Place de la Monnaie (Muntplein), Brussels (ca. 1890–1900) | Library of Congress / Public Domain
In March last year, several hundred cultural workers gathered at the Place de la Monnaie in Brussels as part of a national strike. They were there because the Belgian federal government was considering whether to limit the Artist Status, a social protection system that provides unemployment benefits to freelance cultural workers between projects. Employment minister David Clarinval had argued it cost too much. The governing coalition formed in early 2025 was led by the Flemish nationalist Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA) and the francophone liberal Mouvement Réformateur (MR). For the first time in decades, the coalition excluded the Francophone Parti Socialiste (PS), and the new government pushed an ambitious austerity agenda to trim Belgium’s welfare state, one of the most generous in Europe. They proposed limiting unemployment benefits to two years, raising the retirement age, and reducing pension credits in ways that disproportionately affect women and part-time workers.
As part of the overhaul, the MR and N-VA wanted artists subjected to the same two-year benefit cap it proposed for all unemployed workers. For a system designed to cover gaps between projects that may never come on a predictable schedule, this would amount to eliminating the Artist Status program entirely. Within days, 23,000 people signed a petition against the proposed changes. Culture minister Élisabeth Degryse declared the Artist Status a “red line,” signaling that her party, the Francophone Christian democratic party Les Engagés, would leave the governing coalition rather than accept the cuts. To keep its centrist coalition partners whose support it needed to govern, the government backed down. On April 11, employment minister Clarinval went on national television and announced the status would remain in place.
The system that survived was worth defending. The Artist Status provides cultural workers with unemployment benefits that do not decrease over time, exempts recipients from job search requirements, and recognizes that creative labor is real labor even when it does not produce a pay slip every month. The program costs €136 million per year and covers roughly 8,500 people, approximately 2.6 percent of Belgium’s total unemployment expenditure. For readers in countries where artists receive no public support at all, this may sound generous. Belgium extends protections to cultural workers that most countries do not even contemplate. I know several French artists who relocated to Belgium because its system is more accessible than France’s similar but more restrictive program. While under attack by the Right, particularly the MR and N-VA, the political center (greens, Christian democrats, and social democrats) treats the Artist Status as sacrosanct.
The reason the Artist Status is so necessary to preserve, however, speaks to deeper problems in the structure of employment in the arts and cultural sector. As of 2024, 8,560 people are currently covered by the protections—a reflection of the growing number of workers pushed into precarity.
Only four years ago, the Artist Status covered roughly 5,600 workers. In 2022, a government reform expanded the protections—previously reserved for culture workers like musicians and sculptors—to technicians and support staff, such as sound engineers, stagehands, and production coordinators. Jobs in the culture industry that once provided stable employment no longer did. The Artist Status expansion was rightly celebrated as progress; it also represented a grim state of rising need amid a broader program of government austerity, and the growing casualization of cultural labor.
For many artists, intermittent work has long been the standard. A sculptor between commissions, a musician between tours, a performer between productions: This is what the profession looks like, even at its most stable. The Artist Status was initially designed for these workers. But there is a whole swath of cultural work now performed by freelancers that was, in the recent past, largely made up of full-time employees. For the sound engineers who lost broadcast contracts and the actors who lost ensemble positions, freelancing had not been the plan. Precarity was imposed by the restructuring of labor in the cultural sector over the past thirty years. The pandemic accelerated the trend; COVID exposed how many cultural workers lacked any safety net at all. But the expansion was not simply a COVID correction. The workers who entered the system after 2022 were not newly precarious. Many of them had lost institutional positions years earlier.
A generation ago, many of these workers had permanent contracts at cultural institutions. Flemish theater companies once maintained standing ensembles of salaried actors. KVS theater in Brussels began dismantling its permanent ensemble in 1993. Toneelhuis theater in Antwerp replaced its permanent company with a rotating “house of makers” in 2006. NTGent, Ghent’s city theater, kept its ensemble until 2018, when the new artistic director switched to hiring actors on a project basis. Actors who had been on payroll became freelancers.
Cuts in permanent positions tracked a broader decline in funding for the arts. By 2016, cultural expenditures’ share of the Flemish budget had fallen to 1.12 percent, its lowest point in two decades, down from 1.99 percent in 2004. Faced with waning state largesse, organizations have limited their exposure to the risks of permanent, salaried staff.
The Flemish public broadcaster VRT illustrates the pattern. Over roughly 20 years, VRT lost approximately one thousand permanent staff positions. Around five hundred people now work for the broadcaster as freelancers and temporary staff. In 2022, VRT privatized the production of its flagship soap opera, Thuis, which had employed roughly seventy permanent staff. These staff are precisely the kind of “artistic-technical” workers the 2022 Artist Status reform was designed to cover. Institutional defunding had pushed a new population into freelance precarity. The celebrated expansion caught workers falling out of institutional employment on the way down.
This is still more than most Anglophone democracies attempt: The US and UK largely leave displaced cultural workers to the market. The Belgian state took some responsibility, but via a constrained system that manages consequences rather than addressing causes. The expansion of the Artist Status since 2022 absorbs displaced workers without asking why they were displaced. By doing that relatively well, it makes the defunding of cultural institutions easier to forget. And as the spring 2025 crisis showed, the same forces that defunded cultural institutions and precipitated the job cuts can, when the moment is right, turn around and attack what remains of the safety net too.
In Belgium, high union density has protected workers from some of the worst effects of labor casualization. But membership is eroding, falling from 52 percent to 39 percent between 2016 and 2023, and only a quarter of workers under 30 are unionized. In the cultural sector, nearly 40 percent of creative enterprises in the Brussels-Capital region are solo freelancers, a higher share than in the rest of the economy. A workforce of solo operators is structurally difficult to organize: Cooperatives like SMart help freelancers access social protections, but they are not unions and do not bargain over wages or working conditions.
Cultuurloket, Belgium’s cultural policy advisory body, described the cultural sector as a “social laboratory” for broader labor market flexibilization. The expanded Artist Status offers real protection, but that protection lowers the social cost of casualization, reducing the pressure for the kind of confrontation that might reverse it. The November 2024 vision document from 16 cultural sector organizations confirms the pattern. It diagnosed project-to-project work as fragile and a driver of burnout, but it did not propose restoring institutional payrolls. Its recommendations stayed within the freelance paradigm: fair practice codes, wage catch-ups, and longer funding cycles.
The Artist Status, itself a compromise, faces ongoing threats. The MR is ideologically committed to eliminating “subsidized culture”; one of its stated goals is to “get artists off unemployment.” The N-VA has also targeted the Artist Status in its campaign documents. Even as the European Parliament calls for an EU-wide framework on working conditions for cultural workers modeled on systems like Belgium’s, the parties that dominate Belgium’s current government have it in their crosshairs.
Centrist parties prefer to defend instruments like the Artist Status rather than address the institutional defunding that made them necessary. The model does not solve the underlying problem but simply makes it temporarily manageable, while leaving the sector exposed to the next onslaught from the right. Meanwhile, non-artistic freelancers, watching from outside, might reasonably ask why they cannot enjoy the same protections. If the center continues to shift rightward, the Artist Status may come to look less like a settled achievement and more like a privilege that invites resentment from workers whose own safety nets are being cut.
