‘There's no way that you get paid to do the arts’. Unpaid labour across the cultural and creative life course
Unpaid or ‘free’ labour is an important element of how precarity has been theorized. It is also an issue that is often seen as endemic to cultural and creative work, rightly attracting a range of criticism. Questions as to the role of unpaid work, for example internships, have become central to understanding the social exclusiveness of many cultural and creative jobs. This paper develops this existing analysis by comparing and contrasting the meaning of 'free' work over the life course of a range of creative occupations, historicising the impact of unpaid labour on the creative sector and showing how it has been stratified by social class, age and career stage. The paper uses two datasets drawn from the Panic! What happened to social mobility in the arts? project, to outline the differing experiences of unpaid labour in cultural and creative occupations. By demonstrating the stratification of unpaid work as a form of precariousness in cultural jobs, along with the social distribution of benign narratives of unpaid work, the paper aims to offer new empirical evidence for those seeking to resist precarious forms of labour.