jobs, while workers whose parents have specialized or executive jobs are over-represented, predominantly in certain segment such as advertising, publishing and music. different explanations have been created explaining this, the most well-known of is the development in unpaid internships as a way of cultural work – a little that young generation from privileged backgrounds are less expected to be intelligent to undertake compared to those whose parents can carry on to funding them after proper education finishes (or give them rent-free housing at habitats).

 But other things come into play likewise. Research proposes that the social system that people create, mostly in high-status school, colleges and university, the social systems that their relatives may have – exposure to people who are employed in the cultural parts already for instance- and the social self-assurance that accompanies with a fortunate learning, all have an effect in a form of employment where being in a position to develop and use social systems is very important. Fresh study on the acting occupation (O’Brien et al , 2016), shows that actors from privileged backgrounds earn less all through their working years even if they are successful into the line of work – as the possibility of getting an mediator, the right sort of mediator of course, identifying the correct sort of associates and making it possible to survive unemployment spells, are all in fraction dictated by social background.

So noticeable is this occurrence that even the typical media in the United Kingdom has begun taking observation with a sequence of media information about the supremacy from the TV programs to the well-known music charts of privileged leaders, frequently educated privately, white and gentleman. This is repeated in the United States or for instance by the by-now yearly furore in the Oscars pick out with its clear exclusion of people from ethnic groups. These are high profile cases, but all over the place the links –economic and political – amid cultural personnel and the rest the public are disputed. A representation of creative industry growth has maintained the professionalization of a reality of cultural work and a great development in the labor force. The precarity of that labor force is understandable – it is far from time after time privileged – but the capability of privileged people and people from ethnic groups to assume this type of work efficiently has been harshly attenuated, manufacturing industries, which while they might keep open-minded or leftist leanings politically, are extremely detached.

References

Florida, R. (2004). The Rise of the Creative Class: And how it’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. London: Basic Books.

Blair, H. (2001). ‘“You’re only as good as Your Last Job”: the Labour Process and Labour Market in the British Film Industry.’ Work, Employment and Society. 15(1): 149-169.

Comunian, R, Gilmore, A & Jacobi, S. (2015) ‘Higher Education and the Creative Economy: Creative Graduates, Knowledge Transfer and Regional Impact Debates’. Geography Compass, Vol 9, 7 p. 371-383

Kong, L., Gibson, C., Khoo, L-M. and Sample, A-L. (2006) ‘Knowledge of the Creative Economy: towards a relational geography of diffusion and adaptation in Asia,’ Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 47: p. 173-94

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