THE majority of our members are self-employed. Working as an artist is precarious work, with people working on a freelance basis, on temporary projects, commissions and contracts.

Self-employed arts and culture workers have already been hard hit by over 10 years of austerity and then we were hit hard by the pandemic — work cancelled with immediate effect and for the foreseeable future — and also found themselves falling between the gaps when it came to government measures to support self-employed people.

Because of the nature of their work, they may not encounter unions and local reps in the way some other workers do, but union organisation is much-needed for these workers. Self-employed workers make up a substantial number of British workers — over 4 million — and in turn make a significant contribution to the economy.

As artists we work with vulnerable and marginalised communities, in education, outreach work, care, health, healing, therapeutic roles amongst others, so the work we do in supporting our communities is crucial.

Cuts to funding has a double impact, on the users and customers of our art services and on us as workers.

Due to precarious, irregular work, self-employed people are likely to experience lower pay, worse terms and conditions and miss out on the right to sick and holiday pay and pensions for example, leading to poverty and deprivation, not just during our working lives but in retirement too.

Businesses and society at large have this wholly unreasonable idea that we should create art out of the love of doing so and that somehow, we can just live off fresh air. Self-employed artists face exploitation every day by employers that fail to acknowledge the labour that goes into creating art or delivering art-focused services from conception, preparation to delivery, only wanting to pay for the end product.

So many self-employed creative sector workers find themselves having to take second or third jobs just to make ends meet.

There are huge, disproportionate, adverse-equality impacts with discrimination in the arts and culture sector, with barriers to accessing funding for disabled people, a higher concentration of women impacted and as primary carers having no financial support or subsidised childcare access, black workers impacted by institutional racism, young workers unable to start their careers and older people retiring with no pension. In addition, all of these groups are hard hit by a cost-of-living and housing crisis.

Last year I wrote a Manifesto for Cultural Workers on behalf of Public Services International, a union federation of more than 700 trade unions representing 30 million public services workers, which focuses on many of these issues and has now been signed up to by trade unions around the world (see www.mstar.link/MCW21). It’s crucial we make these demands a reality.

Many other self-employed workers not in our sector face the same difficulties and challenges.

Self-employed workers are across sectors and will be providing labour in the same work places as workers on PAYE, in the same way the trade union movement must continue to work to ensure outsourced workers, agency workers and other precarious workers are included in our movement and represented in collective bargaining, we must ensure that self-employed workers are recognised, acknowledged and respected as workers and fight for their rights to dignity, fair and equal pay, pensions, no discrimination, holiday and sick pay as their wellbeing is of equal importance to any other worker.

We hope that our comrades across the movement will give full support to our motion on self-employed workers at TUC Congress.

The role that creative self-employed workers play is crucial to the world, to our collective and individual self-care, raising awareness and education on important issues, challenging discrimination and injustice, bringing joy and healing, enhancing businesses and making the world a better place.

The arts surround us and are an integral part of all of our lives — so it’s time to honour the contribution we make to society, the economy and to our planet by standing with us for our rights as workers.

Zita Holbourne is national co-chair of the Artists’ Union England.