Smart places the worker, bearer of economic and social value, at the center of its mission
— Smart Co-op website
Artists are some of the original gig workers. The word “gig” comes from “engagement,” a performance associated with a single contract—one-off and occasional. Working in the fields of arts and entertainment means dealing with multiple clients, inconsistent employment, and multiple workplaces. Because of these conditions, artists often face economic challenges. They have difficulty accessing health insurance, retirement, family and sick leave, unemployment benefits, and other benefits and protections that standard employees might receive.
Starting in the 1980s, artists in various countries across Europe who had precarious working conditions chose to cooperate to obtain professional recognition and more predictable contracts. They formed worker-owned cooperatives that allowed them to gain access to social protections and strengthen their sense of community.
One of the longest running artist cooperatives in Italy is Doc Servizi. It was founded in 1990 by musicians seeking to obtain decent work, share job opportunities, create working teams, and organize training to increase their expertise. Since its birth, Doc Servizi has formally employed its members, who are also its owners. They are thus able to maintain the independence associated with freelancing but can also receive social protection due to their status as co-op employer. Doc Servizi offers digital platforms and other services to support members’ self-management. Today, the cooperative remains focused on entertainment but is also part of Rete Doc, a bigger network of Italian cooperatives that covers all sectors of the cultural and creative industries and comprises more than 8,800 worker-members.
In the late 1990s, similar experiments began in Finland and Belgium with two cooperatives: Lilith and Smart. In order to guarantee its worker-members the status of employees and provide them with a safe and secure work environment, in 1997, Lilith was created in Helsinki by a group of musicians and producers. Today, Lilith is the biggest Finnish cooperative of workers in creative fields with more than 400 members. Smart, or the Société Mutuelle des Artistes, is a multi-stakeholder cooperative founded to support artists to develop their activities through the provision of shared services and a digital platform that makes it easier to invoice for their work. In the beginning, Smart was created in 1998 as a nonprofit association, but it became a multi-stakeholder cooperative in 2016. At first it was aimed at artistic and creative workers, but it later opened up to all freelancers and, recently, to platform workers. In the cooperative, the workers are shareholders, co-investors, and salaried employees through either fixed-term or open-ended contracts. Smart is now a network of cooperatives and companies that stretches across nine countries in Europe and has about 32,000 workers in its membership.
More recent examples of cooperation among musicians are DiGiDi and Resonate. The Danish DiGiDi was founded in 2003 as a cooperative digital music distribution service and today counts more than 6,500 members, including labels and artists. Resonate is an Irish multi-stakeholder cooperative that since 2015 has offered streaming music services with the purpose of bringing together the core stakeholders of the music economy. Both cooperatives are designed to offer more sustainable careers for their members and to value the creative work of musicians.
Contingent and unreliable working conditions are not only common in the arts and creative industries but, especially with the spread of casualization and automation, also characterize employment in other sectors. In many parts of the world, self-employed workers in industries ranging from software development to food delivery, and from education to journalism, have turned to cooperatives for fairer contracts and greater control over their time. As the cooperative sector grows, it is increasingly able to shape public policy.
In 1994, a French activist named Elisabeth Bost helped to formalize a new cooperative model, the Business and Employment Cooperative (BEC), to address the needs of isolated, self-employed workers in any field, enabling them to share common resources and services. Each BEC supports the “employee entrepreneur” in many ways: legal, administrative and accounting management, business administration, job creation, training, and peer-to-peer exchange. In France, about 155 cooperatives with 12,000 employee-entrepreneurs are organized on the BEC model. The model has been adopted in Switzerland and the Czech Republic, and similar forms exist in Morocco and Tunisia.
As ever more jobs are absorbed by the gig economy, worker-owned cooperatives represent a viable means of mitigating the isolation and unreliability faced by increasing numbers of workers. Working together instead of working alone, artists and cultural workers can gain more control over the market and the future of work as a whole.
