Despite anchoring one of the world’s great cultural economies, Italy’s art workers face workplace instability, low wages, and a system structurally designed to keep them materially dependent and institutionally silent. To reckon with this condition, the report aims to investigate the institutional framework that sustains it as well as the broader causes that contribute to shaping such precariousness.
A holiday born from struggle
May Day commemorates the 1886 Haymarket events in Chicago, when striking workers demanding an 8-hour working day clashed with police, triggering international solidarity that made May 1st a global symbol of labour rights. In Italy, the tradition dates to Livorno dock workers who protested in solidarity with the victims. Since 1990, the occasion has included a major concert in Rome organised by the major national trade unions CGIL, CISL, and UIL, a platform where musicians as well as trade unionists and politicians openly denounce the conditions cultural workers are subject to.
The centrality of live music in this programme is not incidental. In fact, it reflects the pivotal role the arts play in Italian national identity, while simultaneously exposing the structural inequalities that make it so difficult to earn a living within that very sector. In order to comprehend the big picture, it is necessary to observe both the public policies that shape cultural workers’ conditions and the deeper structural forces that have come to normalize instability in the first place.
Mapping the cultural sector: policy framework
Before analysing policy, it is essential to define what “the art sector” actually means. It is a complex and evolving ecosystem encompassing visual arts, music, performance, literature, cinema, design, and cultural heritage, disciplines that do not exist in isolation but rather circulate within an interconnected system of planning, production, and distribution.
Italy’s cultural governance is anchored in Article 9 of the Constitution, with the Ministry of Culture as the primary authority. Key funding tools include the Fondo Unico per lo Spettacolo (FUS) for live performance and the ArtBonus tax incentive for private donations.
At EU level, the Creative Europe programme funds cross-border collaboration, while the 2023 European Parliament resolution on the status of the artist called for clearer employment definitions, fairer pay, and stronger social protections, although the gap between the policy objectives and real life remains wide.
Despite this infrastructure, systemic challenges persist. The 2023 European Parliament resolution on the status of the artist explicitly acknowledged the precarious conditions of cultural workers across the EU, calling for stronger coordination, clearer definitions of employment status, measures to combat false self-employment, and improved standards for remuneration. The resolution marked a significant step, indeed, but it is still insufficient to bridge the gap of precariousness that disproportionately affects cultural workers.
The reality of precariousness
For the many thousands of Italians who work in the cultural sector, precariousness is a daily reality. According to Eurostat data cited in the Ministry of Culture’s 2025 Minicifre della cultura report, cultural workers in Italy numbered around 840,000 in 2024, approximately 3.5% of total national employment. Yet, this figure places Italy below the EU average of 3.8%: undoubtedly, it is a noticeable gap for a country that is widely considered among the most culturally significant in the world.
According to Symbola and Unioncamere’s 2025 Io sono Cultura report, 36.5% of workers in Italy’s cultural and creative sector are self-employed, compared to a national average of 21.2%. This structural dependence on independent and freelance work limits the possibilities of collective bargaining and deepens the informal and precarious character of employment in the field. Interestingly, this is a typical pattern of cultural industries in southern European countries, of which Italy is a prime example.
The consequences are visible in earnings. According to sector surveys and trade union reports, cultural professionals earn on average less than €12,000 per year, a figure that has remained persistently low for decades. Employment is predominantly project-based and intermittent, with few workers enjoying the stable contracts that would grant access to standard social protections such as unemployment benefits, pension contributions, or paid sick leave.
Additionally, geographic inequality must be taken into account. A third of all cultural sector workers are concentrated in north-western Italy, with 27% in central Italy. The Mezzogiorno, i.e. the south and the islands, is severely underrepresented, leaving workers in those regions with fewer professional networks and greater distances from the decision-making centres that control how public funds are allocated. Many are forced to migrate to Milan, Rome, or abroad just to sustain a career.
A system designed for instability
Claudia Fauzia, an Italian diversity and equality consultant, offers a structural rather than individual answer to this chronic state of underpayment and instability: the system, she argues, is built to maintain precariousness. The wages paid to cultural workers are not enough to live on, and many effectively perform what amounts to voluntary or heavily subsidised labour, sustained by passion and the hope of future stability. But this cannot be resolved by simply refusing to accept bad conditions, because someone else will always be willing to accept them.
Precariousness, Fauzia argues, is not a collateral effect of the system but a function of it. To keep those who shape culture in a state of material fragility is an efficient mechanism for rendering them politically and institutionally irrelevant. Public institutions finance cultural work just enough to legitimise it, but not enough to make it autonomous. The result is a class of highly skilled creative workers who are structurally dependent on the State and on the goodwill of private patrons, and who therefore lack the independence to challenge the conditions imposed upon them.
Also, this dependency is geographically concentrated: it is most acute where communities and professional networks are weakest, where distances from decision-making centres are greatest, and where workers must ultimately leave in order to survive. What appears as individual precariousness is in reality a purposeful dispersion of competences. The appropriate response, Fauzia suggests, is to reframe the narrative: from individual shortcomings to collective responsibility. Building robust economic, organisational, and territorial structures around cultural work is essential to avoid surrendering entirely to this system.
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing vulnerabilities. As journalist Roberta Capozucca reported in Il Sole 24 Ore, the sector’s fragmentation into small enterprises and freelancers kept many categories from being included in government emergency strategies.
Visual artists, for instance, were entirely excluded from the €600 emergency bonus intended for all cultural sector workers under the 2020 Cura Italia relief decree. Without unified associations capable of negotiating collectively, entire professional categories were left without support.
The episode illustrates a broader truth: the diversity of professional categories that makes the sector so rich culturally becomes a liability when crisis strikes and there is no unified voice to negotiate on workers’ behalf.
The new frontier of artificial intelligence
To the structural vulnerabilities already described, a new and rapidly advancing is added: artificial intelligence. In fact, it is now becoming an infrastructure, a wholly new system that is redefining the conditions of entertainment, communication, and visual and digital production.
The first roles to be affected are predominantly technical. Sound designers, colorists, and post-production specialists see their core competencies being absorbed by increasingly fast and precise softwares. What once required skilled labour, time, and specialist equipment can now be produced algorithmically at a fraction of the cost. For junior creatives and new generations entering the labour market, this shift is even more consequential, as they are now competing in a landscape where AI can generate images, videos, and music at a significantly reduced cost and relatively high quality.
For a sector already defined by low wages and precarious contracts, this represents a radical shift in the conditions of competition, for which neither workers nor public institutions are fully prepared. But the challenge is just as political as it is economic: if creative professions have historically offered autonomy and irreplaceability that more or less compensated for the material instability, the disappearance of that uniqueness in favour of non-human production removes the one structural advantage cultural workers possessed.
Without strong collective responses from trade unions, professional associations, and policymakers, the most vulnerable workers in the sector risk being sidelined entirely. The urgency of developing AI governance frameworks that protect cultural labour is as pressing today as FUS reform was a decade ago.
Towards coherent reform
Taken together, these challenges describe a sector in urgent need of coherent and comprehensive reform. The conditions of Italy’s cultural workers must not be treated as a second-class concern: they safeguard a heritage that defines the country’s identity and drives a significant share of its economic output. To treat their current state as the inevitable price of a vocation is both an ethical and strategic failure.
Italian deputy and PACE member Valentina Grippo, in a recent interview with ASSEDEL at the Palais de l’Europe, identifies a concrete set of legislative priorities: establishing remuneration standards for cultural workers, expanding access to cassa integrazione (wage supplementation schemes), and reforming the mechanisms of the assegno unico, all of which require action at the national legislative level. Past parliamentary sessions have already produced budget amendments aimed at increasing FUS resources, a recognition that many cultural professions are precarious not by accident, but by their very nature, as they are tied to individual productions rather than permanent employment structures. This structural reality makes tailored policy responses essential, rather than generic labour market reforms.
The argument for reform, however, goes beyond economic logic alone. European institutions must approach the protection of cultural workers from a rights-based perspective: defending those who make art means defending the human rights of European citizens, including all those who benefit from culture as audiences, communities, and future generations. To protect cultural workers is, in this sense, to protect a collective heritage that belongs to society as a whole, not to a single industry.
Read the full report ici.
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