The exploitation of 'creative labour': a study of employment conditions for entry-level workers in the film and TV industries, and educational strategies to prepare them for career launch in this environment

The UK film and TV industries are notoriously hard to enter, but careers in these sectors are coveted for the esteem involved in an industry with public renown, even glamour. Access to a highly casualised freelance workforce, working conditions for new entrants, and concerns about a culture of inequality and disposability in the creative sectors have been a significant focus for scholars in recent years. The importance of this thesis lies primarily in addressing the lack of quantitative data on prevalence of illegal employment conditions amongst entry level workers – and consequently, a lack of focus in educational understanding of the attributes needed by graduates to navigate career launch successfully. There has also been little attention to career sustainability; the challenge of getting in – and staying in career-long.

The research used a two-year longitudinal study tracking 91 new entrants with questionnaires at regular intervals, to detail their working conditions and personal challenges as they attempted to establish themselves. In addition, focus groups were carried out with established industry professionals to explore their views on attributes for career success. Finally the project integrated interviews and questionnaires with other professionals who had all left the UK TV industry; giving the findings a whole-career approach – and explored the results through the lens of Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, symbolic violence and ‘hysteresis’.

The research revealed that unpaid work is, concerningly, very much part of the landscape, with 80% of participants carrying it out at some point. It drops off quickly in favour of paid work, and is viewed retrospectively as exploitative; the study found no correlation between individual levels of unpaid work and successful career progression. Key challenges included geographic location, and lack of contacts, as new entrants rode a rollercoaster ride between optimism and frustration. Educationally, participants received better practice-based training than they did career skills; many lacked confidence and were concerned about being disadvantaged by their identity. Soft skills proved more beneficial than industry-specific craft skills, in a Bourdieusian ‘hysteresis’ where cultural capital from the academic field was exchanged for social capital in the professional. Those who had left the sector suggested specific challenges for female workers, and the thesis offers recommendations for educators in preparing students for the short term experience of precarisation, and the longer term challenges of sustainable career development and planning.