Music, the labor reform at concerts is a score to be arranged
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LWhat is clear to everyone – at least to those tuned in to the latest catchphrase or standing in line for the concert of their favorite band – is that music is an essential element of the summer landscape, in Italy as in the rest of the world. Less clear is the fact that we are talking to all intents and purposes of an economic sector with well-defined business segments that create development, generate induced activities and above all employ something like 169,000 people.
For years we have ignored him, perhaps because whoever is on stage is so “big” in our eyes that they shade those behind him to allow the show to go on. Then there was Covid, the two-year period in which the shows were stopped or took place at a narrow gauge: suddenly we realized that the sector exists and that it is often the hands of invisible workers who keep it going . It was said that this was an unmissable opportunity to reform a sector that enjoyed few protections, through tools such as the Entertainment Code and in particular the discontinuity allowance. One year after the full recovery of live shows, the Code of Entertainment still lacks the implementing decrees and there are many concerns from companies and workers. Because the music business, in Italy more than elsewhere, is a world that struggles to create a system, with all the repercussions of the case in terms of representation at institutional tables. But let’s go in order.
How many workers are there
Any consideration of work in music cannot be separated from a scientific mapping of the phenomenon. And here we run into the first critical point: there are no constantly updated studies on workers in the sector divided by segment. The latest attempt dates back to the second edition of the Creative Italy Report (2017) which surveyed almost 169,000 artists (74,000), concert workers (40,600), discography workers (2,400) and various indirect workers. Numbers that should be reviewed, considering that Covid, with shows more or less stopped for two years, has certainly “moved” those values between outgoing and incoming. «Simply the fact that there is no observatory that constantly keeps an eye on the dynamics of the sector», underlines Annarita Masullo, president of the la Musica Che Gira association, «and that, in the past, institutional representatives have ventured into estimates all ‘anything but realistic says a lot about the consideration which the sector unfortunately enjoys’.
The most uncomfortable position is that of the workers who work in the live segment, precarious almost by definition. Not by chance the expression gig economy derives from “gig”, the token sessions held by shift workers. «Together with Left Wing», continues Masullo, «in June, we held the States General of Entertainment in Rome to press the legislator on central issues for those who work in this sector and are often precarious, such as the discontinuity allowance».
Post Covid interventions
The legislator, after Covid, has in fact tried to intervene in support of the sector in two ways: on the one hand with the Sostegni Bis Decree, on the other with the launch of the Entertainment Code, which has since become law. “On the first front – comments Massimo Pontoriero, president of Unisca, coordination of creativity, arts and entertainment associations – we are talking about a measure that did not adequately protect self-employed workers”. On the second side, there is still no trace of the implementing decrees but, in the chapter on discontinuity allowance which should guarantee intermittent workers during breaks from live activity, there is one aspect that should not be underestimated: «the calculation – adds the president of Unisca – must take place on the basis of the income received and not of the days worked. Which would represent a real paradigm shift that must also apply to pensions, maternity leave and sickness».
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