Where will I be when I grow up?

In the European net magazine Eurozine you can read a very interesting article by the sociologist and freelance writer Klaus Ronneberger:

“Interns, temporary agency workers, people on job creation schemes, and pseudo-freelances make up the vast reserve army of workers in precarious employment. For the majority, standards such as productivity or flexibility have become second nature. In this respect, they are the avant-garde of post-Fordism, constantly opening up new avenues of self-exploitation.”

It was written a bout a year ago but when I read the last report from the Swedish Public Employment Service Cultural department it came back to me. We are closely approaching the end of an era. If you work in the cultural field you must be a freelancer or a self employed. Some statistics:

From Sweden:
In the cultural field the self-employed staff is increasing by 10-15 % every year (p 6-8). All of the growth within this sector is with and by self-employed and freelances.

From Germany (From Ronneberger):
In the 1980s over 80 per cent of musicians had permanent jobs, but within twenty years this proportion had dropped to 54 per cent. The number of actors with full-time jobs dropped from 76 per cent to 58 per cent during the same period.

The trend is clear. When I grew up I will be self-employed or a freelancer. Is that a problem? Well If you are a liberal and believe in choices this is a problem. If an entire sector is filled with projects run by self-employed each and every organisation will lose its memory. Further on will there be problems if the University and other educational institutions don’t provide the skills necessary for the workforce they educate. In this era new skills are needed:

•  Mobility
•  Networking
•  Competence for organising your own work processes
•  Strategic marketing of Yourself as a brand
•  Relational skills and social competence necessary for the “I- company” to stay on the market

We run an education, http://kulturverkstan.net/information_in_english, which is in the middle of this situation. We are small, quite new and unhierarchical. Do we like this situation? Well, it is much like the Greenhouseeffect. In some way it is contested, i.e. does it really exist? But if you have the feeling that the weather becomes worse and worse it might very well be so. The political changes the last 30 years has put us in this situation. The end of the Keynesian era, globalisation, the neoliberal revolution and the postpolitical dilemma are all true facts. It has changed the working market forever. Of course are there both pro’s and con’s. It has in some ways increased the possibilities for social mobility class wise. On the negative side: How are people supposed to pursue long-term goals if they constantly have to re-organise their lives and re-orient themselves?

Or to put it in an other way – We must learn to understand the dialectics of the postfordist society. We as an education must be in the forefront of this understanding. Otherwise will we loose both ourselves, but more importantly the future of our students.

The title of this text is an adaptation from the Swedish painter Peter Tillbergs ”Blir du lönsam, lille vän?”. This painting is in many ways the best description of the school politics of the fordist society. A remake of today would describe a single individual in the classroom. The face will surely look the same but today the collective is gone.

Further reading:
Klaus Ronnebergers text in Eurozine: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-01-26-ronneberger-en.html
The long-term report from the Swedish Public Employment Service Cultural department (in Swedish): http://www.arbetsformedlingen.se/go.aspx?c=220

Peter Tillbergs painting is available to buy as a poster from Moderna Museet in Stockholm:
http://www.modernamuseet.se/v4/templates/template3.asp?id=2533